The Crease of Antisemitism: Karlsbad in the Language of Ambivalence

Fin de siècle Europe regarded the yearly travel to a renowned spa as an expression of the modern bourgeois experience. The image of the places promised to rest from the strains of increasing class struggles in the metropolis and moreover opened possibilities of transgressing social borders. At the end of the nineteenth century, when growing ethnic tensions began to reflect themselves within those imaginary islands, spas which were favored by Jewish patients and visitors came to be identified as temporal ‘Jewish’ spaces. Situated between Eastern and Western Europe, Carlsbad, Marienbad and Franzensbad embodied such representational centres for Jewish cultures from allover Europe. At the same time they became places of various expressions of antisemitism and by that reflected the everyday life that Jewish visitors had left behind.Fin de siècle Europe regarded the yearly travel to a renowned spa as an expression of the modern bourgeois experience. The image of the places promised to rest from the strains of increasing class struggles in the metropolis and moreover opened possibilities of transgressing social borders. At the end of the nineteenth century, when growing ethnic tensions began to reflect themselves within those imaginary islands, spas which were favored by Jewish patients and visitors came to be identified as temporal ‘Jewish’ spaces. Situated between Eastern and Western Europe, Carlsbad, Marienbad and Franzensbad embodied such representational centres for Jewish cultures from allover Europe. At the same time they became places of various expressions of antisemitism and by that reflected the everyday life that Jewish visitors had left behind