woman speaking to audience

Navigating Austro-Modernism Dr. Marjorie Perloff talks of life in Austria between the world wars and the 'Vienna Paradox'


When most people think of Vienna, they think of Mozart and
The Sound of Music
, but for distinguished scholar and author Marjorie Perloff, Ph.D., interwar Vienna was home for the first few years of her life.

“For a young child, even a Jewish child brought up as I was, in the shaky republic of Austria, between the two world wars, nothing was more glamorous than the tales of the Habsburg emperors,” Perloff said during a lecture she gave at Chapman University on Tuesday, Feb. 16.

Perloff’s talk was part of the
Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education
’s yearlong series:
Memory, Meaning, and Justice.
With the help of multiple family photos, letters and documents, Perloff described not only the Vienna before the Nazi invasion, but also the cultured life and world of her early childhood.

“The importance of Vienna as a great large cultural capital of the early 20
th
century is hardly a dispute, but what has been less well understood is the astonishing impact of what I call in my new book, ‘Austro-modernism,’” she said.

Born Gabriele Mintz to an assimilated Jewish family in Vienna, Perloff grew up speaking German and was introduced to an intellectual life. After the Nazi takeover, she and her family fled to Switzerland before immigrating to the United States. Though she was only six years old when she left, she recalled every detail of the trip.

“There was such a mob and we had to wait so long that Mommy said she would unpack a book and I sat down on our hat-box and read. When we finished, we went to the station restaurant where we had ham rolls that tasted very good,” Perloff read from her memoir:
The Vienna Paradox
. “And as I was sitting in this restaurant, I didn’t yet have any idea that later in America I would write a book.”

Indeed she did end up writing. In addition to her memoir, Perloff has also written more than a dozen books on post-modern literature and art  and is a recipient of the prestigious Robert Penn Warren Prize. Her newest book,
The Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Hapsburg Empire,
is set to be published in May 2016.

Looks like her six-year-old self knew what she was doing all along.

Woman speaking

Dr. Perloff talks with the audience.

Top image: Dr. Marjorie Perloff discussing interwar Austria.

Michelle Yee

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