Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the Enlightenment - Softcover

Spiel, Hilde

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1939931037 ISBN 13: 9781939931030

Publisher: New Vessel Press, 2013

Synopsis

Berlin-born Fanny von Arnstein married a financier to the Austro-Hungarian imperial court, and in 1798 her husband became the first unconverted Jew in Austria to be granted the title of baron. Soon Fanny hosted an ever more splendid salon which attracted the leading figures of her day, including Madame de Staël and Arthur Schopenhauer. Hilde Spiel's carefully researched biography provides a vivid portrait of a brave and passionate woman, illuminating a central era in European cultural and social history.

About this title

About the Author

Hilde Spiel was the grande dame of 20th century Austrian literature. She was born in Vienna and studied philosophy at the city’s university. She left Vienna for England in 1936 amid rising anti-Semitism and because of her opposition to the clerico-fascist Austrian regime, but returned after World War Two and had a distinguished and prolific career as the cultural correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Guardian and The New Statesman. Spiel wrote novels, works of cultural history, volumes of essays and literary criticism and translated the works of modern British writers including W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene and Tom Stoppard.

Christine Shuttleworth grew up in London, the daughter of the German-language writers Hilde Spiel and Peter de Mendelssohn, who emigrated there in 1936. A graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, she has served as executive editor of the international journal The Indexer. She has translated several books by Hilde Spiel: Fanny von Arnstein, Daughter of the Enlightenment; The Dark and the Bright, Memoirs 1911-1989; and Return to Vienna. Among her other translations are Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship by Erdmut Wizisla and Human Space by O. F. Bollnow.

Michael Z. Wise spent five years as a Vienna-based correspondent for Reuters and The Washington Post. He is author of Capital Dilemma: Germany's Search for a New Architecture of Democracy.

Review

"Von Arnstein represents one of the most fascinating and paradoxical eras in modern Jewish history ... For an American Jewish reader, Fanny von Arnstein is fascinating above all as a cautionary tale and a reminder of our luck at having avoided the excruciating choices that Fanny, and so many Jews like her, had to face."
―Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine

This book is indispensable for those interested in the history of culture, the role of women, and the transition of the Jewish community out of the ghetto toward the center of European life.”
―Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, author of Judentum und Modernität and co-editor of Vienna: Jews and the City of Music

"An elegant edition ... fascinating ... We must be grateful to have this biography."
―The Jewish Review of Books

In capturing the fascination of Fanny von Arnstein and her times, Hilde Spiel provides both a finely drawn portrait of a defining figure of her era, but also of the times themselves.”
―John Kornblum, former U.S. Ambassador to Germany

More exciting, more entertaining and―not least―more instructive than the best told novel."
―Die Zeit

Edition details

• Publisher: New Vessel Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1939931037
• ISBN 13: 9781939931030
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 371