Interwar Salzburg: Austrian Culture Beyond Vienna

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A long-overdue reassessment of post-1918 Salzburg as a distinct Austrian cultural hub that experimented in moving beyond war and empire into a modern, self-consciously inclusive, and international center for European culture.

For over 300 years, Salzburg had its own legacy as a city-state at an international crossroads, less stratified than Europe's colonial capitals and seeking a political identity based in civic participation with its own economy and politics. After World War I, Salzburg became a refuge. Its urban and bucolic spaces staged encounters that had been brutally cut apart by the war; its deep-seated traditions of citizenship, art, and education guided its path.

In Interwar Salzburg, contributors from around the globe recover an evolving but now lost vanguard of European culture, fostering not only new identities in visual and performing arts, film, music, and literature, but also a festival culture aimed at cultivating an inclusive public (not an international elite) and a civic culture sharing public institutions, sports, tourism, and a diverse spectrum of cultural identities serving a new European ideal.

Reviews

Interwar Salzburg is a beautiful volume on a neglected and fascinating subject. Dassanowsky and Arens are just the right people to bring this world to light, and their introduction is elegantly written to draw interwar Salzburg out of the shadows of the wreck of the Empire. The essays collected here provide an impressive array of thoughtful understandings of this small city that was hard to see from Viennaas it still is a century later. They aim at alternative historical narratives of Austria and Europe, in an effort to restore Europes peripheries to national narratives and European histories. * David S. Luft, Horning Endowed Chair in the Humanities Emeritus, Oregon State University, USA *

Interwar Salzburg makes a case for Austrias second city as a dynamic cultural space that worked to forge a modern, post-Habsburg Austrian and European identity after the upheavals of the First World War. This volume assembles an impressively interdisciplinary team of leading scholars who provide diverse perspectives on what it meant to be in, of, and from Salzburg between the wars. The essays
collected here offer compelling models of local and regional history that insist we think beyond national histories and the political and financial metropolises that that typically dominate those histories.

Author Bio

Robert Dassanowsky is CU Distinguished Professor of Film and Austrian Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, USA, and is a former President of the Austrian Studies Association. He works as an independent film producer, and his previous publications include Austrian Cinema: A History (2005) and Screening Transcendence: Film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope 19331938 (2018). He is a jury member for the annual VIS: Vienna Shorts Film Festival.

Katherine Arens is a Professor of Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Womens and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, and a former President of the Austrian Studies Association. Her most recent monographs are Vienna's Dreams of Europe and Belle Necropolis: Ghosts of Imperial Vienna (both 2015).