Doron Rabinovici is an Israeli-Austrian writer, historian and essayist. He was born in Tel Aviv in 1961, and moved to Vienna in 1964. His literary work includes short stories, novels and essays, but also drama.
Doron Rabinovici is an Israeli-Austrian writer, historian and essayist. He was born in Tel Aviv in 1961, and moved to Vienna in 1964. His literary work includes short stories, novels and essays, but also drama.
Doron Rabinovici was born in Israel on December 2, 1961,[1] but the family moved to Vienna in 1964. Rabinovici studied at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in 2000 with the historical work Instanzen der Ohnmacht.[2] The Viennese Jewish community leadership from 1938 to 1945 and their reaction to National Socialist persecution and extermination. Rabinovici's doctoral thesis concerns the reaction of the Viennese Jewish community's administration to the persecution by the National Socialists and the community's consequent extermination. Published in 2000 as Instanzen der Ohnmacht (Authorities of Powerlessness) by Jüdischer Verlag (a branch of Suhrkamp), it raises the painful questions of resistance and collusion that have come to dominate recent debates on the Holocaust. The study was published in English by Polity Books in 2011 under the title Eichmann's Jews.[3]
Doron Rabinovici not only writes literary texts such as the short story collection Papirnik (1994) or the novels Suche nach M. (1999), Ohnehin (2004), Andernorts (2010), Die Außerirdischen (2017) and Die Einstellung (2022), but also numerous non-fictional texts in which he comments on developments in Austria and politics. He also provides information on Jewish identity, but also on poetological considerations, such as his writing intentions or the role of literature.
Rabinovici's first novel, Suche nach M (1997), deals with the aftermath of extermination. His other novels also repeatedly deal with dealing with memory, the Nazi past, foreignness, migration, right-wing extremism in Austria and Jewish life in Vienna.
In 2013 and 2014, he initiated and conceived the production "Die letzten Zeugen" at the Burgtheater together with Matthias Hartmann. The production staged the memory of seven survivors. The performance was set on the main stage of the Burgtheater. The testimonies of the seven survivors were based on their books or on interviews with them. The texts are recited by four actors. Rabinovici compiled the text book for the performance; the production referred to the November pogroms of 1938, the 75th anniversary of which was celebrated in 2013.
In 2018, based on an idea by Florian Klenk, Doron Rabinovici put together the drama collage "Anything can happen!" A political theater, a mosaic of speeches and statements by Europe's racist populist government politicians that reveals the nature and intentions of these policies. The reading is merely commented on by individual quotations from Hannah Arendt, Viktor Klemperer and Erich Kästner and is framed by a few sentences written by Rabinovici. "Anything can happen!"(Original title: Alles kann passieren!) has been performed several times at the Burgtheater and other German-speaking stages.[4]
Doron Rabinovici is a member of the board of the Grazer Autorinnen Autorenversammlung. He has been an associate member of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature since 2018.[5]
Doron Rabinovici's mother, Shoshana Rabinovici, comes from Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, then still Poland, survived the ghetto, concentration camps and the death march and came to Israel in the 1950s. Schoschana Rabinovici described the story of her survival in her book Thanks to My Mother.[6] His father, David Rabinovici, fled from Romania to Palestine in 1944.
2014: Abrahams Stunde; Production Hessischer Rundfunk with Österreichischer Rundfunk; Director: Götz Fritsch, Dramaturgy: Ursula Ruppel
Since 1986, Rabinovici has been speaker of the Republican Club New Austria, an intellectual group that was formed against the background of the anti-Semitic presidential campaign of Kurt Waldheim. In 1999, Rabinovici became the speaker of Demokratische Offensive (Democratic Offensive), a movement geared to mobilize the Austrian civil society against the threat of a center-right coalition with Haider's extreme right-wing party. The Demokratische Offensive called for mass demonstrations against racism. The response was overwhelming – in February 2000, 300,000 people assembled on Vienna's historic Heldenplatz to stage the largest demonstration in Austria's post-war history.
