Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna

In the 1990s, Vienna's Jews and queers abandoned their clandestine existence and emerged into the city's public sphere in unprecedented numbers. Symptoms of Modernity traces this development in the context of Central European history.

Jews and homosexuals are signposts of an exclusionary process of nation-building. Cast in their modern roles in the late nineteenth century, they functioned as Others, allowing a national community to imagine itself as a site of ethnic and sexual purity. In Ma...