The Nazis, however, exiled or murdered all but a few of Leopoldstadt’s 180,000 Jews. In the eighteenth century, Jews began coming back to the district, and by the nineteenth century, they had reclaimed it. Aptly enough, the only Jewish cultural site preserved was the Jewish cemetery. Over the foundation of the new synagogue, St Leopold’s Church was reared and consecrated in August 1670, and in 1675, what remained of the old synagogue was repurposed to build St. By August 1670, all Jews had left Vienna. While only a small number of wealthy Jews remained, their efforts to save the ghetto failed.
The Viennese district received its modern name in 1669 when the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I expelled nearly 1,600 of its Jews. Though the play has only one set, the Merz family’s living room in the Ringstrasse, the specter of Leopoldstadt, the old Jewish ghetto, clings to its proceedings like an inexpiable ghost. Set in Vienna in nine scenes, from 1899 to 1955, beginning with families decorating a Christmas tree to the accompaniment of Stille Nacht and ending with survivors trying to make sense of the genocidal fallout of Kristallnacht, the play runs over two hours without intermission and looks at the fortunes of two intermarried, upper middle-class Jewish families, the Merzes and Jacoboviczes, whose members include not only Jews but also Gentiles and, in Hermann Merz, a Catholic convert. Only the most heedless could say the same after seeing the play. “You live as if without history,” one character says of another. Since Tom Stoppard’s new play, Leopoldstadt, is a play about history-the supple confusions, the betrayals, the ambushes of history-it might be useful to look at the history it revisits.
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