In Van­ish­ing Vien­na, his­to­ri­an Frances Tanz­er ana­lyzes the cul­tur­al evo­lu­tion of Vien­na from the Nazi peri­od into the ear­ly 1960s. She traces the way that the pres­ence, absence, and specter of Vienna’s Jews influ­enced the for­ma­tion of a dis­tinct Aus­tri­an iden­ti­ty through­out this period.

The book is divid­ed into two ​“acts” — fit­ting, because much of the book is about per­form­ers. Act One gives an overview of Aus­tri­an cul­ture from the Anschluss in 1938 to the con­clu­sion of World War II in 1945; Act Two exam­ines Jew­ish rem­i­gra­tion after 1945. The first chap­ter delves into the removal of Jews from Vien­na, pay­ing par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to how the cul­tur­al spaces (both sym­bol­ic and phys­i­cal) that had been asso­ci­at­ed with Jews nego­ti­at­ed the shed­ding of those asso­ci­a­tions. The sec­ond chap­ter focus­es on the cre­ative lives — and, in par­tic­u­lar, the nos­tal­gic per­for­mances — of exiled Vien­nese per­form­ers. Tanz­er lat­er iden­ti­fies nos­tal­gia as a core ele­ment of post­war Aus­tri­an iden­ti­ty for­ma­tion. In fact, she argues that the Anschluss, ​“a moment where Austria’s bor­ders dis­solved and many of its most sig­nif­i­cant cul­tur­al fig­ures fled,” was ​“iron­i­cal­ly the foun­da­tion for the post­war artic­u­la­tion of an Aus­tri­an identity.”

In the sec­ond act, Tanz­er details the anti­se­mit­ic response to the return of Vienna’s Jews after World War II. The next chap­ter explores philosemitism, or the ide­al­iza­tion of Jews, in post­war Vien­na, which Tanz­er describes not as the inverse of anti­semitism but as its nat­ur­al bed­fel­low. The chap­ter deals with the mod­ernist cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion that has become so emblem­at­ic of Vien­na. While it brought Jews in sym­bol­i­cal­ly, it paid lit­tle regard to the real Jews who had returned to the city. As Tanz­er writes, ​“the con­tin­u­a­tion of philose­mit­ic stereo­types hard­ly paved the way for the inclu­sion of Jew­ish artists or cul­tur­al fig­ures … rather, it reflect­ed a world where Jew­ish dif­fer­ence remained one of the pri­ma­ry modes for think­ing about nation­al and con­ti­nen­tal iden­ti­ties.” The final chap­ter focus­es on the Jew­ish per­form­ers who returned to Vien­na and on the humor in their work.

Van­ish­ing Vien­na is a deft cul­tur­al his­to­ry. Study­ing the ever-shift­ing posi­tion of Jews in Vienna’s cul­tur­al imag­i­na­tion, espe­cial­ly as it relates to Jew­ish migra­tion and rem­i­gra­tion, Tanz­er elu­ci­dates the ways in which the city grap­pled with its annex­a­tion, its role in the Holo­caust, and its place in post­war Europe.