The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews After the Holocaust

by Elizabeth Anthony

The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the Holocaust explores the motivations and expectations that inspired Viennese Jews to reestablish lives in their hometown after the devastation and trauma of the Holocaust. Elizabeth Anthony investigates their personal, political, and professional endeavors, revealing the contours of their experiences of returning to a post-Nazi society, with full awareness that most of their fellow Austrians had embraced the Nazi takeover and their country's unification with Germany-clinging to a collective national identity myth as "first victim" of the Nazis. Anthony weaves together archival documentation with oral histories, interviews, memoirs, and personal correspondence to craft a multilayered, multivoiced narrative of return focused on the immediate postwar years.



The book consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 begins with setting the historical scene and political context to elucidate the backdrop for the role and position of Jews in Austrian and Viennese society. Chapter 2 begins just before the Soviet conquest of Vienna in April 1945 and with the story of the last Jews murdered in Vienna. Chapter 3 deals with the second group of returning Jews-concentration camp survivors-and outlines their varied processes and journeys, as they also followed their impulse to go to their familial home. Chapter 4 presents how their parties shaped their motivations and expectations of home while they lived abroad after fleeing from the Nazis. Chapter 5 illuminates the return and rerooting of Austrian Jewish professionals, including their struggles and successes. Chapter 6 expounds common challenges encountered by all groups of returnees while relaunching their lives in Vienna, with a focus on developing postwar identity concepts-both Viennese Jewish identity and Austrian national identity.

The Compromise of Return is the first such social history to depict how survivors-individually and collectively-navigated postwar Vienna's political and social setting. This book will be of special interest to scholars, students, and readers of Holocaust and European studies.

Genres: Nonfiction

280 pages, Hardcover

Published May 4, 2021

About the author

Elizabeth Anthony discovered historical novels early in her teens. After graduating from university she worked as a tutor in English Studies, but always dreamed of writing. Her ambition was fulfilled with the publication of an 18th century thriller received with great acclaim in the UK and US and translated into nine languages. She has also written several historical romances. Elizabeth lives with her husband in the Peak District.

Reviews

[W. Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

What could motivate someone to return to a country that participated in genocide against your people? Dr. Elizabeth Anthony has written a compelling and important history of Jewish communities' return to Vienna after the Holocaust. This book is a serious work of scholarship that makes significant contributions to the fields of Holocaust Studies, refugees and immigration, and European history more broadly. What I was struck by is Dr. Anthony's approachable writing style. I found myself lost in the stories of the individuals she discovered in the archives and through original interviews with survivors. Although this history is specific to a particular time and place, it was - in some way - relatable. That's the power of Dr. Anthony's craft; she has told the unfathomable history of having to piece one's life back together after the Holocaust in a way that you are constantly aware of the human toll. At the end of the day, this book is a powerful exploration of what it means to be human in the wake of war and devastation. Sadly, this history still resonates as relevant today.

[Irene Wittig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very powerful book about the difficulties Jews faced when returning to Vienna, a city they had loved, after the war. Highly recommended.