Walking the City: Women, Space, and Violence in Nazi-Era Vienna

I arrived in Vienna on a foggy Monday morning in early April — bleary-eyed off an overnight train, in search of the closest coffee stand, with a small green suitcase in tow— not unlike most of my research trips across Germany, and now Austria. With caffeination in hand, I headed directly to the archive, pondering the day’s potential findings and already taking note of the names of the streets and squares between the Vienna Hauptbahnhof and the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, where I would be spending most of my time while in the city. There is always something titillating about the time before the real research begins, as you go over your notes of requested documents, crossing fingers and pressing thumbs in hopes of finding a new “treasure trove” of sources hidden within the stacks of each institution. Within an hour of my arrival, I was sitting in the reading room, reaching for the first postwar trial record from the large stack of pre-pulled requested material. With the support of a Central European History Society research and travel grant, I had finally made it to Vienna to begin working through the records that form the evidentiary core of my dissertation on Austrian women’s participation in Nazi-era violence against their Jewish neighbors.

While the bulk of my research to this point had focused on German source material, this trip to Vienna was dedicated to filling a critical gap in the Austrian component of the project. My goal was to gather as many key sources as possible, documenting Austrian women’s involvement in racialized violence following the Anschluss, when the country’s embrace of National Socialism produced especially intense and public forms of persecution. The case material I gathered in Vienna was rich in content and extensive in detail. I came away with documentation on more than sixty women, drawn from trial transcripts, denunciation files, and witness testimony. Although party membership varied, these women were not high-ranking officials or camp guards; they were neighbors, shopkeepers, and tenants. The records show them looting and destroying Jewish homes and businesses, assaulting Viennese Jews on doorsteps and street corners, and denouncing Jewish shop owners in the street during the November Pogrom. Other cases describe women policing where Viennese Jews were and were not permitted to walk, shop, or sit, inserting themselves into the everyday enforcement of racial boundaries without any official mandate to do so. After reading through dozens of cases, what comes through is not a handful of extreme, exceptional acts but a steady accumulation of smaller, and at times larger, local cruelties carried out by women who had no formal authority and needed none.

After each day at the archive, I set out to walk the streets of Vienna to get a better feel for the city’s geography, a practice I had developed in the early days of my dissertation research. I spent many evenings in and around Vienna’s old Jewish quarter and surrounding districts, tracing the places and routes that would show up again and again in the files as I read through them — the same street names, the same intersections, the same shop addresses — all attached to different people and different incidents of racialized violence. Walking the city or town where I am conducting research has become its own sort of research method for my project. I have found that, through personal familiarity with the physical space itself, names click into place faster, while patterns that at first look scattered on a page start to resolve into something legible when you can picture the surrounding geography more clearly.

The practice of walking through the spaces discussed in the records is more than just an incidental outcome of a long day of sitting at the archive; it has become a key part of the project. In looking at how “Aryan” women participated in racial terror in public spaces during the Nazi period, compared to white women in the U.S. during the era of Jim Crow, space is not just the backdrop for this history; rather, it is one of the things being controlled and fought over. Every accusation or curse hurled, every punch thrown or body shoved, and every window broken or valuable stolen was also an act of spatial control and violence, a way of influencing and limiting who got to move through which parts of the city and how. Walking those same streets myself, decades later, is one way I try to keep that spatial dimension of the violence in view rather than letting it flatten out into abstract case numbers. It would also serve as inspiration for a more visual way in which to present this research. 

The more time I spent tracing these cases on foot, the more I realized I could do the same thing analytically: pin each incident to a specific place and moment, and then watch what happens when you put all fifty-plus cases on the same spatial and chronological map. Individually, an incident outside a particular shop or in a specific courtyard can look small. Plotted together, the cases provide a clearer image of a decentralized, street-by-street layout of the city and the spaces in which Jewish Viennese were unable to safely navigate or exist, gradually built up not just by a single policy but by the cumulative, everyday actions of women across the city. While I had mapped several parade-like routes of violence during the November Pogrom in small towns across Germany, I did not have enough sources to produce a map for Austria prior to this trip. Unexpectedly and excitingly, the findings from Vienna will allow me to do more than map a single instance of large-scale violence; rather, they enable me to layer years of incidents on top of one another to create a thorough, detailed map of violence across the city. 

With my final walk in the city at an end, I returned to Berlin via Munich by train, eager to read through and organize the new material into my larger source base. The research conducted while sitting in the reading room and walking along the cobblestone streets of the historic city provided me with ample material to begin drafting the chapters of my dissertation that deal with women’s participation in the everyday violence of Nazi-era Vienna and Austria more broadly. None of this would have been possible without the support of the Central European History Society, and I am genuinely grateful for it.

I look forward to sharing a future iteration of the map and a finished dissertation in the coming years. In the meantime, I encourage all who travel for research to take a long walk around the block when the archive shuts its doors.