Chapters in a story of unrequited love: Imperial Austria’s memory and its Jewish writers

Abstract

This article aims at tracing the contours of the long and ambivalent history of the integration and assimilation of Jews to Austro-German Culture, by means of some literary renderings of this phenomenon. The beginnings of this process are to be found in the late 18th century, but its literary reflections shine well into the 21st century. The contraposition between an essentialist understanding of culture and a different one, based on the German idea of Bildung, are at the core of the different developments of this process analyzed here, generating doubts and perplexities which are still significant for the study of Austro-Jewish literature.