ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historically situated ethnographic account of the evolving conditions and experiences of Viennese Jews and queers over the last one hundred years, with particular emphasis on the six post-Nazi decades. It also provides a model for historically informed anthropological analysis. Jews’ and homosexuals’ abjection and their fantasized roles as the bearers of racial and sexual impurity buttressed and gave “coherence to the fiction of German nationness”. Nor could the intensified persecution—and, soon thereafter, organized murder—of Jews and also of homosexuals be acknowledged after 1945. In addition, Jews’ attempts to repossess the property that had been stolen from them was treated as a threat to Austria’s economic viability and was even met in 1948 by an organized campaign which lobbied on behalf of the rights of “Aryanizers.” Matti Bunzl details the coping strategies developed by Jews in the face of persistent aggression.
