Duction and Eight Essays Offer Special Insights Into the Artists of the Berlin

130 | SOL GITTLEMAN duction and eight essays offer special insights into the artists of the Berlin Secession, early Expressionism, the place of antisemitism in the rise of art and literary criticism before Adolf Hitler, and the impact of World War I on art. Paret examines the major nineteenth-century German artists— Adolph Menzel, Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, and Max Slevogt—as well as the age that produced them. He also offers a new interpretation of Ernst Barlach and the art that emerged out of his war experience. Inescapable is the pale of antisemitism that was reºected in the es- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/130/1695335/00221950260029291.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 tablished German society that fought modernism at every point. Any- thing that suggested even a hint of the avant-garde was quickly identiªed with “the alien element,” which meant the Jews. Liberals like the writer Theodor Fontane could not escape it. Apologists who de- fended their Jewish fellow artists could not escape it. Racial antisemitism was woven into the fabric of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ger- man intellectual life, at the universities and academies, in the salons and art galleries, and in the newspapers and critical journals. The modernists, it was asserted, differed from “real Germans” and their native traditions and conventions. Paret’s ªnal essay deals with Hans Schweitzer, a Nazi cartoonist and poster designer, thereby completing “the curve of cultural degradation” that informs everything in this provocative collection. Like other great expatriate German cultural historians who came to the United States, particularly George Mosse and Peter Gay, Paret is comfortable in all as- pects of the intellectual environment of the times. In many ways, these Americanized German academics helped to create the interdisciplinary language on which subsequent generations built. Sol Gittleman Tufts University Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I. By Marsha L. Rozenblit (New York, Oxford University Press, 2001) 252 pp. $49.95 Interviewed by the Berlin newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel, on the occasion of the opening of the new Austrian embassy in the German capital, Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel observed that the legacy of his country’s supranational past might have positive application in a contemporary Europe of interdependent regions. A Mitteleuropa loosely confederated on the model of the Benelux countries, Schüssel continued, could offer the prospect of harmonious co-existence to peoples who were em- broiled in, or endured, too much of the opposite in the preceding century. No one would have concurred more in the attractiveness of this vi- sion than the subjects of this ªne new book. As Rozenblit describes it, the Dual Monarchy, particularly the provinces ruled from Vienna rather than Budapest, provided Jews a unique opportunity to forge an identity combining loyalty to the state and its dynasty, cultural afªliation more or REVIEWS | 131 less freely chosen, and a sense of Jewish ethnic kinship and shared religious belief. In the Hungarian half of the monarchy, Jews were “Magyarized”; they became Hungarian in their citizenship and culture, while remaining Jewish in their ethnicity and religious practice. In the Austrian provinces, Jews were no less devoted to venerable Emperor Franz Joseph but adopted German, Czech, or Polish culture, usually, but not always, on the basis of geography, and conducted their lives, in ethnic and religious terms, as Jews. This complex structure of political, cul- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/130/1695335/00221950260029291.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 tural, and ethnic identity was reinforced during World War I, as 300,000 Jewish soldiers served at the front and countless other Jews contributed to the domestic war effort. But its foundations collapsed with the disin- tegration of the monarchy in 1918 and the emergence of new national states in central and eastern Europe. Nearly 2 million Jews, hitherto Habsburg subjects, faced the challenge of reconstructing their identity, often in hostile, sometimes dangerous, circumstances. Drawing upon the work of theorists as diverse Smith, Anderson, and Gellner, Rozenblit differentiates between Anglo-French concep- tions of nationality, founded on common citizenship in a territorially contiguous state, and central and eastern European notions of a roman- tic, ethnocultural national identity that either spilled over or was denied political boundaries and territorial delineations.1 Distributed, unevenly, across the Habsburg lands, Jews could neither aspire to citizenship in a nonexistent national state nor identify in ethnic terms with any of the more numerous nationalities around them. As racial and biological qualiªcations increasingly deªned membership in a particular Volk, Jews became the state-people par excellence, dependent on the protection of the Habsburg central authorities for whatever security this status af- forded them. Rozenblit describes with sympathetic understanding the difªculties that Austrian Jews faced during World War I—for example, the plight of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Galicia and Bukovina, support for whom fell preponderantly on their more modern and cosmopolitan co-religionists in Vienna, or the efforts by Jewish organizations to com- bat the rising tide of antisemitic vituperation fed by food shortages, black marketeering, and other dislocations of domestic life. Many Jews turned to Zionism, and even among non-Zionists, expectations grew that the Jews would be recognized as a nationality and accorded national minor- ity rights in the postwar political order. Events turned out otherwise. Some of Rozenblit’s most incisive pages recount the repeated disap- pointment of Jewish nationalist aspirations in the Habsburg successor states. Only in the new Czechoslovak Republic were Jews able to re- constitute an identity that approximated the one that they had known previously, and even there unresolved nationality conºicts threatened their well-being. 1 See, for example, Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1989); Bene- dict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reºections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (Lon- don, 1991); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, 1983). 132 | JAMES AXTELL Rozenblit’s account is essentially a straightforward historical one. She moves with ease among the multiplicity of Jewish subcommun- ities—assimilationist, traditional, Hasidic, and Zionist—that populated the Habsburg lands, although her primary concern is the German-speak- ing Jews of Vienna, Bohemia, and Moravia. This focus becomes espe- cially pronounced in her ªnal chapter on early postwar developments; more detail on the experiences of Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, and other Jews who sought redeªnition in a changed world might have been Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/130/1695335/00221950260029291.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 helpful. By exploring the sociology and psychology of identity forma- tion, as well as its politics, Rozenblit casts an illuminating beam on one of the enduring problems of European history in a manner that makes for engrossing reading. With surprising topicality, she also anticipates the argument offered by Burger, formerly director of Vienna’s University of Applied Arts, that Austria suffers from an excess of “remembering” its Nazi (and Jewish) past. Burger’s appeal “for forgetting” is admirably re- butted in her pages.2 A promised further volume, dealing with Jewish identity in interwar central and eastern Europe, will be welcome. James J. Ward Cedar Crest College Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676. By Joyce E. Chaplin (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2001) 411 pp. $45.00 Chaplin seeks to place the history of science—ideas about the nature of the material world, its human inhabitants, and their technologies—at the center of our understanding of the English conquest of America. Be- lieving that hers is not “a project in traditional intellectual history,” she claims to focus on “the way in which contemporary European [English] theories about nature inºuenced English settlers’ relations with Indians” (8). She is conªdent that her “structural analysis” of English accounts of American exploration and colonization will “turn down the background noise, the static of cultural expectations and assumptions that the English put into their accounts” and show more clearly what the Indians them- selves were saying and doing when they interacted with the newcomers (27). Despite her claims, this book is not about the inºuence of ideas upon actions but a highly schematized “decoding” of a set of ideas ad- umbrated and appreciated by a relatively small group of educated writers and readers. The textual trends that she detects in—or constructs for— three periods (1500 to 1585, 1585 to 1660, and 1640 to 1676) served English readers solely as “an intellectual framing device, as justiªcation to explore or colonize, and as a mark of the educated character of colo- 2 See Rudolf Burger, “Die Irrtümer der Gedenkpolitik: Ein Plädoyer für das Vergessen,” Europäische Rundschau, XXIX (2001), 3–13. A storm of criticism ensued, too extensive to cata- log here..

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