1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910780448503321

Autore

Bunzl Matti <1971->

Titolo

Symptoms of modernity [[electronic resource] ] : Jews and queers in late-twentieth-century Vienna / / Matti Bunzl

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, 2004

ISBN

1-281-38558-1

0-520-93720-1

9786611385583

1-59734-928-3

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (304 p.)

Disciplina

305.892/4043613/09049

Soggetti

Jews - Austria - Vienna - Social conditions - 20th century

Gay people - Austria - Vienna - Social conditions - 20th century

Nationalism - Social aspects - Austria

Vienna (Austria) Ethnic relations

Vienna (Austria) Social life and customs 20th century

Austria History 1955-

Austria Social policy

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Symptoms of Modernity -- Part One: Subordination -- Part Two: Resistance -- Part Three. Reproduction -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In the 1990's, Vienna's Jews and queers abandoned their clandestine existence and emerged into the city's public sphere in unprecedented numbers. Symptoms of Modernity traces this development in the context of Central European history. Jews and homosexuals are signposts of an exclusionary process of nation-building. Cast in their modern roles in the late nineteenth century, they functioned as Others, allowing a national community to imagine itself as a site of ethnic and sexual purity. In Matti Bunzl's incisive historical and cultural analysis, the Holocaust appears as the catastrophic culmination of this violent



project, an attempt to eradicate modernity's abject by-products from the body politic. As Symptoms of Modernity shows, though World War II brought an end to the genocidal persecution, the nation's exclusionary logic persisted, accounting for the ongoing marginalization of Jews and homosexuals. Not until the 1970's did individual Jews and queers begin to challenge the hegemonic subordination-a resistance that, by the 1990's, was joined by the state's attempts to ensure and affirm the continued presence of Jews and queers. Symptoms of Modernity gives an account of this radical cultural reversal, linking it to geopolitical transformations and to the supersession of the European nation-state by a postmodern polity.