The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews After the Holocaust by Elizabeth Anthony (review)

Reviewed by: The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews After the Holocaust by Elizabeth Anthony Peter Pirker The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews After the Holocaust. By Elizabeth Anthony. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. 271 pages. 36. 99 (paper). When the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front of the Red Army reached Vienna on April 6, 1945, coming from Budapest, there were only approximately 5, 500 people in the city whom the National Socialists considered to be Jews. About 600 of them saw themselves as Jews. Seven years earlier, in the spring of 1938, Vienna was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe numbering 167, 000 members. According to their racist criteria, the Nazis came up with a little more than 200, 000 Jewish inhabitants, whom they made the target of their radical antisemitic policy. The Nazis expelled about 146, 000 of them before murdering 65, 000 who remained in concentration and extermination camps. About 1, 700 survivors returned from the camps by the end of 1945. Two years later, some 2, 000 Jews returned to Vienna from Great Britain, Shanghai, Palestine, and the Soviet Union. Historian Elizabeth Anthony, employed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, describes and analyzes the return of Jews to Vienna from the last days of Nazi rule until about 1948. She is particularly interested in the question of "their motivations End Page 145 for laying down roots anew in a hometown and a homeland that had expelled them and did not expect them to return" (6). Furthermore, she investigates the difficulties the survivors had to overcome in doing so. The author stresses the term "home" for grasping the sense of belonging to Vienna the returnees had felt. What does she mean by this? In the introduction, Elizabeth Anthony refers to reflections of literary scholar Jaqueline Vansant, who understood return as an attempt "to reconnect with an Austrian 'we'" (4). In her study, Anthony suggests that there was a "particular Viennese 'we'", to which survivors of the Shoah tried to reconnect. What this Viennese "we" was supposed to have consisted of is, as in any discourse on identity, difficult to comprehend. Methodologically, the author proceeds in two steps. In the first chapter, she outlines the history of Viennese Jews from the mid-nineteenth century to 1938, that is, from the phase of emancipation and legal equality under Habsburg rule, through the Austrian nation-state between 1918 and 1938, to the beginning of disenfranchisement, expulsion, deportation, and extermination after Austria's Anschluss to Nazi Germany. In the following chapters, she describes the return of four groups: Jews who survived directly in Vienna in hiding places (U-Boote) and as "partial Jews" (Mischlinge) or those protected through mixed marriages; the returnees from the concentration camps; the politically motivated reémigrés from exile; and those who wanted to resume their professions in Vienna after seeing few prospects elsewhere. In her narrative, she skillfully interweaves the state of research with excerpts from interviews and conversations with returnees, some of which she conducted herself in Vienna. In the first chapter, she searches for points of reference in Jewish identities that existed before National Socialism to which returnees could re-connect. In doing so, she adds a fourth aspect to Marsha Rozenblit's concept of Habsburg Jews' tripartite identity. According to Rozenblit, "Austrian Jews considered themselves to be politically Austrian (loyal to the Habsburgs), culturally German, and ethnically Jewish. " It is precisely in this ability to live with different layers of identity and variable combinations that End Page 146 Elizabeth Anthony recognizes the specifically Viennese: "Gentile or Jew could be Austrian and also distinctly—and perhaps more importantly—Viennese, which speaks to the ever-present ambiguities typical of the Viennese mind-set and way of life" (20). The complexity of identities not only enabled Jews to be active in society in many ways and to help shape it politically, scientifically, culturally, and economically (Wiener Moderne). It was also a resource that made it possible to deal with the antisemitism that was rampant in Vienna in more or less all political camps but most endemic among the Christian Social and German national movements. As is well known, Austria. . .