Vienna, the Ostjude, and the Jewish Shadow

Julian Ungar-Sargon, MD, PhD — Former Clinical Director, PA Program, Borra College of Health Sciences, Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois

“One can leave Vienna; Vienna does not easily leave the soul.”

Introduction: The Stone

The stone should not have survived.

Around it lay fragments of names, broken Hebrew letters, shattered marble, abandoned graves whose descendants had disappeared into Auschwitz, Melbourne, Chicago, Tel Aviv, and memory. Yet one tall granite monument remained standing, weathered but unbowed. Upon it was carved the name of my great-grandfather, dead since 1918, decades before Europe decided that Jewish history should end.

I had crossed an ocean to stand before that stone.

I thought I had come to visit the dead.

Instead, the dead began questioning me.

Not through voices. Through images. A synagogue. A Viennese boulevard. My father’s remembered city. And finally, unexpectedly, a Hasidic family crossing the street in black kapotes.

The encounter lasted only seconds. The questions have lasted much longer.

Why did their presence disturb me? Not morally. Psychologically. Why should visible Jewishness feel somehow incongruous in a city that once tried to erase Jewish visibility altogether? Whose eyes were seeing? Mine? My father’s? Vienna’s? Or Europe’s?

That question became the beginning of this essay.

Notice that Hitler has not yet appeared here. Neither has Jung. I want the reader inside the pilgrimage before either enters — because the questions I am asking did not arrive as history or as theory. They arrived as a feeling in the body, on a street, before I had any framework with which to understand them. Everything that follows is an attempt to build that framework retroactively, honestly, without letting the framework flatten what was, as it happened, simply and uncomfortably felt.

1: The City That Invented the Modern Soul

Before this can become a story about Jews, it must become a story about Vienna, because Vienna is not incidental to what I felt on its streets — Vienna is, in a sense, the mechanism.

Between roughly 1870 and 1938, a single city of modest size produced psychoanalysis, twelve-tone and late-Romantic music at its most radical, the Vienna Circle’s logical positivism, the Secession’s architectural and visual revolt against ornament, and — not by coincidence, but by dialectical relation — both political Zionism and modern political antisemitism, each responding to the other’s presence in the same coffee houses and the same newspapers. Carl Schorske’s classic account of fin-de-siècle Vienna treats the city as a laboratory in which liberal bourgeois culture, having lost its confident hold on politics, retreated into aesthetics, psychology, and the interior life — and Vienna’s Jews, disproportionately represented among the professional and........

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