Centropa Jewish Vienna Tour

Welcome to Centropa’s Jewish walking tour of Vienna. My name is Edward Serotta, director of Centropa. We’re going to take a walk through the heart of the Jewish quarter—along Taborstrasse in the second district.And while we don’t have actual addresses to show you, we do have stories that took place all along this street—and the surrounding streets– so let’s begin. The app will suggest a place for you to start.You are in the city that began the 20th century as the grand capital of an enormous empire, when more than 175,000 Jews lived here. In earlier times, Vienna was home to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. Then as the world raced toward modern times, it was Mahler and Schoenberg, along with Freud, Wittgenstein, Schiele and Klimt, some of the names that define western culture. But the Austro Hungarian empire died at the close of the First World War and Austria became a shrunken republic in 1918 that no one particularly wanted. 20 years later, Austria was subsumed into Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich and Vienna’s Jews would go running for their lives. 65,000 did not get away. They were sent off to their deaths. Of those Jews who fled in time or survived, very few wanted to return here. Nevertheless, there’s a small and very lively Jewish community in Vienna today but our task is to pay tribute to that last generation of Jews who were born and grew up here before the Holocaust. Except for my brief introductions, you’re going to hear from three women Tanja Eckstein interviewed for us in 2005 and 2006, and we’ll hear from two writers who were here when history happened. Let’s start with excerpt from a collection of essays by Joseph Roth. He lived from 1894 to 1939, and wrote more than a dozen novels and countless newspaper articles. His masterwork, The Radetzky March, is considered one of the great novels of the 20th century. We can’t recommend it highly enough. Here is what Roth—ever ironic—wrote about Vienna’s Jewish quarter back in 1927. The translation is by Michael Hoffman.