Full Description
This book examines three exhibitions of contemporary art held at the Vienna Künstlerhaus during the period of National Socialist rule and shows how each attempted to culturally erase elements anathema to Nazi ideology: the City, the Jewess and fin-de-siècle Vienna.
Each of the exhibits was large scale and ambitious, part of a broader attempt to situate Vienna as the cultural capital of the Reich, and each aimed to reshape cultural memory and rewrite history. Applying illuminating theories on memory studies, collective and public memory, and notions of "memoricide," this is the first book in English to focus on visual culture in the period when Austria was erased as a nation and incorporated into the Third Reich as "Ostmark." The organization, content and publications surrounding these three exhibits are explored in depth and set against the larger political changes and dangerous ideologies they reflect.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, cultural history, memory studies, art and politics and Holocaust studies.
Contents
1. Introduction: Repression, Revision and the History of Art in Nazi Vienna 2. Austrian Identity, the Anschluss and the Creation of Ostmark 3. Ushering in the Ostmark: Vienna and the Künstlerhaus: Spring 1938 to Spring 1939 4. Erasing the City: Mountains and People of Ostmark: March 3 to April 23, 1939 5. Cultural Politics, Separatism and Baldur von Schirach: Summer 1939 to Spring 1942 6. Erasing the Jewess: The Beautiful Viennese Female Portrait: June 13 to July 12, 1942 7. The Pearl Loses Its Luster: Summer 1942 to Defeat at Stalingrad 8. Erasing the Fin de Siècle: The Gustav Klimt Exhibit, February 7 to March 7 1943 9. The Fall of Vienna and the Künstlerhaus 10. Conclusion
