Symptoms of Modernity is an anthropological,
cross-cultural study concerning the conditions and progress of the LGBT and
Jewish communities in Austria. Matti Bunzl is able to link these two groups
because both were perceived, by the majority of citizens, as containing traits which opposed the nation’s Aryan self-image. The existence of Jews and
LGBT people contradicted the dominant culture’s view of itself as Aryan men and
women, having specific gender roles, within a culturally homogeneous nation.
From this jumping-off point, Bunzl presents the similar
history of these groups from pre-World War II to the early 21st
Century. The reader sees an evolution from oppression and exclusion, through
the inter-war Nazi period of extermination, to the post-War period of disregard.
The trajectory becomes more positive in the 1970s as both groups organize
publicly and begin demanding rights. One then observes increasing progress
through the 1990s and into the 21st Century, which is influenced by
both demands from these two communities within the nation and modernizing
transnational pressure exerted primarily by the European Union that Austria
wished to join.
The chief post-war stumbling block, which prevented
Austrians from making much progress around homophobia and anti-Semitism, was
the nation’s self-identification as “Hitler’s First Victim.” Those familiar
with the history of the Anschluss will remember that the Austrian population
overwhelmingly supported the Nazi “invasion.” German soldiers were welcomed at
the border with flowers and treated to parades in Vienna. After the confetti
was swept-up, Austria’s citizens brutally, enthusiastically participated in the
Third Reich’s program, of killing and deporting to concentration camps, their
Jewish and LGBT citizens. They were “Hitler’s First Cheerleaders.” But the loss
of the war made remembering this behavior inconvenient. So the victim myth was
born. Unlike their relatives in Germany, Austrians remained unrepentant. While
Germany began a program of classes in public schools that addressed national
responsibility for the Holocaust, Austria continued its ideology of racial
purity and gendered images of Aryan men and women that excluded LGBT people and
Jews. By the late 20th Century, Germany was electing leftist
chancellors like Willy Brandt and rising Green Party members like Petra Kelly,
while Austria was electing conservative ex-Nazis like Kurt Waldheim and rising
reactionaries like Jorg Haider.
Bunzl’s work is a unique contribution to the study of
Austrian history and society. His examination of the intersections between the
experiences of Jewish and LGBT communities is a first. The author teaches
Anthropology, as well as History. His research is based upon both historical
archives and direct, anthropological field study. As a result, his perspective
is on the development of the two cultures, their institutions, their
connections with each other and their relationship to the dominant culture, as
they politically awaken and culturally expand over time.
The language of this book is a combination of academic
anthropological expression and over-thinking. Its dense professional vocabulary
sometimes results in ideas sounding more original and complex than they are.
For example, Bunzl will say that the two communities “share a common genealogy
of cultural abjection” (Bunzl, p. 12), rather than “they are similarly
oppressed minorities.” Through a novel use of terms, Professor Bunzl also
argues for a thesis statement that is intellectually obtuse and linguistically
awkward. The author calls the LGBT and Jewish communities “symptoms of
modernity,” meaning that they were “the abject products of the nation’s reification
as a fantasized space of ethnic and sexual purity, as well as the signposts of
its historical trajectory” (Bunzl, p. 216). Aside from the author’s
ever-present, convoluted language, the idea is flawed on its face. It’s not
Jewish and LGBT people who are “symptoms.” Indeed, calling oppressed minorities
“symptoms” dehumanizes them and configures them in a subservient position as
indicators for the dominant culture, when they should be represented as
independent peoples. It would be simpler and more accurate to say “the way LGBT
and Jewish people were treated showed how the Austrian culture was changing.”
The value of Symptoms of Modernity is not only in its
unique presentation of Vienna’s LGBT and Jewish communities, but also in its
optimism. Bunzl shows vibrant groups overcoming a horrific past and arriving in
a more liberated, culturally rich present. His images of Pride Marches, social events,
Jewish museums, strong organizations and protests, are affirmative pictures of healthy growth. A particular nugget of interest is his portrait of an iconoclastic political group of LGBT Jews called Re'uth. It’s
not all rosy. This anthropologist presented signs that Austria was developing
new nationalist prejudices targeting non-European immigrants. These anti-immigrant sentiments are poignant to read about, as Austria and the EU face their
Migrant Crisis of Syrian refugees. But by and large, Bunzl celebrates the
changes that have taken place and the regenerative ability of humanity.
Bunzl, Matti. Symptoms of Modernity. Jews and Queers in
Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004.
No comments:
Post a Comment