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Edited by Johannes Feichtinger and Gary B. Cohen
Multiculturalism has long been linked to calls for tolerance of cultural diversity, but today many observers are subjecting the concept to close scrutiny. After the political upheavals of 1968, the commitment to multiculturalism was perceived as a liberal manifesto, but in the post-9/11 era, it is under attack for its relativizing, particularist, and essentializing implications. The essays in this collection offer a nuanced analysis of the multifaceted cultural experience of Central Europe under the late Habsburg monarchy and beyond. The authors examine how culturally coded social spaces can be described and understood historically without adopting categories formerly employed to justify the definition and separation of groups into nations, ethnicities, or homogeneous cultures. As we consider the issues of multiculturalism today, this volume offers new approaches to understanding multiculturalism in Central Europe freed of the effects of politically exploited concepts of social spaces.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2014, 246 pp. Cloth, ISBN: 978-1-78238-264-5
Edited by Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller
The Viennese café was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural and political world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Just as the café served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna 1900. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2013, 244 pp. Cloth, ISBN: 978-0-85745-764-6
Edited by Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff, and Dieter Langewiesche
A few years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed, revolving around the German axis. That alliance, the states involved, and the interplay between their territorial aims and those of Germany during the interwar period and World War II are at the core of this volume. This "territorial revisionism" came to include all manner of politics and military measures that attempted to change existing borders. Taking into account not just interethnic relations but also the motivations of states and nationalizing ethnocratic ruling elites, this volume reconceptualizes the history of East Central Europe during World War II. In so doing, it presents a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the War itself and offers an alternative to standard German accounts of the period 1933-1945 and East European nation-states' histories.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2013, 210 pp. Cloth, ISBN: 978-0-85745-738-7
Edited by Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber
At the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud's investigation of the mind represented a particular journey into mental illness, but it was not the only exploration of this territory during the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Sanatoriums were the new tourism destinations, psychiatrists were collecting art works produced by patients, and writers were developing innovative literary techniques to convey a character's interior life. This collection of essays uses the framework of journeys in order to highlight the diverse artistic, cultural, and medical responses to a peculiarly Viennese anxiety about the madness of modern times. The travelers of these journeys vary from patients to doctors, artists to writers, architects to composers, and royalty to tourists; in engaging with their histories, the contributors reveal the different ways in which madness was experienced and represented in Vienna 1900.
New York: Berhahn Books, 2012, 213 pp. Cloth, ISBN: 978-08745-458-4
By Britta McEwen
Vienna's unique intellectual, political, and religious traditions had a powerful impact on the transformation of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century. Whereas turn-of-the-century sexology, as practiced in Vienna as a medical science, sought to classify and heal individuals, during the interwar years, sexual knowledge was employed by a variety of actors to heal the social body: the truncated, diseased, and impoverished population of the newly created Republic of Austria. Based on rich source material, this book charts cultural changes that are hallmarks of the modern era, such as the rise of the companionate marriage, the role of expert advice in intimate matters, and the body as a source of pleasure and anxiety. These changes are evidence of a dramatic shift in attitudes from a form of scientific inquiry largely practiced by medical specialists to a social reform movement led by and intended for a wider audience that included workers, women, and children.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. 240 pp. Cloth, ISBN: 978-0-85745-337-2, $90.
By Hillary Hope Herzog
Assessing the impact of fin-de-siècle Jewish culture on subsequent developments in literature and culture, this book is the first to consider the historical trajectory of Austrian-Jewish writing across the 20th century. It examines how Vienna, the city that stood at the center of Jewish life in the Austrian Empire and later the Austrian nation, assumed a special significance in the imaginations of Jewish writers as a space and an idea. The author focuses on the special relationship between Austrian-Jewish writers and the city to reveal a century-long pattern of living in tension with the city, experiencing simultaneously acceptance and exclusion, feeling "unheimlich heimisch" (eerily at home) in Vienna.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. 340 pp. Cloth, ISBN: 978-0-85745-181-1, $95.
Edited by Howard Louthan, Gary B. Cohen and Franz A. J. Szabo
Early modern Central Europe was the continent's most decentralized region politically and its most diverse ethnically and culturally. With the onset of the Reformation, it also became Europe's most religiously divided territory and potentially its most explosive in terms of confessional conflict and war. Focusing on the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this volume examines the tremendous challenge of managing confessional diversity in Central Europe between 1500 and 1800. Addressing issues of tolerance, intolerance, and ecumenism, each chapter explores a facet of the complex dynamic between the state and the region's Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Utraquist, and Jewish communities. The development of religious toleration—one of the most debated questions of the early modern period—is examined here afresh, with careful consideration of the factors and conditions that led to both confessional concord and religious violence.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. 264 pp., illus. Cloth, ISBN 978-0-85745-108-8, $85.