Interwar Salzburg

A long-overdue reassessment of post-1918 Salzburg as a distinct Austrian cultural hub that experimented in moving beyond war and empire into a modern, self-consciously inclusive, and international center for European Culture. Interwar Salzburg tells the story of a European cultural capital eclipsed in histories enamoured with Austria's imperial past and the glittering aristocratic cultures of Vienna, Prague, and Budapest.  For over 300 years, however, Salzburg had its own legacy as a city-state at an international crossroads, less stratified than Europe's colonial capitals and seeking a political identity based in civic participation with its own economy and politics. After World War I, Salzburg became a refuge: a small city with easy access to the rest of Europe, less overtaxed by refugees and soldiers returning from the front than the other Habsburg capitals, and more interested in building a new "Capital for Europe," as writer Hermann Bahr termed it, rather than rebuilding a past. Salzburg's urban and bucolic spaces staged encounters that had been brutally cut apart by the war; its deep-seated traditions of citizenship, art, and education guided its path. Contributors from around the globe recover an evolving but now lost vanguard of European culture, fostering not only new identities in visual and performing arts, film, music, and literature, but also a festival culture aimed at cultivating an inclusive public (not an international elite) and a civic culture sharing public institutions, sports, tourism, and a diverse spectrum of cultural identities serving a new European ideal.