Interwar Salzburg

A long-overdue reassessment of post-1918 Salzburg as a distinct Austrian cultural hub that experimented in moving beyond war and empire into a modern, self-consciously inclusive, and international center for European culture.

For over 300 years, Salzburg had its own legacy as a city-state at an international crossroads, less stratified than Europe's colonial capitals and seeking a political identity based in civic participation with its own economy and politics. After World War I, Salzburg became a refuge. Its urban and bucolic spaces staged encounters that had been brutally cut apart by the war; its deep-seated traditions of citizenship, art, and education guided its path.

In Interwar Salzburg, contributors from around the globe recover an evolving but now lost vanguard of European culture, fostering not only new identities in visual and performing arts, film, music, and literature, but also a festival culture aimed at cultivating an inclusive public (not an international elite) and a civic culture sharing public institutions, sports, tourism, and a diverse spectrum of cultural identities serving a new European ideal.

Auteur

Robert Dassanowsky is CU Distinguished Professor of Film and Austrian Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, USA, and is a former President of the Austrian Studies Association. He works as an independent film producer, and his previous publications include Austrian Cinema: A History (2005) and Screening Transcendence: Film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope 1933-1938 (2018). He is a jury member for the annual VIS: Vienna Shorts Film Festival.

Katherine Arens is a Professor of Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, and a former President of the Austrian Studies Association. Her most recent monographs are Vienna's Dreams of Europe and Belle Necropolis: Ghosts of Imperial Vienna (both 2015).