Writing Austria's Modern Jewish History Using Emigre and Survivor Memoirs and Other "Memory Texts"

Hundreds of thousands of Jewish Austrians--defined first in the broader, Habsburg sense of "Austria" and later in the narrower, republican sense--migrated abroad in the first half of the twentieth century, 130,000 alone fleeing Vienna under National Socialism. This diverse collective, often with roots all over Central Europe and with extremely eclectic religious, economic, cultural, linguistic, educational, professional, and other backgrounds, were nevertheless united through the common experience of having once been Austrians, many having been driven violently from their homes to settle across the world. Thousands of these individuals recorded their experiences and the memories of their Austrian past in a wide array of "memory texts," including hundreds of memoirs, published and unpublished. This paper outlines this eclectic corpus of Jewish Austrian memory texts, focusing predominantly on the Austrian Heritage Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and the broader Jewish Austrian experience of cultural genesis, genocide, survival, and rebirth in the twentieth century recounted therein. It closes with a range of new questions that allow for the parameters in which scholarship has conceived of Jewish Austrian history and culture to date to be substantially augmented or even revised. Keywords: Austrian Heritage Collection, Leo Baeck Institute, Collective Memory, Jewish Austrian Culture, Exile Memoirs