Seite - 297 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

Harriet Pass Freidenreich Gender and Identity Jewish University Women in Vienna The memoirs of Rose-Marie Papanek-Akselrad, written shortly after her emigration to the United States in 1938, begin as follows : “I am an Austrian. I was born and raised in Vienna and the families of both my parents resided in Austria for centuries ; all of their traditions and memories were tied to this homeland. I am also a Jew, but what that was and what it meant I knew very little about in my childhood and youth. One belonged to the Jewish religious community because one’s fathers and grandfathers were Jews, but otherwise one lived exactly as the other Austrian citizens who were Catholic or Protestant.” Papanek thus presents herself as an Austrian by nationality and as a Jew by religion, although she implies that Judaism was not her own personal religion but that of her male forbears. Papanek’s Jewish identity was shaped largely by negative factors, such as social segregation and antisemitism, rather than Jewish observance at home or religious education at school. Born in 1904, she was raised in a very assimilated family ; her father, a newspaper editor, had grown up in a non-observant Jewish household in Bohemia, and her mother descended from a highly secularized, educated family in Moravia ; many of her relatives had been baptized. As a student at the Hochschule für Bodenkultur, a hotbed of German nationalism in the 1920’s, Papanek witnessed frequent outbreaks of violence against male Jewish students, many of whom were Zi- onists ; but as a woman whom fellow-students viewed as “un-Jewish” in both appear- ance and behavior, she rejected Jewish nationalism and claimed not to have personally experienced overt discrimination. She seems to have associated primarily with other Jews, but her marriage in a synagogue ceremony is the only contact with organized Jewish life which she mentions in her unpublished autobiography . To what extent is Rose-Marie Papanek-Akselrad’s identity as a Jew and an Austrian typical of Jewish university women in early twentieth century Vienna ? Rose-Marie Papanek-Akselrad, “My Life in Germany”, unpublished manuscript, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Boston, bMS, #175, p. 1. Ibid.