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This chapter probes the degree to which the lives of Vienna’s Jewish residents were shaped Jewish space in the city. From the provinces, interwar “Red Vienna” represented a Socialist—and Jewish—metropolis, but within the bounds of the city, a complex coding of Jewish space affected how all residents established, used, and described their city. These physical and symbolic spatial distinctions mirrored the country’s larger city/province divide. The persistence of the Leopoldstadt imagined as a “Jewish space” served a purpose for both Jews and non-Jews: it enabled them to envision other urban spaces they wished to design or inhabit as “non-Jewish.” Just as Vienna was never more Jewish than when it was used as a way to articulate its relationship to the Catholic provinces, so did the Leopoldstadt—the majority of whose residents were not in fact Jews—emerge as most Jewish when considered in its relationship to the rest of the city. The texts of authors writing in German (Veza Canetti), Yiddish (Abraham Mosche Fuchs) and Hebrew (David Vogel) set all or in part in the Leopoldstadt both shaped and reflected the ways in which different engagements with Jewishness in Vienna were inextricably intertwined with the city’s “Jewish” geography.

This chapter offers a reading of Haye nisuim (Married Life), a 1929 novel by David Vogel in the Hebrew language and published in Palestine. Married Life exemplifies Vogel's “incorrigible Europeanness” while offering rare instances of a Jewish sensibility in his assimilated Jewish protagonist, a writer named Rudolf Gurdweill. One of the novel's most extraordinary features is Vogel's intricate mapping of Vienna's postwar landscape and his perception of the city's role in social and psychological breakdown. German place names proliferate in Married Life, increasing the novel's verfremdungseffekt and reinforcing the strangeness of its language and setting. Married Life ends with an inevitable tragedy and without any emotional purification or redemption.