VIRTUAL LECTURE 
Marjorie Perloff, Ph.D.
Presidential Fellow, Chapman University
Author of The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir and Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Hapsburg Empire

Professor Perloff's lecture takes as its point of departure Brigitte Hamann’s groundbreaking study Hitler’s Vienna (1996). In tracing Hitler’s transformation from ordinary feckless teenager in the small Austrian town of Linz to rabid racist and antisemite by the time he left Vienna for Munich in 1913, Hamann shows that pre-World War I Vienna when the Austro-Hungarian empire, with its polyglot population, was in its death throes, was in many ways the cradle of the Nazi ideology that was to destroy the Weimar Republic.

The extremes of wealth and poverty in Vienna, the terrible living conditions Hitler experienced in various flop houses and homeless shelters, the success of the neighboring Czechs who were invading Vienna as workers for the new factories, and the Jews who were arriving in droves from Galicia—now Ukraine—produced a powder keg waiting to be lit after World War I. The shaky Weimar Republic, Dr. Perloff argues, didn’t stand a chance.

Marjorie Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into an assimilated Jewish family in Vienna. In the immediate aftermath of the Anschluss, Gabriele, her parents, and older brother escaped to Switzerland and later emigrated to the United States. A prolific and groundbreaking scholar, Dr. Perloff has written more than a dozen books. A recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Prize, Dr. Perloff is Florence Scott Professor of English Emerita, at USC, and Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita, at Stanford University. She is an elected Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In June 2021, Professor Perloff was honored with the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, the highest Austrian distinction in culture and science.