Orientalism and the Transformation of Jewish Identity in Vienna, 1900

This paper discusses the transformation of Jewish identities in Vienna through examining the opposition of modernist authors and architects such as Jewish authors Richard Beer-Hofmann and Karl Kraus and gentile architects Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos against the Orientalist trend in architecture and design at the turn-of-the-century.

Positioned between Theophil von Hansen’s Historicist Academy of Fine Arts and Otto Wagner’s art nouveau underground station in Karlsplatz, Joseph Maria Olbrich’s Secession House (1898) followed Wagner’s modernist design of underground stations. Yet Olbrich made sure to secure an Oriental exotic identification through the golden cupola. Orientalism was not necessarily identified as a choice of Jewish self-identification. It evolved rather in connection to attempts of gentile architects to convey the dual identity of European Jews as Europeans and as “Jews,” as witnessed in Semper’s synagogue in Dresden. At the time the Secession House was built there were striking Moorish-style synagogues in Vienna’s urban landscape, recently designed by gentile and Jewish architects.

Question arises was the Oriental identification of the Secession House meant as cultural provocation to conservative Christians, a gesture against the Baroque St. Charles Church, and at the same time to serve as reminders to acculturated Jews of their "origins in the Near East," a gesture against the Jewish patrons who demonstratively built Neo-Renaissance rental-apartment palaces on the Ringstrasse? This paper discusses the influence of the Secession House on the fashioning of new Jewish European identities in Vienna 1900.