Austrian Studies 24, on Jewish Difference, now out

We are pleased to publish Austrian Studies 24, now being shipped in paper form and available electronically at JSTOR.

This 24th yearbook has the title Jews, Jewish Difference and Austrian Culture: Literary and Historical Perspectives, and is edited by Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman, and ranges widely. An introduction and thirteen chapters on this year's theme are rounded out with a general Reviews section, as always.

Among surprising discoveries in this year's text is that two-thirds of the people in Vienna are dead. Here's Tim Corbett:

Vienna’s Central Cemetery is one of the largest cemeteries in Europe, extending over 2.5 km2 and containing some 330,000 graves in which over three million people have been interred since its creation in the 1860s, almost twice the number of living Viennese citizens today. It is so large that it has its own internal public bus route, the 106. Its creation transformed the outskirts of the city’s eleventh district, Simmering, into a parade of mortuaries, stonemasons and flower shops, with tram line 71 having constituted the physical and associative link between the city centre, the Vienna of the living, and the Central Cemetery, the Vienna of the dead, since its inauguration in the 1900s. A popular tourist attraction, each year on All Saints’ Day alone the Central Cemetery draws an estimated average of one million visitors.

Also that, per Sema Colpan, Bernhard Hachleitner, and Matthias Marschik, Vienna had the largest football stadium in Europe, which I am quite ready to believe, but more improbably that the National Theatre staff fielded an amateur team good enough to play in the second division. (In 1935 they actually won the cup.) And what has this to do with Jewish difference? That Jewish sports officials in Austria played an important role in the professionalisation of soccer, it turns out, and so towards the present status of football as Europe's favourite game.