“‘Wienerisch’ as it lives in our day”: Wiener Werkstätte fashion and the search for a Jewish Austrian identity, 1914-1932
Whether one envisions it through Klimt’s paintings, Wagner’s architecture, or Schorske’s famous Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1979) – Vienna around the turn of the century is known as a place of high culture and flourishing artistic innovations. Recently, however, this narrative has been questioned heavily. An important aspect that has gained attention is the prominence and leading role of Jews in this Viennese high culture.1For instance: Rethinking Vienna 1900, ed. Steven Beller (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001). Despite the wide acceptance of their role, I will argue that it should likewise be studied in-depth in the period after the fin-de-siècle. Using the Wiener Werkstätte’s fashion department as a case study, I will demonstrate how art provided a means for Viennese Jews to search for a new position and identity in a changing political environment.
Marsha L. Rozenblit (2001) has described the transitions in identity that followed the First World War and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. She points out that these events forced Austrian Jews, once relatively comfortable in the multinational Habsburg Empire, to find new means to emancipation and new ways to claim their cultural authority in a German-dominated society.2Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). What happened to the prominent cultural position Viennese Jews had once the war broke out, and more importantly, when the empire collapsed? How did they respond to identity transitions in Austria and Vienna?
As such questions cannot be answered in a few pages, a case study can help to illustrate the transitions that the Jewish cultural elite in Vienna went through. The Wiener Werkstätte (1903-1932) often pops up in the earlier mentioned studies, and for good reasons: Jews were associated with the Werkstätte in all possible ways. Despite this fact, and the Werkstätte’s huge (international) influence, studies of Jewish identification and the Wiener Werkstätte have never gone beyond an occasional portrait of an individual.3For instance: Elena Shapira, Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Yet with its long history, the Wiener Werkstätte can shed light on exactly the aforementioned questions.
My analysis will therefore take the Wiener Werkstätte’s fashion department as a case study for the period starting with the outbreak of the First World War until the closing of the Werkstätte in 1932. Fashion and dress can effectively express identity, making this department a key to the Wiener Werkstätte’s ideals. Moreover, it allows best for perspectives from Jewish women in Vienna as well. Using primarily newspaper articles and internal documents of the Werkstätte, my analysis will uncover how Jewish patrons, designers, buyers, and critics of the Wiener Werkstätte attempted to be ‘wienerisch’ as it lived in their day.
- 1For instance: Rethinking Vienna 1900, ed. Steven Beller (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001).
- 2Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
- 3For instance: Elena Shapira, Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).