The Jewish Museum Vienna was founded in 1990 and was initially located on the premises of the Jewish Community before moving in 1993 to its current home in Palais Eskeles. In 1996, it was opened for a second time after seven months of renovations by the architects Eichinger oder Knechtl.
The first floor of the Museum is devoted to the various temporary exhibitions, of which over fifty were organized in just seven years. When Ito went here in mid-June 2006, they exhibited numerous items related to Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838), Mozart's liberettist. He was born Emanuele Conegliano in Ceneda (now Vittorio Veneto, about 60 km north of Venice), Italy in 1749. They were a Jewish family but after Emanuele's mother died in 1754 and when his father decided to marry a Christian woman, in 1763, the entire family had to convert to Catholicism. The Bishop who baptized the Conegliano family was named Lorenzo da Ponte. As was the custom, the family took his surname and the eldest son his Christian name, Lorenzo. After vainly knocking around several cities of the Austrian Empire to become a court poet, he arrived in Vienna in 1781, when the Emperor Joseph II looked for a poet for the Italian opera theater. At that time da Ponte met Mozart. Mozart and da Ponte worked in a true collaborative relationship in producing their three joint operas including Don Giovanni. When Joseph II died, in 1790, imperial support of the opera ended. Mozart died in 1791, the same year that da Ponte left Vienna after losing his job as a poet to the Italian opera company. He went to Trieste first where in 1892 he met and married Nancy Grahl, an English lady. In 1793 they moved to England where da Ponte had connections. He managed to get himself appointed poet to Italian opera at the King's Theater. His job there continued intermittently until 1804, when he decided to move to New York or "Jew York." Da Ponte spent 35 years in the United States, until he died in 1838 at the age of 89.
On the second floor is a further section of the permanent exhibition, this time showing the various aspects of Jewish history of Vienna. The subject matter ranges from the first medieval community to the ghetto, emancipation in bourgeois society, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the rebuilding of the Community after 1945. The historical exhibitions reflecting the different facets of current and past Jewish life in Vienna.
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Behind the facade of this patrician house is the oldest surviving synagogue in Vienna, today the center of Jewish religious life in the city. The building has an extremely chequered history and contains several features that reflect Vienna's attitude to its Jewish population.
While there had been synagogues in the medieval Jewish quarter and the seventeenth century ghetto, from the closing of the ghetto in 1670 until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Jews of Vienna were forbidden to practice their religion in public. In 1824, they were finally permitted to construct a synagogue. The Viennese Biedermeier architect Josef Kornhausel was commissioned to design the synagogue. He planned a long oval doomed central room with women's galleries running around three sides supported by monumental columns. It highlights the conflict between traditional and assimilated Jews. The oval form was atypical and the bimah, the pedestal where the Torah scrolls are placed for reading, stood not in the center of the room but at one end, in front of the ark. max Eisler, one of the most well-known contemporary synagogue experts, criticized the City Temple as being bourgeois and unreligious. He called it a "temple of national humanism" which "looks like an apartment building from the outside and a theatre from the inside" and was nothing more than a "shell without a kernel."
In compliance with Joseph II's building regulations for non-Catholic houses of worship, the building was not visible from the street but "hidden" behind a townhouse facade. It was thanks to this regulation that the City Temple was not burnt down during the November Pogrom in 1938, since there ware a risk that the neighboring houses would also go up in flames. The interior, which was destroyed by the Nazis, was reconstructed and restored in 1963.
The opening of the City Temple in 1826 is also a reflection of the gradual social recognition and growing self-awareness of Vienna's Jewish community. The clergyman Isaac Noa Manheimer, invited to Vienna, managing to introduce reforms that were accepted by both reform and orthodox Jews. He was supported by a young cantor, Salomon Sulzer, who reformed the music of the synagogue, and his compositions and voice became famous far beyond the confines of the Jewish community.
Mannheimer came to Vienna officially as director of the Jewish religious school, and he functioned only de facto as a rabbi. He supported the revolution of 1848 and was committed to achieving civil equality for the Jews. Emperor Franz Joseph ha d already addressed a delegation of Jews as the "Jewish community of Vienna" in 1849 but official recognition of the Jews as a religious community did not come until the year 1852. Leopold von Wetheimstein was elected as the first president of the community in 1853.
The Jewish Community was now officially responsible for creating a social network for its members from birth to death: it supported widows and orphans, provided welfare for the poor and disabled, arranged health care and burials, supplied schools with materials and gave free accommodation to penniless students and rabbinical scholars, and even helped brides without means. the community today still runs numerous welfare institutions including a nursing home, the ESRA psychosocial center, and schools and kindergartens.
The constitution of the community and concessions towards emancipation, which culminated in the granting of equality, made Vienna into a magnet for Jews from all over the monarchy. The prospect of economic and social improvement resulted in a surge in the Jewish population of Vienna from the mid-nineteenth century (1860: 6,200, 1869: 40,000, 1880: 73,000). By 1938, there were some 180,000 Jews living in Vienna. With few exceptions they were all driven out or put to death by the National Socialist regime. After World War II, very few Jews returned to Vienna, today the community has just 7,000 members. The synagogue building also houses the offices of the Jewish community and the library of the Jewish Museum Vienna.
The adjacent Seitenstettenhof was also designed by Josef Kornhousel. The ground sfloor was converted in 1999 by the young Viennese architects Karin Nekola and Josef Schweighofer into a kosher restaurant. (Extracted from Judisches Wien or Jewish Vienna [Wien: Mandelbaum Verlag Wien, 2004])
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In 1935, a statue by Siegfried Charoux of the poet Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) was erected on Judenplatz. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1939. In 1968, Charoux created a second monument, which stood until 1982 on Franz-Josefs-Kai below Ruprechtskirche (St. Ruprecht's Church) before being moved to the site of the original statue.
Lessing visited Vienna in 1775-76 during a journey to Leipzig, Berlin and Dresden and was received by Kaiser Joseph II. He was the most important representative of the "deutchen Aufklarung" (German Enlightenment) and his plays advocated tolerance for the Jews. Moses Mendelssohn, founder of the Haskala or Jewish Enlightenment, was one of his supporters and friends and is immortalized as the main protagonist in Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise). Although the work did not appear in Vienna until 40 years after its original publication, Lessing can nevertheless be said to have had an important influence on the changing intellectual climate in the city. (Extracted from Judisches Wien or Jewish Vienna [Wien: Mandelbaum Verlag Wien, 2004])
There are numerous allusions and references to Lessing in Joyce's works. Among them my favorite reference appears:
-- Lessing, said Stephen, should not have taken a group of statues to write of [=Lessing should not have written Laokoon (1766)]. The art, being inferior, does not present the forms I spoke of distinguished clearly one from another. Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Gabler & Hettche 1993, V.1440-69)
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The erection of a monument to the 65,000 Austrian victims of the Holocaust was preceded by drawn-out discussions and arguments. The idea was originally put forward because Alfred Hrdlicka's monument against war and fascism on Albertinaplatz, which depicted a Jew scrubbing the pavement, was seen by many as merely a further humiliation. In 1994, Simon Wiesenthal suggested to Michael Haupl, mayor of Vienna, that a separate monument to the 65,000 Austrian Jewish victims of the Holocaust should be erected. An international competition was held and the jury selected a design by the British artist Rachel Whiteread. It consists of a reinforced concrete structure, the walls of which represent a library with the book spines facing inwards. On the plinth are the names of the locations where Austrian Jews were killed by the National Socialists.
The work also makes reference to the characterization of the Jewish people as "People of the Book." Books stand for leaning and the survival of the Jewish tradition in spite of the Diaspora and banishment. Another motif is the tradition of Yislor or commemorative books, which record the lives of important figures, but also the destruction of the community, and act as "memorials" to the victims of persecution.
The memorial was unveiled on October 25, 2000, in the presence of Simon Wiesenthal and numerous local politicians at the same time as the opening of the Judenplatz Museum. (Extracted from Judisches Wien or Jewish Vienna [Wien: Mandelbaum Verlag Wien, 2004])
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The Judenplatz Museum is located in Misrachi House on Judenplatz. Its opening coincided with the unveiling of the memorial by Rachel Whiteread. It focuses on the history of medieval Jews in Austria and is part of he Jewish Museum Vienna (Judishen Museums Wien).
At the same time as preparations were being made for a competition for the design of a memorial, archaeological excavations began in 1995 to uncover the remains of the medieval synagogue. The initial findings gave rise to protracted discussions as to whether the remains of the synagogue might not be a "better" memorial, since medieval anti-Semitism was a precursor of modern anti-Semitism and ultimately of the Final Solution. A compromise was eventually reached with Rachel Whiteread's memorial being erected on the historical site and the remains of the synagogue being opened to the public. The excavations can be seen in the basement of the Judenplatz Museum, which provides information on the old synagogue and the medieval Jewish community. The museum itself has numerous innovative features, including a virtual reconstruction of the synagogue and medieval Jewish quarter. The core of the museum is formed by the remains of the synagogue, which was destroyed in 1421.
On the ground floor, visitors can also consult a database compiled by the Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance containing the names of the 65,000 Austrian Jews who were killed during the Holocaust and providing information about the historical background to this tragedy. (Extracted from Judisches Wien or Jewish Vienna [Wien: Mandelbaum Verlag Wien, 2004])
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Born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, Mozart toured with his father around Europe, then moved to Vienna in 1769 when he accepted Emperor Joseph II's commission to compose and conduct operas. After a two-year tour and a short stay in Italy, Mozart settled in Vienna in 1781, living in poverty despite his position as the royal chamber composer and piano teacher. Long in poor health he died on December 5, 1791.
There are numerous allusions to Mozart in James Joyce's works: Among them Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) by Mozart and the Jewish liberettist Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838) are frequently cited in Ulysses.
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Franz Joseph was born in Vienna, the oldest son of Archduke Franz Karl (younger brother and heir of Emperor Ferdinand I), and his wife Princess Sophie of Bavaria. Franz Joseph was also the older brother of Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. Because his father renounced his claim to the throne, Franz Joseph was brought up by his mother as a future Emperor with emphasis on devoutness, responsibility and diligence. His youth was marked with seclusion and he never experience an affectionate relationship, even with his brothers and sisters. At the age of 13 he started a career as a colonel in the Austrian army. Since then his fashion was dictated by army style and he wore the uniform for most of his life.
He became Austrian Emperor as Franz Joseph I when Ferdinand abdicated near the end of the Revolution of 1848, on December 2, 1848. His imperial career was at first connected with the personality of Felix Schwarzenberg and was targeted to restore absolutism and regain the powerful position in foreign affairs. He abolished the Constitution of 1849 and became a sovereign monarch in 1852. However, the 1850s witnessed several failures of Austrian external policy -- the Crimean War and break-up with Russia, Austro-Sardinian War of 1859 against armies of the House of Savoy, and Napoleon III).
The set-backs continued in the 1860s with Austro-Prussian War of 1866. It resulted in Austrian-Hungarian Dualism in 1867. FranzﾊJoseph and his great-grandnephew Archduke Otto
In 1854 Franz Joseph married Duchess Elisabeth in Bavaria ("Sisi" or "Sissi"). Contrary to popular myth, their married life was not happy: their first daughter Sophie died as an infant, while the only son, Crown Prince Rudolf died, allegedly by suicide, in 1889 in the infamous Mayerling episode with his young mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera. The Empress herself was stabbed to death by an anarchist in 1898; Franz Joseph never recovered from the loss and always said to his relatives "You'll never know how much I loved her."
In 1914 the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, leading to World War I. Franz Joseph died in 1916, aged 86, in the middle of the war. After the defeat in World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy dissolved into national states.
Strange to say, there is no direct reference to Franz Joseph I in Joyce's works. However, when the Joyces first lived between 1904-1914 in Trieste, the important port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was still in the reign of Franz Joseph I. Naturally Joyce was much conscious of the emperor's existence. He must have been one of the key persons to inspire Joyce to create Leopold Bloom who has a Hungarian Jewish background: In the hallucination of the Circe episode Bloom becomes Leopold the First and tries to establish Bloomsalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future (U15.1470-1589).
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There are numerous allusions and references to Goethe in Joyce's works:
12. [Dublin: at Sheehy's, Belvedere Place]
O'Reilly -- (with developing seriousness) ....
Now it's my turn, I suppose ....(quite seriously)
.... Who is your favourite poet?
(a pause)
Hanna Sheehy -- ......German?
O'Reilly--......Yes.
(a hush)
Hanna Sheehy--....I think ....Goethe....
(Epiphanies 12)
The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life--the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet is intense -- the life of Blake or of Dante--taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. ("James Clarence Mangan," (1902) The Critical Writings, (1959), p. 82)
Here and not in Shakespeare or Goethe was the successor to the first poet of the Europeans, here, as only to such purpose in Dante, a human personality had been found united with an artistic manner which was itself almost a natural phenomenon: and the spirit of the time united one more readily with the Norwegian than with the Florentine. (Stephen Hero (1963), XVI, p.41)
-- I hear you are writing some essays about esthetics. Stephen made a vague gesture of denial.
-- Goethe and Lessing, said Donovan, have written a lot on that subject, the classical school and the romantic school and all that. The Laocoon interested me very much when I read it. Of course it is idealistic, German, ultra-profound. (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Gabler & Hettche 1993, V.1320-26)
--Directly, said he [Thomas William Lyster (1855-1922), the quaker librarian of National Library of Ireland], creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts. One always feels that Goethe's judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis. (Ulysses 9.0009-11)
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Beethoven is once mentioned in the name list of the Cyclops episode (U 12.194).
I do not think that Beethoven influenced Joyce more than Wagner and Mozart, although both Beethoven and Joyce had a serious physical handicap in their later years when both achieved greatest feats: audibly-challenged Beethoven and (almost) visibly-challenged Joyce.
However, Alfred Kazin reviewed:
Alone among the artists of our time, therefore, perhaps alone in Europe since Beethoven wrote those last quartets that climax man's quarrel with life, Joyce overpowering importance of his soul and written as if the world were well lost for art. Through blindness, war, poverty, neglect, the cracking of those who do not understand, Joyce has followed his metier. Yet remarkable as his accomplishment has been, the terrifying isolation that has made him the writer he is seems today even more significant. For it has brought him, through one of those cycles that spell the biography of genius, from the longings of Dubliners, the limpid beauty of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the herculean comedy of Ulysses, to the nightmare of darkness and immolation. That is Finnegans Wake. (Finnegans Wake on New York Herald Tribune, 21 May 1939)
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A large number of busts of Jewish professors can be seen in the courtyard (unfortunately it was under restoration when Ito visited in June 2006). The city's academic reputation in many fields at the end of the nineteenth centuries is largely attributable to the many Jewish scientists and researchers, particularly in the field of medicine.
In connection to Joyce, the most important Jewish graduate is Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the father of psychoanalysis (see below).
Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) first encountered the anti-Semitism while studying at the University of Vienna in1882, and was awarded a doctorate of law from this university in 1884. In 1896 he published Der Judenstaat. Versuch einer modernen Losung der Judenfrage (The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question) which was included in Joyce's Trieste library. In 1897 he organized the first Zionist Confress in Basle with a view to put Zionist ideas into practice, and in the same year he launched Die Welt as a newspaper outlet for the new movement. He is regarded as the founder of political Zionism. The Zionist movement grew in a short time into an internationally recognized organization, which attracted Eastern Europe. In 1948, Herzl's dream came true and the State of Israel was founded.
Otto Weininger (1880-1903) entered the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Vienna at the age of 18. He converted to Christianity (Protestantism) on July 21, 1902, the day he became a doctor of philosophy.ﾊHe completed Geschlect und Charakter (Sex and Character), which was first published in German in May 1903. On October 4, 1903, he committed suicide at the age of twenty-three. After Weininger's death, however, Geschlect und Charakter ironically received a favored reaction from numerous readers and it has been re-published many times in a number of European languages. Geschlect und Charakter is a voluble and unsubstantiated treatise, which "proved" that women and Jews did not possess a rational and moral self and, therefore, neither deserved nor needed equality with Aryan men or even simple liberty. Although Joyce's existing Trieste library does not include this book, I presume that it inspired Joyce to write Giacomo Joyce and Ulysses.
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He went on to attend the University of Vienna at 17, from 1873 to 1881. In 1886, Freud returned to Vienna and, after opening a private practice specializing in nervous and brain disorders, he married. After publishing successful books on the unconscious mind in 1900 and 1901, Freud was appointed to a professorship at the University of Vienna, where he began to develop a loyal following.
In 1933, as Hitler and the Nazis seized power in Germany, Freud's books were burnt publicly by the S. A.. Following the Nazi German Anschluss, Freud fled Austria with his family with the financial help of his patient and friend Princess Marie Bonaparte in 1938. On June 4, 1938, they were allowed across the border into France and then they traveled from Paris to Hampstead, London, England, where they lived at 20 Maresfield Gardens (now the Freud Museum). Freud smoked an entire box of cigars daily for most of his life, which caused his mouth cancer. No longer tolerating he pain associated with his cancer Freud ended his life by a physician-assisted morphine overdose in London on September 23, 1939.
During Joyce's English lessons for Paolo Cuzzi from 1911-1913 in Trieste, Freud became a subject of conversation for them. As Ellmann noted, Joyce had in Trieste three small pamphlets in German, Freud's A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci, Ernest Jone's The Problem of Hamlet and the Oedipus Complex, and Jung's The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual. They were all published in German between 1909 and 1911, and it seems likely that Joyce purchased them during that period (James Joyce, p. 340n). Later Joyce purchased Zur Psychopathologie des Alltaglebens (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Berlin, 1901/1917) in Zurich. He told that he preferred Vico to Freud but it is clear that Joyce had a strong interest in dreams and read Freud's works, which inspired Joyce to write Finnegans Wake.
There are four references to Freud in the Scylla and Charybdis episode of Ulysses (U 09.0738, 0740, 0778-83 & 0795-96). In Finnegans Wake his name is literally referred to three times: "when they were yung and easily freudened" (FW 115_22-23), "what matter what all his freudzay or who holds his hat to harm him" (FW 337.06-07) and "You never made a more freudful mistake, excuse yourself!" (FW 411.35-36).
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