The Red Vienna Sourcebook 1571133550, 9781571133557

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THE RED VIENNA SOURCEBOOK

Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

Copyright © 2020 by the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2020 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-355-7 (Hardcover) ISBN-13: 978-1-64014-067-7 (Paperback) ISBN-13: 978-1-78744-610-6 (ePDF) Cover design by Frank Gutbrod Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McFarland, Robert B., editor. | Spitaler, Georg, editor. | Zechner, Ingo, editor. Title: The Red Vienna sourcebook / edited by Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler, and Ingo Zechner. Description: Rochester, New York : Camden House, [2020] | Series: Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture ; 204 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020002978 | ISBN 9781640140677 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781571133557 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Vienna (Austria)—History—20th century—Sources. | Popular culture—Austria— Vienna—History—20th century—Sources. | Vienna (Austria)—Social policy—Sources. Classification: LCC DB855 .R445 2020 | DDC 943.6/13051—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002978 .

The Red Vienna Sourcebook was made possible by the generous support of the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna (Stadt Wien Kultur). Printed with support from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History (LBIDH).

CONTENTS Acknowledgmentsxxiii Permissions and Credits

xxv

A Note on the Structure of This Book

xxix

Introduction1 Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler, and Ingo Zechner

Part I. Foundations Chapter 1:  Constitution, Legislation, and Jurisdiction Vrääth Öhner

15

1. Hans Kelsen, The Constitution of German Austria (1920)

17

2. Karl Kautsky, Democracy and Democracy (1920)

20

3. Karl Renner, The Free State on the Danube (1922)

22

4. Robert Danneberg, The German-Austrian Financial Constitution (1922)

23

5. Oskar Trebitsch, Jurisdiction and Class Struggle (1923)

25

6. Friedrich Austerlitz, The Murderers of Schattendorf Acquitted! (1927)

27

7. Therese Schlesinger, Criminal Justice and Psychoanalysis (1930)

29

Chapter 2:  Finances and Taxes Veronika Duma

33

1. Robert Danneberg, Finance Politics in the City of Vienna (1921–22)

35

2. Hugo Breitner, Capitalist or Socialist Taxation? Who Should Pay Tax? The Rich or the Poor? (1926)

37

3. Viktor Kienböck, Foundations of Financial Policy (1927) 

39

vi

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4. Anonymous, On the Tax Policy of the City of Vienna (1930)

41

5. Gabriele Proft, No! From the Finance and Budget Board of the National Council (1931)

42

6. Anonymous, In the Sign of Austerity. Meeting of the Vienna Municipal Council (1931)

43

7. Otto Bauer, The Budget Restructuring Law: A Speech given on October 9, 1931 by Dr. Otto Bauer before the Delegates of the Postal Union (1931)

44

8. Anonymous, The Financial Demands on Vienna (1933)

46

Chapter 3:  Consumption and Entertainment Marie-Noëlle Yazdanpanah

49

1. Anton Kuh, The Soda-and-Raspberry Existence (1919)

51

2. Margarete Hilferding, Black Market (1919)

52

3. Ludwig Hirschfeld, The Paper Calf: Valuta Miniatures (1919)

54

4. Julius Klinger, The Holy Every Day (1923)

56

5. György Bálint, Jazz Band (1929)

57

6. Neon, Revue (1929)

59

7. Anonymous, Dance around the World: The GÖC Revue (1929)

61

8. Ernst Fischer, I Am Conducting an Economic Study on Myself (1931)

62

9. Anonymous, The Discovery of the Housewife (1931)

64

Part II. Philosophies Chapter 4:  Empirical Social Research Ingo Zechner

69

1. Käthe Leichter, The Housing Situation (from How do the Viennese Homeworkers Live? A Survey on the Working and Living Conditions of 1,000 Viennese Homeworkers) (1928)

71

2. Käthe Leichter, Housework (from This Is How We Live: 1320 Women Workers in Industry Report about Their Lives) (1932)

73

3. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, On the Career Attitudes of the Young Working Class (1931) 78



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vii

4. Lotte Radermacher, On the Social Psychology of the Popular Education Centers’ Students (A Survey of 21,749 Course Participants) (1932)

80

5. Marie Jahoda, Life Fulfillment (from Anamneses from the Poorhouse) (1932)

83

6. Marie Jahoda, Meal Plan and Budget (from Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community) (1933)

85

Chapter 5:  Logical Empiricism Gernot Waldner

91

1. Anonymous, Magic and Technology (1931)

93

2. Philipp Frank, On the Intuitive Nature of Physical Theories (1928)

95

3. Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath, The Vienna Circle’s Scientific Conception of the World (1929)

97

4. Rudolf Carnap, Overcoming Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language (1931)

99

5. Edgar Zilsel, The Intellectual State of our Time? (1932)

102

6. Otto Neurath, Ideology and Marxism (1931)

106

7. Otto Neurath, Protocol Statements (1932–33)

108

Chapter 6:  Austro-Marxism Vrääth Öhner

113

1. Max Adler, Bourgeois or Social Democracy (1919)

115

2. Karl Renner, What Is Class Struggle? (1919)

117

3. Otto Bauer, The Austrian Revolution (1923)

119

4. Hans Kelsen, Otto Bauer’s Political Theories (1924)

122

5. The Struggle for State Power (from Program of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of German Austria, Enacted at the Party Convention at Linz on November 3, 1926) (1926) 

124

6. Leon Trotsky, The Austrian Crisis and Communism (1930)

126

7. Käthe Leichter, The Best Defense (1933)

128

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Chapter 7:  Freudo-Marxism and Individual Psychology Rob McFarland, Nicole G. Burgoyne, and Georg Vasold

133

1. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922)

135

2. Wilhelm Reich, Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis (1929)

137

3. Siegfried Bernfeld, Socialism and Psychoanalysis: Basic Ideas from a Presentation Held at the Society of Socialist Doctors (1926)

139

4. Alfred Adler, The Significance of the Social Feeling for the Development of Character (1927)

141

5. Alice Rühle-Gerstel, Marxism and Individual Psychology: The Revolutionary Science (1927)

143

6. Sofie Lazarsfeld, Raised by a Family or Educated by a Community? (1926)

145

7. Karl Bühler, The Will to Form and the Desire for Function in Children’s Games (1927)

147

Part III. Identities Chapter 8:  Post-Empire Kristin Kopp

153

1. Anonymous, Inside and Outside our Borders (1918)

155

2. Directive of the Ministry of Education and the Interior and of the Ministry of Justice in Consultation with the Involved State Ministries on April 18, 1919 Regarding the Implementation of the Law Abolishing Nobility and Certain Titles and Honors (1919)

156

3. Julius Deutsch, The Property of the Habsburgs (1925)

157

4. Alfred Polgar, Imperial Furniture (1920)

159

5. Anonymous, German Austria: Bankruptcy Asset and Colony (1919)

161

6. Karnute, How Should Carinthia Orient Itself? (1919)

163

7. Friedrich Austerlitz, Abandon Vienna! (1919)

165

8. Anton Kuh, Vienna by the Mountains (1923)

167

9. Otto Bauer, Three Groups in the Anschluss Camp (1927)

169



Contents

Chapter 9:  Demography Kristin Kopp and Werner Michael Schwarz

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ix

173

1. Anonymous, New Guidelines for the Ranking of Apartment Applicants (1922) 175 2. Edmund W. Eichler, The Foreigners in Vienna: Of Conspirators, Emigrants, Dreamers, and Harmless Tradesmen (1924)

177

3. Anonymous, Expulsion of Refugees (1919) 

179

4. Bruno Frei, Jewish Suffering in Vienna (1920) 

182

5. Anonymous, Foreigners in our Labor Market (1925)

184

6. Anonymous, Czech Provocations in Vienna (1920)

185

7. Anonymous, The Czech School System in Vienna and the German School System in Czechoslovakia: A Speech by Otto Glöckel (1926)

186

8. Anonymous, German to the Core—with a “Háček” (1931)

187

9. Anonymous, The Persecution of Gypsies in “Red” Vienna (1932) 

189

Chapter 10:  Jewish Life and Culture Rob McFarland, Nicole G. Burgoyne, and Gabriel Trop

191

1. Eugen Höflich, Bolshevism, Judaism, and the Future (1919) 

194

2. Moshe Silburg, What I Have to Say to You (1920)

196

3. Melech Ravitch, Preface (from Naked Songs) (1921)

197

4. Anitta Müller-Cohen, The Return of the Jewish Woman to Judaism (1923)

200

5. J. L. Benvenisti, Arthur Schnitzler Foretells Jewish Renaissance (1924)

202

6. Felix Salten, New Humans on Ancient Ground: A Trip to Palestine (1925)

203

7. Max Eisler, On the New Spirit of Jewish Architecture (1926)

205

8. Josef Löwenherz, The Cultural Duties of the Viennese Jewish Community (1928) 

207

9. Leo Goldhammer, Weary of Life: A Warning to the Jews (1931)

209

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Part IV. New Values Chapter 11:  Religion and Secularism Gabriel Trop and Rob McFarland

213

1. Religion and Church (from Program of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of German Austria, Enacted at the Party Convention at Linz on November 3, 1926) (1926) 

215

2. Jakob Reumann, Dedication Speech for Vienna’s Crematorium: “Vienna’s Crematorium Opens, In Spite of Everything!” (1922)

216

3. Cardinal Friedrich Gustav Piffl, Shepherd’s Bulletin (1923)

218

4. Max Winter, The Living Mummy: A Look at the Year 2025 (1929)

219

5. Sigmund Freud, Future of an Illusion (1927)

222

6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

225

7. Franz Werfel, Realism and Inwardness (1932)

227

8. Otto Bauer, Religious Socialism (1927)

229

Chapter 12:  The New Woman and Women’s Rights Marie-Noëlle Yazdanpanah and Veronika Duma

233

1. Therese Schlesinger, Women and the Revolution (1921)

235

2. Anonymous, Mass Protest against the Murder Clause, Article 144 (1927)

237

3. Marianne Pollak, From Crinoline Dress to Bobbed Hair: Revolution and Fashion (1926)

240

4. Stefan Zweig, Confidence in the Future (1929)

242

5. Bettina Hirsch, The Housewife and the Single-kitchen Building: Experiences Living on Pilgerimgasse (1927)

244

6. Liesl Zerner, The Young Working Woman (1930)

246

7. Käthe Leichter, Epilog (from This Is How We Live: 1320 Women Workers in Industry Report about Their Lives) (1932)

248



Contents

Chapter 13:  Sexuality Katrin Pilz

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xi

253

1. Josef Karl Friedjung, Sex Education: A Guide for Parents, Teachers, and Doctors (1924) 

255

2. Karl Kautsky Jr., Marriage Counseling as a Welfare Service (1925)

256

3. Therese Schlesinger, On the Evolution of Sexuality (1923)

259

4. Marianne Pollak, Women’s Issues at the Sexual Reform Congress (1930)

261

5. Sofie Lazarsfeld, Gynophobia (from How a Woman Experiences a Man: Thoughts from Others and My Own Observations) (1931)

263

6. Grete von Urbanitzky, The Wild Garden (1927) 

264

7. Ernst Fischer, Crisis of Sexuality (from Crisis of Youth) (1931)

265

8. Wilhelm Reich, Politicizing the Sexual Problem of Youth (from The Sexual Struggle of Youth) (1932) 

268

Part V. Social Engineering Chapter 14:  Health Care and Social Hygiene Birgit Nemec

273

1. Adele Bruckner, At the Tuberculosis Care Station (1925)

275

2. Alois Jalkotzy, The Children Accuse Us: Letters from Children on Corporal Punishment (1925)

276

3. Philipp Frankowski and Rosa Liederer, The City of Vienna’s Kindergartens (1932)279 4. Paul Kammerer, Organic and Social Technology (1921)

283

5. Otto Neurath, The Viennese Method of Social Enlightenment (1933)

285

6. Margarete Hilferding, Motherhood (1922)

287

7. Julius Tandler, Dangers of Inferiority (1929)

289

Chapter 15:  Welfare Katrin Pilz

293

1. Adele Bruckner, Welfare Services (1925)

295

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2. Heinrich Holek, The Schmelz Neighborhood (1926)

298

3. Julius Tandler, Social Democratic Welfare Services (1924)

300

4. Karl Honay, The New Vienna for Its Youth (1932)

302

5. Anonymous, Who Is Smarter, a Monkey or an Infant? 700 Children “Tested”—Significant Advances at the Research Center for Child Psychology in Vienna (1930)

304

6. D. R., Visiting Young Mothers (1932)

307

7. August Aichhorn, The Training School (from Wayward Youth) (1925)

309

Chapter 16:  Education for Everyone Marie-Noëlle Yazdanpanah

313

1. Gina Kaus, Sex and Character in the Nursery (1925)

315

2. Lili Roubiczek, The Kinderhaus: Montessori Principles and Architecture (1926)317 3. Otto Felix Kanitz, Class Pedagogy Part 1 (1921)

319

4. Otto Glöckel, The Gateway to the Future (1917)

322

5. Otto Glöckel, Drill Schools, Learning Schools, Work Schools (1928)

324

6. Max Lederer, Why Do We Demand Nonselective Schools? (1919)

325

7. Joseph Buttinger, The Viennese Workers’ College (1930)

327

8. Ludo Moritz Hartmann, Democracy and Popular Education (1919)

329

Part VI. Vitality Chapter 17:  Labor and Free Time Vrääth Öhner

333

1. Julius Braunthal, The Eight-Hour Law (1919)

335

2. Adelheid Popp, The Double Burden of Women (1922)

336

3. Ida Foges, Weekend: A New Viennese Practice (1922)

339

4. Anonymous, Time! What Do I Do in My Free Time? (1929)

340



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xiii

5. Ernst Fischer, The Work Ethos and Socialism (1931)

343

6. Marie Jahoda, Time (from Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community) (1933)

346

Chapter 18:  Sports and Body Culture Georg Spitaler

351

1. Willy Meisl, Sports at a Crossroads (1928)

353

2. Stephanie Endres, Rhythm and the Proletariat (1930)

355

3. Julius Deutsch, Sports and Politics (1928)

357

4. Roch, Hakoah Wins the League (1925)

360

5. Jacques Hannak, Only a Soccer Match . . .? (1932)

361

6. Marie Deutsch-Kramer, Rise (1931)

364

7. Ernst Fischer, Crisis of Ideology (from Crisis of Youth) (1931)

365

Chapter 19:  Nature Cara Tovey

369

1. Robert Winter, Socialism in Nature (1919)

371

2. Gustav Harter, Back to Nature (1923)

373

3. Gustav Müller, The Mountains and Their Significance for the Rebuilding of the German People (1922)

375

4. Franz Kleinhans, On the Question of the Aryan Clause (1924)

377

5. Theodor Hartwig, The Political Impact of Our Apolitical Action (1929)

379

6. Karl Renner, On the Friends of Nature (1931)

380

7. Anonymous, The Sunday Fleet (1931)

382

8. Adele Jellinek, The Children’s Crusade (1931)

383

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Part VII. Housing Chapter 20:  Urban Planning  Aleks Kudryashova and Werner Michael Schwarz

389

1. Otto Neurath, Urban Planning and the Proletariat (1924)

391

2. Anonymous, My Skyscraper (1924)

393

3. Franz Siegel, What Does the Municipality of Vienna Build? Sunny and Healthy Homes (1924)

395

4. Adolf Loos, The Day of the Settlers (1921)

396

5. Anonymous, Was the Program of 25,000 Public Homes in the Form of a Garden City Really Possible? (1926)

398

6. Werner Hegemann, Critical Remarks on the Housing Projects in the City of Vienna (1926)

400

7. Anonymous, The Ring Road of the Proletariat (1930)

402

Chapter 21:  Architecture Georg Vasold and Aleks Kudryashova

405

1. Franz Schuster and Franz Schacherl, Proletarian Architecture (1926)

407

2. Anton Brenner, Settlement House and Tenement Building—Mutual Influences (1928)

409

3. Ernst Toller, In an Apartment Building in Socialist Vienna (1927)

411

4. Gustav A. Fuchs, The Fuchsenfeldhof (1923)

413

5. Anonymous, A Short Guide for Tenants in People’s Apartment Buildings (1928)416 6. Otto Neurath, Single-Kitchen Building (1923)

417

7. Adolf Loos, The Grand Babylon Hotel (1923)

420

8. Josef Frank, The Public Housing Palace: A Speech Not Delivered on the Occasion of a Groundbreaking (1926)

421



Contents

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xv

Chapter 22:  Interior Design Aleks Kudryashova

425

1. Adolf Loos, Learning to Live (1921)

427

2. Hans Ankwicz-Kleehoven, Simple Household Goods: On the Exhibition at the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry (1920)

429

3. Ernst Lichtblau, Aesthetics Based on a Spirit of Economy (1923)

431

4. Josef Frank, Kitsch for Fun and Kitsch as a Problem (1927)

432

5. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Efficiency in the Household (1927)

434

6. Else Hofmann, A Residence and Workspace for a Professional Couple: A Design by the Architects Liane Zimbler and Annie Herrnheiser (1929)

437

7. Franz Schuster, A Furniture Book: A Contribution to the Problem of Contemporary Furniture (1932)

439

8. Fritz Czuczka, Ten Commandments for Furnishing a Home (1933)

441

Part VIII. Cultural Politics Chapter 23:  Fine Arts Georg Vasold

445

1. Stella Kramrisch, Sofie Korner (1920)

447

2. Lajos Kassák, Foreword (from Book of New Artists) (1922)

448

3. Leopold W. Rochowanski, The Contemporary Will to Form in the Applied Arts (1922)

451

4. Hans Tietze, Municipal Policy and Modern Art (1927)

453

5. Eduard Leisching, Municipal Policy and Modern Art: A Response (1927)

456

6. Josef Luitpold and Otto Rudolf Schatz, The New City (1927)

458

7. Otto Pächt, The End of Illustrative Theory (1930–31)

460

Chapter 24:  New Music Wolfgang Fichna

465

1. August Forstner, The Transport Workers at the First Workers’ Symphony Concert (1928)

467

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2. David Josef Bach, Why Do We Not Have a Social Democratic Art Policy (1929)468 3. Paul A. Pisk, Can the Worker Find a Close Relationship to Contemporary Music? (1927)

471

4. Anton Webern, The Path to New Music, II. Lecture (1933)

473

5. Elsa Bienenfeld, Schönberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1922)

475

6. Theodor W. Adorno, On the Anbruch: Exposé (1928)

476

7. Anonymous, The Young, the Old, and Us: The Bourgeois Youth of the Postwar Period (1928)

478

Chapter 25:  Literature Richard Lambert and Gernot Waldner

483

1. Rudolf Brunngraber, The Greatest Possible Order (from Karl and the Twentieth Century) (1933)

485

2. Hermynia zur Mühlen, The Ally (1924)

486

3. Else Feldmann, Dandelion—A Childhood (1921)

488

4. Anton Kuh, Bettauer (1925)

489

5. Joe Lederer, Type-moiselle (1925)

491

6. Josef Luitpold, The Return of Prometheus (1927)

492

7. Josef Weinheber, The Crowd (1935)

494

8. Stefan Zweig, Trip to Russia (1928)

495

9. Ernst Fischer, The Man without Qualities: A Novel by Robert Musil (1930)

497

10. Hermann Broch, The Unknown Quantity (1933)

498

Chapter 26:  Theater Richard Lambert

503

1. David Josef Bach, The Arts Council (1923)

505

2. Ingenieure der Werkstatt für Massenform, Theater of the Future (1924)

507

3. Gina Kaus, Toni: A Schoolgirl Comedy in Ten Snapshots (1927)

509



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xvii

4. Elisa Karau, On the Speaking Choir Movement (1927)

510

5. Ernst Fischer, Red Requiem (1927)

512

6. Oscar Pollak, Why Do We Not Have a Social Democratic Art Policy (1929)

515

7. Jura Soyfer, Political Theater (1932)

518

8. Neon, Agitation Theater (1929)

519

9. Rudolf Holzer, The Rejuvenated Theater in der Josefstadt (1924)

520

10. Ödön von Horváth, Tales from the Vienna Woods (1931)

521

Part IX. Mass Media Chapter 27:  Film and Photography Joachim Schätz

527

1. Siegfried Weyr, The Photo as a Weapon (1931)

529

2. Fritz Rosenfeld, Social Democratic Film Politics (1929)

531

3. Hugo Huppert, Kulturfilm, Revisited (1927)

534

4. Béla Balázs, The Masses (1926)

536

5. Max Frankenstein, The Market of the Masses … (1925)

538

6. Wolfgang Born, Photographic World View (1929)

540

7. Lothar Rübelt, The Work of the Sports Photographer (1926)

542

Chapter 28:  Newspapers and Radio Erik Born and Richard Lambert

547

1. Alfred Polgar, Intellectual Life in Vienna (1920)

548

2. Karl Kraus, A Belated Celebration of the Republic (1926)

551

3. Friedrich Austerlitz, The Real Kraus (1926)

553

4. Oscar Pollak, The Problems in the Calm (1929)

555

5. Anonymous, How Der Kuckuck Is Made (1930)

557

6. Anonymous, Freedom of the Airwaves! (1924)

558

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7. Fritz Rosenfeld, Radio in Good Conscience (1932)

560

8. Anonymous, The RAVAG Listener Survey (1932)

562

9. Eugenie Schwarzwald, The Prophesied RAVAG (1934)

564

Part X. Exchange Chapter 29:  Americanism Rob McFarland

569

1. Helene Scheu-Riesz, A Culture in the Making (1925)

571

2. Stefan Zweig, The Monotonization of the World (1925)

573

3. Felix Salten, Monotonization of the World? (1925)

576

4. Ann Tizia Leitich, A Word in Defense of America: One More Response to “The Monotonization of the World” (1925)

578

5. Otto Bauer, Failed Rationalization (1931)

581

6. Anna Nußbaum, Introduction to Africa Sings: A Collection of Recent African American Poetry (1929)

583

Chapter 30:  Global Resonances Werner Michael Schwarz

587

1. Erwin Zucker, Vienna—Moscow: Two Cities—Two Worlds (1932)

588

2. Günter Hirschel-Protsch, The Municipal Housing Complexes of the City of Vienna (1926)

590

3. Heinrich Peter, The 1926 International Residential Building and City Planning Congress in Vienna (1927) 591 4. Hermann Tobler, Learning School or Helping School? A Presentation Given to the Vienna Teachers Assembly on October 4, 1923 (1924)

592

5. Solita Solano, Vienna—A Capital Without a Nation (1923)

594

6. J. Alexander Mahan, Dark Hours and the Dawn of Today (1928)

596

7. Louis H. Pink, Vienna Excels (1928)

598

8. Anonymous, Europe Revisited. III.—Vienna: The Dawn (1929)

599



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9. Edward L. Schaub, Vienna’s Socialistic Housing Experiment (1930)

601

10. Charles O. Hardy, The Housing Program of the City of Vienna (1934)

603

11. John Gunther, Danube Blues (from Inside Europe) (1936)

604

Part XI. Reaction Chapter 31:  Anti-Semitism Nicole G. Burgoyne and Vrääth Öhner

609

1. Joseph Eberle, The Jewish Question (1919)

610

2. Jacques Hannak, Jewry at a Crossroads (1919)

612

3. Anonymous, The Jewish Question in the National Assembly (1920)

614

4. Hugo Bettauer, Have You Already Read? The City Without Jews: A Novel of the Day After Tomorrow. The Author on His Book (1922)

617

5. Joseph Roth, Ghettos in the West: Vienna (1927)

618

6. Felix Salten, Impossible Choice! Letter to our Editor in Chief (1927)

621

7. Irene Harand, Party or Fatherland? (1933)

623

Chapter 32:  Black Vienna Wolfgang Fichna and Azadeh Yamini-Hamedani

627

1. Karl Renner, The Christian Social Party and How Its Character Has Changed (1923)

629

2. Ignaz Seipel, The Great Trajectory of Spiritual Development in Our Time (1926)

631

3. Joseph Eberle, De Profundis: The Paris Peace from the Perspective of Culture and History; An Appeal to the Christian Conscience Worldwide (1921)

634

4. Othmar Spann, A Summary of Observations of the Inward Direction of Our Time and Its Political Ideology (from The True State) (1931)

636

5. Max Adler, In Critique of the Sociology of Othmar Spann (1927)

638

6. Alfred Missong, The World of the Proletariat: Psychological Reflections (1931)640

xx

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7. Heinrich Srbik, The Historical Content of the Austrian Portrait Exhibition (1927)642 8. Anton Kuh, Petty Heroism (1922)

644

Chapter 33:  Brown Vienna Vrääth Öhner

649

1. Walter Riehl, National or International Socialism? (1923)

651

2. Anonymous, Remarque Forbidden Once and For All in Austria! A Victory for German Ideology! (1931)

653

3. Fritz Brügel, National Socialist Ideology (1931)

655

4. Alfred Eduard Frauenfeld, The People Want It! (1932)

659

5. Otto Bauer, April 24 (1932)

662

6. Dr. Otto, The Psychopathology of National Socialism (1933)

664

Part XII. Power Chapter 34:  Campaigns and Elections Werner Michael Schwarz

671

1. Anonymous, The Picture Gallery on the Street (1919)

673

2. Rallying Cry of Vienna’s Intellectuals (1927)

674

3. Anonymous, To All Working Jews! Jewish Voters! (1927)

676

4. Robert Danneberg, The Party (1928)

678

5. Joh. H., Who Should We Vote For? The Social Democratic Campaign Has Begun (1930)

680

6. Anonymous, An Election Appeal in Stone! (1930)

682

7. Alois Jalkotzy, Women Matter! (1932)

684

8. Anonymous, Wear Three Arrows! The New Fighting Symbol (1932)

685

9. Anonymous, Wear the Blue Shirt of the Socialist Youth Front! (1932)

686

10. Stal, Three out of a Thousand Pioneers: A Report from the World of Wall Newspapers (1932)

686



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xxi

Chapter 35:  Communication and Propaganda Alicia Roy

689

1. Anonymous, Ten Years of the New Vienna (1929)

691

2. Leopold Thaller, Educational Resources and Propaganda in Campaigns (1930)693 3. Otto Neurath, Youth Front Agitation and the Task of Education (1932)

695

4. Paula Nowotny, Mail Correspondence between City and Country (1931)

697

5. Anton Kuh, The Mass Mobilization of Work (1923)

698

6. Otto Felix Kanitz and Stephanie Endres, Educational Tasks of the Workers Federations of Sports (1932)

699

7. M. N., Cinema for the Tens of Thousands (1923)

703

8. Anonymous, Social-Fascist Deception Films (1930)

704

Chapter 36:  Political Violence Ingo Zechner

707

1. Anonymous, Republic Day: Bloody Disruption of the Mass Demonstration (1918)709 2. Georg Lukács, The State as a Weapon (from Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought) (1924)

711

3. Zsigmond Kunfi, Lessons of July 15 (1927)

713

4. Walter Heinrich, Korneuburg Oath (1930)

717

5. Otto Bauer, The Rebellion of the Austrian Workers: Its Causes and Its Effects (1934)718 6. Hans Kelsen, Defense of Democracy (1932)

722

Chronology725 References739 Contributors749 Index of Subjects 

753

Index of Persons

765

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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The Red Vienna Sourcebook wish to emphasize the vast group effort that has culminated in the publication of this volume. The initial impulse for our project came from the Viennese historian and public intellectual Siegfried Mattl, who brought his passion and expertise for the Red Vienna period to various venues and incorporated them into his discussions with students and colleagues. Over the years, Mattl’s careful and generous mentoring influenced a generation of scholars. We dedicate this volume to his memory. One of the venues where Siegfried Mattl encouraged discussions of the Red Vienna period were the conferences and group discussions of the International Research Network BTWH (Berkeley/Tübingen/Vienna/Harvard). Most of the editors, chapter editors, and translators of this sourcebook are active members of this international collaboration. We would like to thank all BTWH members from across the globe who helped us to imagine and to develop this project from a fanciful idea into a real collection of historic texts. This process would not have been possible without the guidance and expertise of Anton Kaes, professor of German and Film and Media at the University of California at Berkeley, who shared with us his insights into historiography and archival research. He also enlightened us about the political, aesthetic, and ethical tasks of the sourcebook editor. We would also like to thank the many different institutions and individuals who generously provided us with the necessary funding for the planning, research, organization, translation, editing, and publication of The Red Vienna Sourcebook. Michael Häupl, long-term mayor of the city of Vienna, convinced other city officials and the Vienna Municipal Council that our endeavor of recovering and exploring the discourses of an era would provide a worthy honor for the 100th anniversary of the founding of Red Vienna. His deep appreciation of independent scholarship is quite rare today. We owe a debt of gratitude to him, to his office staff, to the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna (MA 7), and especially to the Office of Scientific and Research Funding. Personal thanks go to Franz Oberndorfer, Elisabeth Mayerhofer, and Daniel Löcker. The Vienna Municipal Council unanimously approved the funding of this project. We consider that act as a late acknowledgment of Red Vienna, which had been bitterly embattled during the 1920s and 1930s. Logistical support for this project was provided by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society (LBIGG), which in 2019 was transformed into the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History (LBIDH). Joachim Schätz and Heinz Berger deserve special thanks for their contribution in this regard. Much of the actual work of gathering, selecting, and arguing about the texts and chapters happened at the Austrian Labor History Society (Verein für Geschichte der ArbeiterInnenbewegung, VGA) in the spectacular historical Vorwärts-Haus in Vienna’s Fifth District, Margareten. The editors owe a debt of gratitude to the staff of the VGA, especially to the managing director Michaela Maier, who fought with great commitment for the financing of the project and provided many staff hours. The University of California at Berkeley’s Doreen B. he editors of

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Townsend Center for the Humanities provided generous funding for travel and meetings. Michelle Stott James of the Sophie Digital Library and the Brigham Young University College of Humanities provided a team of student researchers for the project, including Christopher Taylor, Jacob Benfell, Kemery Dunn Anderson, Gina Fowler, Madeline McFarland, Brock Mildon, Joshua Savage, Elisabeth Allred, and Blake Taylor. Publishing this book in the United States would not have been possible without the constant advice and support of Edward Dimendberg and Anton Kaes. Our special thanks go to Jim Walker, Julia Cook, and Michael Koch of Camden House for their invaluable editing and advice. Jim Walker believed in this project right from the beginning and encouraged us to proceed despite all logistical challenges and a very tight schedule. Big thanks go to Julia Teresa Friehs for her efforts to coordinate the English and the German versions of this sourcebook and for her work on the index. Finally, we thank the IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna for hosting a conference of international experts on Red Vienna in 2016 that helped us to conceptualize and aim our project. Malachi Hacohen helped us to shape our understanding of Red Vienna as a revolutionary model for a “Vienna Republic” in a workshop series on “Empire, Socialism, and Jews,” jointly hosted by the Duke University, the IFK, the VGA, and the LBIGG. Michael Loebenstein and the Austrian Film Museum provided rare opportunities for screenings and discussions of films from and about Red Vienna. We would also like to thank the following for their valuable suggestions: Lilli and Werner T. Bauer, Eve Blau, Tatjana Buklijas, Matti Bunzl, Christopher Burke, Ann Cotten, Christian Dewald, Gudrun Exner, Karl Fallend, Walter Famler, Alys X. George, Marcus Gräser, Sonja Maria Gruber, Bernhard Hachleitner, Gerhard Halusa, Gabriella Hauch, Deborah Holmes, Jenna Ingalls, Helmut Konrad, Marion Krammer, Sabine Lichtenberger, Wolfgang Maderthaner, Matthias Marschik, Alfred Pfoser, Barbara Philipp, Sabrina Rahman, Christian Reder, Günther Sandner, Karin Schaden, Walter Schübler, Lisa Silverman, Thomas Soxberger, Friedrich Stadler, Christian H. Stifter, Margarethe Szeless, Klaus Taschwer, Andreas Weigl, Helmut Weihsmann, Paul Weindling, and Susana Zapke.

PERMISSIONS AND CREDITS

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he editors have made every possible effort to determine the copyright status all of the source texts that appear in this book. The majority of these texts are in the public domain. We put great time and effort into contacting those people and entities who hold the rights to all of the other texts. That was not always possible. If we have inadvertently missed any copyright holders, we ask for your assistance: please contact the publisher.

The texts are printed with the kind permission of: Theodor W. Adorno: Suhrkamp Verlag August Aichhorn: Thomas Aichhorn Otto Bauer (1897–1986): Bob Bauer and the Bauer Family Siegfried Bernfeld: Peter Paret Julius Braunthal: Julia Barry-Braunthal Hermann Broch: Suhrkamp Verlag Fritz Brügel: Dan Kuper Rudolf Brunngraber: Milena Verlag Karl Bühler: Velbrück Wissenschaft Fritz Czuczka: George Czuczka Marie Deutsch-Kramer: Ellie Horwitz Stephanie Endres: Karin-Birgit Molinari Ernst Fischer: Marina Fischer-Kowalski Josef Frank: Susanne Eisenkolb, Tano Bojankin Bruno Frei: Stephan Pröll Bettina Hirsch: Anni Rehin and Donald Hirsch Eugen Höflich: National Library of Israel Hugo Huppert: Helmut Pawlik Marie Jahoda (dissertation): StudienVerlag Marie Jahoda (Marienthal study): Allensbach Institute Gina Kaus: Mickey and Stephan Kaus Karl Kautsky, Jr: Juliet Calabi Hans Kelsen: Hans Kelsen-Institut, Vienna Franz Kleinhans: ÖTK Stella Kramrich: Archives of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Paul F. Lazarsfeld: Suhrkamp Verlag Josef Löwenherz: Annette Jacobs, Dan Jacobs, David Jacobs, Janet Smarr

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 Permissions and Credits

Willy Meisl: Dorrit Coch, Andreas Hafer, Wolfgang Hafer Hermynia zur Mühlen: Patrick von zur Mühlen Otto Pächt: Micheal Pächt and Viola Pächt Dávila Paul Amadeus Pisk: Camille Donoghue Melech Ravitch: Thomas Soxberger Wilhelm Reich: Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Lothar Rübelt: Christian Rübelt Helene Scheu-Riesz: Veronica Kothbauer Franz Schuster: University of Applied Arts Vienna Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky: Luzie Lahtinen-Stransky Moshe Silburg: Thomas Soxberger Hans Tietze: Ben Tietze, Filiz Tietze Ludwig Wittgenstein: Suhrkamp Verlag We would also like to thank the following people and institutions for their patient support and their friendly assistance as we worked our way through the very complex process of copyright status research and obtaining permissions: AKM Evelyn Adunka Elisabeth Attlmayr Marcel Atze (Wienbibliothek im Rathaus) Michael Baiculescu (Mandelbaum Verlag) Bestattung Wien Mark Blazis Alexandra Caruso Heidi Chewning (Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University) Felix Dahm (Suhrkamp Verlag) Peter Deutsch Droschl-Verlag Reinhold Eckhardt Anita Eichinger (Wienbibliothek im Rathaus) Ulrike Eilers (Seemann Henschel Verlagsgruppe) Alexander Emanuely (Theodor-Kramer-Gesellschaft) Anke Engelhardt (Allensbach Institute) Alice Essenpreis (Springer-Verlag) Christian Fastl Nathalie Feitsch (University of Applied Arts Vienna) Ralph Fishkin (Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia) Christian Fleck Christian Flierl (Psychosozial-Verlag) Rainald Franz (MAK)



Permissions and Credits

Janette Friedrich Eva Ganzer (StudienVerlag) Lionel Gossmann Richard Hacken (Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University) Andreas Handler (Austrian National Library, ÖNB, Literaturarchiv) Michael Hansel (Austrian National Library, ÖNB) Dieter Hecht (Austrian Academy of Sciences) Sylvia Herkt (University of Applied Arts Vienna) Gerald Holton (Harvard University) International Institute of Social History (IISG), Amsterdam Alexander Jalkotzy Sigrid Jalkotzy-Deger Birgit Johler Toni Kaus Peter Kautsky Brigitte Kreitmeyr (VG Wort) Sabine Lichtenberger (Institut für AK und ÖGB Geschichte) Literar Mechana Literaturhaus Wien Herwig Mackinger (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Vienna) Christine Möller (Akademie der Künste, Berlin) Manfred Mugrauer (Alfred Klahr Gesellschaft) Reinhard Müller (Archiv für die Geschichte der Soziologie in Österreich) Thomas Olechowski (Hans Kelsen-Institut, Vienna) Wolfgang Pallaver Michaela Pfundner (Austrian National Library, ÖNB, Bildarchiv) Friedrich Polleross (Archiv des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte, University of Vienna) Herbert Posch Katharina Prager (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History) Manfried Rauchensteiner Franz Richard Reiter Philipp Rohrbach (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies) Michael Rosecker (Karl-Renner-Institut) Stephan Roth (Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance, DÖW) Christine Schindler (Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance, DÖW) Gerhard Schirmer (ÖTK Bibliothek) Susanne Schönwiese Rivka Shveiky (National Library of Israel) Friedrich Stadler Hildegard Steger-Mauerhofer Julius Stieber Markus Stumpf (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, University of Vienna)

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xxviii  Permissions and Credits

Edith Stumpf-Fischer Manuel Swatek (Municipal and Provincial Archives of Vienna) Marietta Thien (Velbrück Verlag) Katharina Walser Heinz Weiss Vanessa Wieser (Milena Verlag)

A NOTE ON THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

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organized into chapters on a wide variety of topics, as can be seen from the table of contents. The bulk of the book is of course made up of contemporary texts from the Red Vienna period: the sources. In addition to the overall editing by the volume editors, each chapter was edited by one (or more than one) chapter editor, who also wrote the introduction to the chapter as well as the shorter introductions to each text. These chapter editors are acknowledged in the bylines at the beginning of each chapter. The translations of texts originally in German (i.e., the great majority of them) were done by a pool of translators, each of whom is also acknowledged at the end of the publication information that precedes each text. The chapter editors have carefully shortened longer texts and excerpted passages from book-length treatises. In the process of shortening, we oriented ourselves around several principles: first and foremost, we did not want to cut content that would turn texts against their original spirit and intent. We only left out passages that were not immediately relevant, and we indicated omissions with bracketed ellipses: [. . .]. Also, the original texts often used typographic conventions that we have simplified and homogenized in the book. We replaced the occurrences of Sperrschrift (letter spacing within a word for emphasis) and bold lettering in the original documents with italic script (at the expense of rare uses of italics in the originals that no longer stand out). In addition, several texts are annotated with notes to facilitate comprehension of people, organizations, events, concepts, and historical references. In our translations of the many different kinds of original texts collected here, we have tried to maintain a sense of the original flavor and register of the text without making the translation draw undue attention to itself. We have opted to use colloquial American English, which does not have the same capacity as Austrian German to keep track of multiple clauses in long and complex sentences. Therefore, we have taken the liberty of breaking down complex constructions into shorter and simpler sentences and phrases that are more accessible to readers of English. We have tried to include the German original titles of as many texts and organizations as possible, and to provide original German terms in passages that demand special scrutiny. Our hope is that the translated texts will not only build a case for the importance of Red Vienna as a cultural, historical, and scientific phenomenon but also convey the fresh, lively, and spirited language used by the authors of the texts. his book is

Film still from the Social Democratic election film Die vom 17er Haus (The people from house no. 17, 1932, dir. Artur Berger), a utopian vision of Vienna in 2032. (Courtesy of Filmarchiv Austria/ Allianz Film-Fabrikations- und Vertriebsgesellschaft mbH i.L.)

INTRODUCTION Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler, and Ingo Zechner

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of the April 20, 1927, morning edition of the Social Democratic Arbeiter-Zeitung (Worker’s newspaper), underneath a reminder to vote in the upcoming election, was a proclamation titled “A Rallying Cry of Vienna’s Intellectuals: A Testimony to the Great Social and Cultural Achievements of the Municipality of Vienna.”1 Even though the authors agree that intellectually engaged people cannot bow to a particular political dogma, the declaration states: “It would be true neglect if, in the battle against tax burdens, we were to overlook the great social and cultural achievements of Vienna’s leaders. It is this great and prolific achievement that cares for the needy, educates and develops young people on the basis of the best possible principles. [. . .] [W] e want to be assured that this achievement transcending political considerations will be maintained and promoted.” The declaration is followed by a long alphabetical list of supporters, including great Viennese names from the fields of psychology (Sigmund Freud, Karl Bühler, Alfred Adler), law (Hans Kelsen), literature (Robert Musil, Franz Werfel, Alfred Polgar), music (Alma Mahler, Anton Webern), art (Franz Čižek, Anton Hanak), and architecture (Ernst Lichtblau, Oskar Strnad), as well as economists, theater directors, professors, leaders of the women’s movement, and other luminaries in the Viennese intellectual and artistic firmament. When this declaration of Vienna’s intellectuals appeared in 1927 congratulating the Vienna city administration (Stadtverwaltung) and calling for people of many different political persuasions to overlook their differences and to support such “great achievements,” the city’s Social Democratic leadership was nearly a decade into a one-of-a-kind experiment in democratic socialism. While other German-speaking cities and states managed to elect social democratic leaders for short periods during the 1920s and 1930s, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) held constant control of the city that came to be known—derisively at first, and then with pride—as “Red Vienna.” After Germany’s and Austria’s defeat at the end of World War I, the Entente’s Allied powers oversaw the creation of a democratic German nation. Many Austrians of all political stripes hoped that the German-speaking “rump state” left over from the dismembered Habsburg empire would be allowed to join the new German Republic as a southeastern state, “German Austria” (Deutsch-Österreich). The Allies forbade the so-called Anschluss, however, fearing the power of such a unified pan-German state. Instead, they only accepted a tiny country made up of small cities, rural districts, and the huge, polyglot imperial capital Vienna, now severed from its Hungarian, Czech, Galician, and Italian provinces. The Republic of German Austria even had to drop the German in its name. n the front page

 

1 “Eine

Kundgebung des geistigen Wien: Ein Zeugnis für die große soziale und kulturelle Leistung der Wiener Gemeinde,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, April 20, 1927, 1. See chapter 34.

2

 Introduction

The official history of Red Vienna begins with the municipal election of May 4, 1919. It brought the SDAP an absolute majority in the Vienna Municipal Council (Gemeinderat) in the first election to have been held with universal male and female suffrage.2 The unofficial history of Red Vienna began with the declaration of the Republic of German Austria on November 12, 1918. During the ceremony on the ramp in front of the Parliament, revolutionary Marxists forced their way up, took down the Austrian flag and tore the white middle stripe out of it, leaving only the two red stripes. Filmed footage—created by the Federal Film Office on assignment from the State Council (Staatsrat)—shows a flag flattering high above the heads of the parliamentarians, a flag made up of two torn fabric pieces that had been knotted together. In the middle of the assembled crowds, a banner reads: “Long Live the Socialist Republic!” This slogan celebrated a republic that was never declared. The torn and hastily knotted flag simultaneously represents two revolutions that would determine the history of Austrian Social Democracy until its defeat in the civil war of 1934: the accomplished revolution and the deferred revolution. The first revolution had taken place within the Parliament building, even before the ceremony, as the Provisional National Assembly (Provisorische Nationalversammlung) adopted the laws that outlined the new government and state of German Austria. Justifiably, the Social Democrats never tired of emphasizing that this legal accomplishment should be considered as a revolutionary act, a radical break with the constitution of the monarchy. The never-realized second revolution would have consisted of a socialist seizure of power, a fact that was pointed out by the sorely disappointed revolutionary Marxists and by members of the reactionary opposition, who lived in constant dread of a full-fledged dictatorship of the proletariat. The Social Democrats tried repeatedly to reassure their critics from the Right and from the Left that the revolution either had already happened or had only been delayed. However, they made it unmistakably clear to both sides that any revolution had to be, above all else, a democratic revolution, and that violence was to be considered as a last resort, only to be used when the democratic process was truly in danger. In terms of its form and its content, the revolution of 1918 was a genuinely bourgeois revolution, borne by an alliance of convenience between the workers and the Social Democratic intellectual elites. In his foundational study of the history of Social Democracy in Red Vienna, Anson Rabinbach rightfully categorizes the Austrian SDAP—with its ideals of education and its struggle to form a constitutional state even in the time of the monarchy—as the realization of a long-overdue Enlightenment and as the final catalyst of Austrian liberalism (Rabinbach 1983, 7). Since the events of 1776, 1789, 1830, and 1848 had left the old imperial order intact, the architects of the November 1918 revolution had much catching up to do. Resisting violence from the Left and from the Right, the Social Democratic proponents imagined an exceptionalist version of Marxism, a dedicated socialist movement based firmly within the democratic institutions of the bourgeois state. The leading Austro-Marxist theorist Otto Bauer did not rely on a soviet republic (Räterepublik) like the one that had enjoyed temporary success in postwar Munich or Hungary. Instead, in order to overcome the “balance of class forces” that he had diagnosed, Bauer relied upon a victory at the ballot box to garner the “three hundred thousand votes that we must pry away from the bourgeoisie” and thus to take control of the institutions of the state.3 2 The

Vienna Municipal Council (Gemeinderat) is an elected legislative body. The executive power was with the Vienna City Council (Stadtrat, until 1920) and City Senate (Stadtsenat, from 1920) and consisted of the mayor and a number of elected city councillors (Stadträte). 3 Protokoll des Parteitages 1923, in Otto Bauer, Werkausgabe, vol. 5 (Vienna: Europaverlag 1978), 304.

Introduction

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3

The Social Democrats all too quickly lost their majority on the federal level of the new country of German Austria. After 1920, the rest of the country was ruled by Christian conservative forces, but the SDAP held on to a firm majority in the old imperial capital of Vienna, buoyed up by the burgeoning working class. Thus, Red Vienna became the model of a republic which stood for the ultimate completion of both revolutions of the year 1918. In spite of runaway inflation, harsh austerity measures from the League of Nations, and fierce opposition by their political adversaries, the Social Democrats crystallized their political vision and took control of the city of Vienna, relying on an urban constituency that made up a large part of the total population of Austria. The high point of the Viennese voting public’s support for the SDAP came in 1927, when the party won 60.3 percent of the votes in the state and municipal election. In this election, the political opponents had unified themselves into an anti-Marxist coalition led by the Christian Socials and also including National Socialist candidates. At that moment, Vienna’s intellectuals wrote their “rallying cry.” The intellectuals were not bound by their unconditional support of the Social Democrats but by their rejection of their opponents’ reactionary politics, which were buoyed up by anti-Semitism, aggression, and resentment. The Social Democrats maintained a high level of voter support right up to the last free state and municipal election in 1932, when the party held 59 percent of the vote in spite of disruptive gains by the National Socialists. The Social Democrats also enjoyed an enormously broad party base. In 1930, when the population of Vienna was about 1,900,000, the party bragged about having 400,000 members (Holtmann 1996, 150). The SDAP also could rely on many educational and recreational party organizations such as the Friends of Nature (Naturfreunde) or the Workers’ Association for Sports and Physical Culture (Arbeiterbund für Sport und Körperkultur in Österreich, ASKÖ). The SDAP never actually lost its majority while democracy remained intact. It was the antidemocratic chicanery and the violent tactics of the reactionary opposition that brought Social Democratic rule to an end in 1933 and 1934. As a political project, Red Vienna stands at the intersection of models of enlightenment, on the one hand, with discursive strategies that manifest themselves through the kinds of political emotions and political-cultural aesthetics that accompany a political mass movement (Maderthaner 2006, 24–25).4 The articulation of political antagonisms tended toward a left-wing populist flavor. A good example of this tendency is the creation of the tax laws, which were made possible by Vienna’s change in status from mere capital city to its own state, a change that was introduced in 1920 and went into effect in 1922. Ironically, Red Vienna’s legal and financial foundation was made possible by Austria’s federalist structure and not by the Social Democrats’ preferred model of a centralized state. The “Breitnersteuern,” a new bundle of municipal taxes named after the city councillor of finance Hugo Breitner, aimed for a “redistribution of tax burdens from taxation of the masses to the taxation of property” (Eigner 2019, 47–48). These taxes were important not only in their symbolic significance but also as real sources of income. This is especially true of Red Vienna’s luxury and entertainment taxes that were levied on patrons of theaters, concerts, the cinema, and sporting events. It is also true for the dedicated progressive housing construction tax (Wohnbausteuer), introduced in 1923, which was collected from the tenants. This tax covered about 40 percent of the costs of the housing construction projects of the city (45). The decisive factor of the housing construction tax was its 4 For a recent history of emotions and the German labor movement, see Hake (2017); for a reading of Red Vienna’s Social Democratic women’s magazine Die Unzufriedene (The dissatisfied woman) informed by a theory of affect, see Bargetz (2019).

4

 Introduction

progressive nature: whereas smaller apartments had a low tax rate, the most expensive 5 percent of rental properties made up nearly half of the entire tax revenue. Both luxury and housing construction taxes became political points of contention in the city’s bitterly fought election battles. For the Social Democrats, the taxes also served as proof of Red Vienna’s fight against the forces of big capital and the old imperial order. In spite of the ways opponents portrayed the Breitner taxes in polemical debates, the tax burden in Vienna was not higher than it had been before the war. Thus, where the taxation of the landowning classes was concerned, “radical rhetoric obscured a milder reality” (48). The innovative economic approach of Red Vienna consisted of the deliberate taxation of luxury items rather than the destruction of luxury as prescribed by orthodox Marxism. Wealth thus became the source of welfare for the masses. The city lost much of its financial margin of error after the world economic crisis of 1929 and after the passage of a federally mandated financial adjustment law that curtailed Red Vienna’s access to federal funds in 1931. The economic depression underscored the interdependence of the Social Democratic model and the very financial and economic systems of capitalism which it publicly opposed. Contemporary leftist criticism made much of the SDAP’s dependence upon the dominant means of production, seeing it as a manifestation of a revolution that had not been carried through to its necessary end. In addition to their absolute insistence on democracy as the basis for the new socialist order, the leaders of Red Vienna were convinced that all policy should be based upon carefully documented scientific fact. To this end, the Social Democrats fostered institutions that connected political engagement to cutting-edge scientific achievements, from Käthe Leichter’s Female Labor Unit of the Chamber of Labor (Referat für Frauenarbeit der Arbeiterkammer) and Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s Austrian Research Center for Economic Psychology (Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle) to Otto Neurath’s Social and Economic Museum and its Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics— later known as Isotype. Otto Glöckel worked to apply democratizing educational reforms in Vienna, while Käthe Leichter, Marie Jahoda, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld expanded the methodology of sociological studies. These efforts made for a productive intellectual climate driven by a common interest in different forms of modern rationality. This common interest was shared by many different political, scientific, and cultural arbiters, bound in groups and movements that were unified by much more than their geographic proximity in Vienna.

Red Vienna as the Second Wiener Moderne When Vienna’s intellectuals declared their support of the city government of Red Vienna in 1927, it was not because they were outspoken Austro-Marxists. Most of the names on that list represent the quintessence of Vienna’s Bürgertum. In fact, many of these same people—Sigmund Freud, Alma Mahler, Alfred Adler, and architect Otto Wagner’s student Ernst Lichtblau—had once been at the center of Vienna’s bourgeois heyday, the often-mythologized and much-commercialized Viennese fin de siècle (to use Carl E. Schorske’s [1980] now-ubiquitous name for the era). This era has also been dubbed as the “Wiener Moderne,” a prolific, creative confluence that rose with the buildings of the Ringstrasse in the late 1800s and came to an apocalyptic close with the end of the monarchy (see Wunberg and Braakenburg 1981). Even though Otto Wagner passed away before the official end of the monarchy, along with Emperor Franz Joseph, and although others—including the feuilletonist Peter Altenberg and the painters Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele—died before the actual beginning of Red Vienna, many of the driving

Introduction

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5

forces of the classic Wiener Moderne continued to create, disrupt, experiment, and imagine under entirely new conditions. As the postwar era unfolded into the twenties and early thirties, the philosophers of the Vienna Circle coalesced into a movement. Sigmund Freud published some of his most influential work, including The Uncanny, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Ego and the Id, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and Its Discontents. Arthur Schnitzler published Fräulein Else and Traumnovelle in 1924 and 1925, respectively. Red Vienna’s scientific milestones were not lost on the old guard from the first Wiener Moderne. Although Schnitzler’s iconic Traumnovelle—with it carriages and fetishes for nobility and clerical order—is often counted as a late outpost of fin-de-siècle culture, the protagonist is a doctor in a modern hospital that very much resonates with the hygiene and welfare projects of the Social Democrats, the same projects touted in the 1927 Rallying Cry of Vienna’s Intellectuals. In The Red Vienna Sourcebook we demonstrate that these transformative ideas that came about in Vienna from 1919 to 1934 were not just the echo of an earlier golden age but new answers to new questions in a world that had been radically changed. These new ideas, methods, and works were all part of a new intellectual, political, and aesthetic laboratory that was created and safeguarded by the politics of Red Vienna. Thus, Red Vienna is much more than a synonym for the Social Democratic city government; it is an epoch in which an entire intellectual system reoriented itself, shifting its focus from the individual to society, from the individual psyche to the psychology of the masses, from the individual body to the social body, from desires to needs, from a vertical hierarchical order to a horizontal egalitarian order. It is in this sense that we refer to Red Vienna as the epoch of the second Wiener Moderne.5 This second Wiener Moderne, we argue, is more than a list of aesthetic masterpieces and scientific breakthroughs. Because of the unique political and humanist underpinnings of the era, Red Vienna also has the potential to be considered a model for strategies of urban economic crisis management, the re-democratization of urban space, or the politics of housing construction and urban planning. It ponders how to build a city without slums and ghettos, how to ensure health care for all, and how to create a socially transparent system of education. These questions remain pertinent today, although they are audible as distant echoes from a time when the political will to change and the forces of enlightenment entered into a fragile alliance with one another. Otto Wagner’s architectural heirs turned the power of their craft toward the problem of healthy public housing. In the visual arts, Franz Čižek led his school of artists to develop the movement of Viennese Kineticism, but his passion and resources focused mainly on developing an art education movement that could transform working-class children into talented, creative artists who could change the world around them. Anton Webern still worked to create the basis for avant-garde music in the twentieth century, but he spent many of his evenings conducting the Workers’ Symphony Concerts (Arbeiter-SinfonieKonzerte), making the music of Mahler and Schoenberg accessible to the masses. Alfred Adler turned psychology’s interest toward the power of the community. Alice RühleGerstel and Siegfried Bernfeld turned Freudian psychology into an instrument of Marxist philosophy. Wilhelm Reich was one of many other acolytes who first flocked to Freud in Vienna and then went on to found their own schools of psychological thought. 5 The subtitle of the German edition of the Red Vienna Sourcebook —Das Rote Wien: Schlüsseltexte der zweiten Wiener Moderne, or “Red Vienna: Key texts of the second Wiener Moderne” (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020)—reflects our claim.

6

 Introduction

Thus, in the cultural paradigm of Red Vienna, it was not the exceptional painting, daring piece of literature, or extravagant avant-garde ballet that was meant to serve as the measure of artistic or intellectual greatness. Instead, the highest goal became access to education and culture for everyone. Yes, Red Vienna saw some manifestations of the dreary dogmatism that can be brought about by socialist cultural politics (Kulturpolitik). But there was a profound difference in the wider effect of Red Vienna—beyond the stilted agitprop speaking choruses, mosaics of factory workers, and pedagogic films—because art was no longer considered to be a specific form of expression but an integral part of social life. A perpetual conflict arose between adherence to bourgeois ideals of education, the promises of a rising consumer culture, and the avant-garde break from both of these other forces. The ultimate goal of Social Democratic Kulturpolitik—to conquer bourgeois cultural institutions for the working class—ran up against the power of the cinema, the dance hall, and other spaces of popular culture that had long conquered the hearts of the masses. Because Red Vienna—often to its own detriment—defended and promoted a vigorous democratic pluralism, funded a wide variety of experimental projects, and supported the genius of so many fascinating people, the city succeeded in attracting a milling crowd of interesting personalities that came and went throughout the period: young Theodor Adorno came to study composition with Alban Berg; Max Reinhardt and his ensemble relocated from Berlin to Vienna’s Theater in der Josefstadt in 1924, where he stayed until 1933; Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr got their breakthrough roles in films made in Viennese studios; Fritz Lang, who originally was from Vienna, made an appearance at the Cinema Reform Conference (Kinoreformtagung) to give a talk on the artistic structure of film drama. As a result, Red Vienna is not an era without landmark masterpieces, going beyond the old guard of the first Wiener Moderne: Robert Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities) changed the landscape of modern literature; Oskar Kokoschka created a monument to the iconic educational and health institutions of Red Vienna in his 1931 painting Wien, vom Wilhelminenberg gesehen; Ödön von Horváth’s 1931 drama Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald (Tales from the Vienna Woods) serves as a sobering reality check for any hopes of social progress; the film Die vom 17er Haus (The people from house no. 17; 1932) provides a utopian counterbalance to the dystopian skyscrapers at the heart of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and the famous Moloch scenes in Lang’s film, filmed on Rehberge in Berlin’s Wedding District, owe much to the teeming throngs in Sodom and Gomorrha filmed on the Laaer Berg in the south of Vienna; Gina Kaus’s drama Toni: Eine Schulmädchenkomödie (1927) explores women’s limited choices with modern, wicked humor; and in particular, as Eve Blau (1999) has so convincingly argued, the vast municipal housing complexes of Red Vienna deserve to be counted among the greatest works of twentieth-century architecture, fascinating in their multitude of different forms. Often criticized for their use of traditional materials and forms, the complexes remain to be discovered as expressions of a radical functionalism that does not limit itself to symbolic forms. And one more aspect of Red Vienna differentiates its masterpieces from other eras— many of the greatest works of art, science, journalism, literature, ethnography, psychology, and political theory were created by women. Indeed, many of the era’s greatest impulses emanate from active women inside and outside of the SDAP, from politician Therese Schlesinger to artist Erika Giovanna Klien to educational reformer Eugenie Schwarzwald to psychological researcher Charlotte Bühler. As a continuation of the Wiener Moderne of the fin de siècle, shot through the prism of Social Democratic ideals, Red Vienna stands as a uniquely productive and compelling moment in history.

Introduction

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7

Red Vienna’s Political and Scholarly Reception Although the efforts of institutions such as the Austrian Studies Association have long supported and facilitated the study of Red Vienna, English-speaking Germanists are often unaware of the important legacy of the era and the different ways that the Social Democratic experiments of the early twentieth century have influenced Austria’s image of itself. In spite of its apparent electoral strength and despite (or perhaps because of) its devotion to democracy, Red Vienna’s vibrant creative community was cut short, leaving its potential unrealized. Red Vienna ended with the failed 1934 Worker’s Revolt against the authoritarian Dollfuß government that had dissolved the Austrian Parliament in 1933. After the traumatic ruptures of Austrofascism and—above all else—after the National Socialist terror of 1938–1945, the Socialist Party of Austria (Sozialistische Partei Österreichs, SPÖ) took over the city and state governments of Vienna as the heir of the old SDAP. Although the concept of Red Vienna remained anchored inside the party circles (see Berg 2014), it did not surface in broader discussions until the 1970s. Red Vienna was rediscovered by a new generation of Austrian researchers, driven by members and sympathizers of the New Left movement (see, for example, Hautmann and Hautmann 1980; Maimann 1981; Maimann and Mattl 1984; Novy and Förster 1985; Weihsmann 2019 [1985]). The historic legacy of Red Vienna from 1919 to 1934 served as a foil for contemporary realities during the administration of the Socialist chancellor Bruno Kreisky (1970– 1983) and the “red” city administration of that era. When left-wing critics decried the disconnect between the promise of revolutionary ideals and the realities of bureaucratic paternalism and half-hearted reforms, they were describing the past but aiming toward the present. Well-versed in the writings of Michel Foucault, these critics considered Red Vienna’s housing and welfare policies in the context of public discipline and biopolitical population control (see Sieder 2019). At the same time, international interest in Red Vienna had been developing since the 1980s, and a number of foundational works were published about the era’s political and cultural landscapes (see Tafuri 1980; Rabinbach 1983; Gruber 1991; Lewis 1991; Blau 1999). In the new millennium, we have witnessed a renewed interest in Red Vienna and its broader parameters, including studies about its political opponents (Wasserman 2014). The one-hundredth anniversary of the municipal election of 1919 brought with it a series of publications and events that addressed Red Vienna (see Konrad and Hauch 2019; Schwarz, Spitaler, and Wikidal 2019; Weihsmann 2019). A large array of scholars have reminded readers that the Vienna of the interwar period served as the springboard for a series of intellectual projects whose relevance is still felt today. Red Vienna also serves as the locus of controversies that reach into our own present context. In the field of political economics, for example, the young Karl Polanyi argued with Otto Neurath and Ludwig von Mises about questions of centrally planned economies and socialization (see Peck 2008). While Mises and his pupil Friedrich A. Hayek—the latter an outspoken critic of Red Vienna—swore by the self-regulatory power of the market even in the heyday of democratic socialism, Polanyi (with his guild-socialist models) remained close to Otto Bauer’s theoretical ideas about the socialization of industries and services (Dale 2016, 101–5; Bockman, Fischer, and Woodruff 2016). Whereas Polanyi, looking back in The Great Transformation, claimed that “Vienna achieved one of the most spectacular cultural triumphs of Western history,”6 Hayek wrote articles in the 6 Karl

Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1944), 298.

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1920s criticizing the Social Democrats’ bitterly defended achievement of rent control, considering it economically counterproductive to let cheap rents affect the amount of privately offered housing.7 The core works of Austro-Marxism, which form the intellectual basis of Red Vienna, are currently being rediscovered internationally as a “golden age” (Krätke 2015, 31) in the development of Marxist theory, and have again been made available in Englishlanguage editions (Blum and Smaldone 2016, 2017; Bauer 2020). This applies to early classic texts from the time of the Habsburg monarchy which intervened in political conflicts that seem like trial laboratories for current populist ethnopolitics (Beneš 2017), and is also the case for many works from the Red Vienna period, such as Otto Bauer’s concept of the “balance of class forces” which provides many connections to critical theories of hegemony, resonating productively with the internationally much better-known texts written by Antonio Gramsci.8 In addition, the experiences of Red Vienna have been memorialized in the works of many thinkers who continued their careers after 1934 in other countries: Hungarian emigrants such as Georg Lukács or Béla Balázs, FreudoMarxists such as Wilhelm Reich, or pioneers of social science such as Marie Jahoda and Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Even Karl Popper’s antitotalitarian polemic The Open Society and Its Enemies can be understood as an attempt to process the trauma of the downfall of Red Vienna and the victory of fascism (Hacohen 2000). Precisely in these times, when it is hard to imagine a future that exists beyond capitalism and neoliberalism, the lost future of Red Vienna has a strong appeal for critical thinkers of many different theoretical directions. Axel Honneth (2017), for one, celebrates the policies of Vienna’s city government in the years between 1919 and 1934 as an example of the kind of “spirit of socialist experimentation” that he would like to see implemented, an experimentation that looks for starting points for societal change in the here-and-now, using pragmatic and innovative possibilities that exist in real space: “every opportunity that presents itself, be it through previously existing laws, instruments of taxation, skilled professionals who are ready to act, currently existing but easily subverted social facilities or intellectual allies” (180). From another perspective, Red Vienna can function as a critical point of orientation for cutting-edge emancipatory municipal policies, especially considering the possibilities of communal action as it runs up against questions of housing policies, international austerity politics, the “right to the city,” and strategies against right-wing populist movements (Duma and Lichtenberger 2016; Holm 2019). If we succeed in bringing Red Vienna some of the attention that has been showered on Weimar Berlin over the last decades,9 we hope to avoid some of the traps that have befallen the studies of that fascinating period of German history. As recent popular television series, detective novels, comics, and movies have shown, the downfall of the Weimar Republic has become bogged down in a particular historical fatalism that is also prevalent in some contemporary scholarship, a melodramatic and tired interplay between 7

Friedrich A. Hayek, Das Mieterschutzproblem: Nationalökonomische Betrachtungen (Vienna: Steyrermühl-Verlag, 1928). 8 Otto Bauer, Die österreichische Revolution (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1923), 196–213. For a current international reception of Bauer, see Baier (2008); for a discussion of Austro-Marxist state theory, see Fisahn, Scholle, and Ciftci (2018). 9 See,

for example, the Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg 1994), a fascinating monument of cultural historiography that has informed our own approach to the Red Vienna Sourcebook.

Introduction

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9

glamour (Glanz) and demise (Untergang). Red Vienna was also brought to a violent end in the civil war of February 1934. Instead of considering all of the era’s breakthroughs as doomed from the beginning, it is important to look at the many different possibilities that Red Vienna opened up.

Why a Sourcebook? There are many productive ways to approach the historical periods and political and aesthetic movements that make up the Red Vienna era. The choice to create a large sourcebook of primary texts arose from a unique international collaboration between researchers, philosophers, and historians that has come to be known as the International Research Network BTWH (Berkeley/Tübingen/Vienna/Harvard). For the past twentythree years, students, alumni, and professors from these four institutions (and several others) have met to discuss the possibilities of cultural history as methods to analyze and understand the emergence of modernity in German-speaking countries. The theoretical project and methodology of The Red Vienna Sourcebook evolved over the span of a decade in discussions among members of BTWH in collaboration with the historian Siegfried Mattl and the film historian Anton Kaes. Whereas narrative histories and case studies provide specific linear analyses of people, texts, events, and practices, a sourcebook eschews the central narrative analysis, providing instead a carefully curated series of texts, each analyzed and introduced in their own right and in their relation to other texts. The texts in the Red Vienna Sourcebook are arranged in thirty-six chapters corresponding to as many discursive fields. All texts were part of a discourse that took place in, around, or about Red Vienna. Even though these texts have been curated and introduced in a way that recreates specific discourses, the form of the sourcebook also allows the texts—even excerpted, translated texts—to retain some of the odd, excessive, resistant elements that make them hard to categorize and to instrumentalize in the service of a neat, teleological history. As it turns out, many of the texts in The Red Vienna Sourcebook do not easily fit into the discourses and chapters in which they are embedded. These texts often invite counter-readings and unprescribed connections to different discursive fields. A sourcebook can thus be more than just a well-ordered mini archive. It can also function as a provocative collection of compelling texts that invites debates, controversies, and unsettling discoveries. A sourcebook can also demonstrate how different social and political milieus are crisscrossed by specific key debates and experimental approaches: discussions of the right way to approach housing for the masses, for example, are not only found in the three chapters of our sourcebook dedicated to urban planning, architecture, and interior design, but also in the chapters about finances and taxes, empirical social research, post-empire, demography, the New Woman and women’s rights, sexuality, health care and social hygiene, welfare, labor and free time, nature, Americanism, global resonances, and campaigns and elections. The same can be said for Red Vienna’s discourses of gender roles and the concept of the New Woman, which can be found in many of the chapters of our sourcebook. And the many Jewish voices and ideas in Red Vienna cannot possibly be contained in our chapter about Jewish life and culture. The question of Jewish identity plays an implicit role in every chapter of our sourcebook. A large percentage of the authors of the texts share Jewish heritage in its widest sense, including many political and intellectual figureheads. Many of them were without religious confession, some had converted to Protestantism and some to Catholicism, sometimes further switching between all three or converting back to Judaism. Regardless

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of their own beliefs, one thing became increasingly certain: in an era when Jewishness became increasingly identified as a nationality, then as an ethnicity, and finally as a race, it was no longer enough to claim or to refuse a religious confession in order to establish your own identity. These citizens of Red Vienna also shared the experience of enduring increasingly obsessive attacks by anti-Semitic forces as “Jews.” In 1938 and the following years of the National Socialist regime and the Holocaust, many of them became victims of National Socialist persecution, losing their property, their homes, and their lives. A book about Red Vienna is, by definition, a book about Jewish Vienna. In order to create a sourcebook, it is first necessary to make fundamental decisions about the scope of the project and the kinds of texts to be included. For The Red Vienna Sourcebook, we decided to only include texts that had been a part of contemporary discussions in Vienna between 1919 and 1934, meaning texts that had been published and reached a broad audience of readers. We thus have omitted secondary literature, as well as personal letters and other unpublished archivalia. In terms of geographic scope, the sourcebook includes texts that were written in Vienna or texts that participated in discussions about the specific events and ideas that were happening in the city or in the wider Austrian context. Early on, we decided that in addition to texts by SDAP functionaries, intellectuals, and Austro-Marxist leaders such as Otto Bauer, Julius Tandler, Käthe Leichter, Julius Deutsch, and Otto Neurath, we would also include a wide range of other authors and the voices of the clerical-conservative and fascist opposition movements in Red Vienna. As a result, The Red Vienna Sourcebook contains texts that represent many different facets of the First Austrian Republic, including ethnographic sketches of unemployed textile workers, lesbian erotica from a pro-Nazi novelist, a behind-the-scenes visit to an illustrated magazine, and travel reports from Zionist settlements in Palestine. Readers of the sourcebook will find texts written by familiar Viennese authors such as Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, and Gina Kaus, as well as texts by famous visitors to the city. Besides these texts from the pantheon of Viennese history, readers of the Red Vienna Sourcebook will also become acquainted with fascinating texts by an intriguing group of lesser-known authors: Austro-Marxist science fiction by Max Winter; a fascinating essay on the “Psychopathology of National Socialism” by a Freudo-Marxist hiding behind the pseudonym “Dr. Otto”; thoughts about the athletic socialist body by Stephanie Endres; and the original text of the decree abolishing nobility and aristocratic titles. Above all, as Anton Kaes has passionately argued, a sourcebook has the opportunity to break out of the idea that history had no choice but to develop along the lines that we have come to know. The bold social experiments and ideas that came out of Red Vienna cannot be reduced to “the interwar years,” an inevitable progression that marches hopelessly from the disaster of the post–World War I years through a moment of brilliance and hope and into the inevitable dark rise of fascism, World War II, and the Holocaust. Things did not necessarily have to turn out the way they did. Many decisions were made along the way. The further a reader goes back, the more potentialities there were for combatting violence, for eradicating poverty, for revolutionizing urban planning, science, art, or music. As ideas mature, like a child, the potentialities are narrowed. People create a form of thinking (Denkform), and then it is slowly filled with reality, squeezing out the potential. A sourcebook is a snapshot of this process, showing an alternative history, presenting texts in which writers are proposing alternatives that have been thought, are thinkable, but have not been fulfilled (Kaes 2015).

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In fact, Walter Benjamin (1991, 701) teaches us that a sourcebook—like any collection of rubble from the past, is filled with the Jetztzeit, the present moment. The texts of Red Vienna—coping as they do with refugees, poverty, wealth inequality, the threats of a globalizing economy, and craven populist strongmen—form an alternative history that speaks to the present moment. They should not only be regarded as failed ideas from a distant time, but as possibly viable ideas that did not have a chance to be fully implemented. Having the documents collected and annotated in a sourcebook allows readers to see what was possible but did not happen. It also allows readers to see that even though the emerging threats were recognized by farsighted observers, they still could not be stopped. The threats seemed to be beyond all reason, and yet they still came to pass. Rather than simply forgetting the promises of the past, The Red Vienna Sourcebook investigates the meaning of these promises in the past and present: What do they tell us about historical possibilities, political struggles, and the continuities and discontinuities of history, as well as its fulfilled or unfulfilled emancipatory hopes? We hope that like those intellectuals who signed the Rallying Cry of Vienna’s Intellectuals in 1927, twenty-first-century historians, philosophers, scientists, and cultural critics will be provoked by the fascinating texts that the chapter editors have gathered in The Red Vienna Sourcebook. Above all else, we hope that these texts will not only warp and refine the way we think about the history, art, and literature of the early twentieth century but also reanimate discourses of equality, health, and prosperity that were once possible in the era of Red Vienna—and may once again find new possibilities of expression.

Part I Foundations

Crowds in front of the Parliament building in Vienna at the proclamation of the Republic on November 12, 1918. Photo by Richard Hauffe. (Courtesy of VGA.)

CHAPTER ONE

CONSTITUTION, LEGISLATION, AND JURISDICTION Vrääth Öhner

I

of Der Kampf (The struggle), the monthly journal of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP), one of its founders, Otto Bauer, outlined the particular task of the Social Democrats in response to the 1907 electoral law reform, a task—as Victor Adler noted in the same issue—that consisted in the formation of a state rather than its preservation: n the first issue

We Austrians are faced with national chaos: Constitutional laws that persist, state institutions that cannot live, a confederation of states (between Austria and Hungary) that cannot stay together yet cannot find a way to sunder, medieval-feudal-like autonomous crown lands that want to tear apart nations, as well as unorganized, legally nonconstituted nations that want to dissolve the crown lands. A community of states, government, crown land, nation—none of them fully constituted or finally dissolved, all mixtures of birth and death, ghosts that we must confront in broad daylight, every day, because our opponents are obsessed by them! . . . This predicament demands that we consider the somewhat tedious questions of state constitution and government, obliges us to deal with legal quibbles and tactical theatrics, and forces us against our will and inclination perhaps to become the experts in constitutional law for the Internationale.1

Bauer’s outline shows how seriously the party considered constitutional questions, even early on in the process. The demands the party made, as early as 1907, for “recognition of national autonomy and democracy as the basis for a future constitution” were aimed at “destroying the historical structure of the state” and dismantling its constrictive “bureaucratic framework.”2 These demands could not be met under the conditions of the constitutional monarchy but exerted a strong influence, after its collapse, on the Social Democratic ideology. In view of both the symbolic and the material significance that Red Vienna was to achieve as the revolutionary center of the Social Democratic movement, it is important to consider, on the one hand, the intended union with the German Republic and, on the other hand, the demand for a centralized national state. The law of November 12, 1918, 1 Anonymous 2 Viktor

[Otto Bauer], “Der Kampf,” Der Kampf 1, no. 1 (1907): 4. Adler, “Neue Aufgaben,” Der Kampf 1, no. 1 (1907): 6.

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regarding the form of state and government of German Austria promulgated by the Provisional National Assembly (Provisorische Nationalversammlung) defined the democratic republic as the state form and declared German Austria to be part of the German Republic.3 The declaration of union was no doubt a result of the conviction shared by all parties that the German-speaking parts of the old Austrian monarchy could not survive economically if left to their own devices.4 Furthermore, for the Social Democrats, the union was not only a logical consequence of the “right of the people to self-determination” but also had its origins in ideas about the relationship between state and nation which Karl Renner and Otto Bauer had already formulated before World War I.5 The declaration of union by the Provisional National Assembly suggested the establishment of a unified, centrally governed state as the state system, to be laid down in a future definitive constitution. As Hans Kelsen noted in a commentary on the position of the states, German Austria could choose to become part of the national community of states of the German Republic “either as an integral German-Austrian state or as a small group of minor member states,” the second option entailing the “risk of excessive fragmentation” because of the size of states such as Bavaria or Prussia.6 While the demand for a centralized national state was initially nothing more than a logical consequence of the declaration of union, it had unforeseeable political consequences: in a centralized national state, the Social Democrats could hope for relative but never absolute majorities, as in the election of the Constituent National Assembly (Konstituierende Nationalversammlung) in February 1919. The sociopolitical experiment of Red Vienna based on an absolute Social Democratic majority would never have been possible. The demand for a centralized national state was in any case unable to prevail in German Austria against the power of the states (Länder). Although Hans Kelsen devised a whole series of draft constitutions for the Constituent National Assembly, most of the drafts were based on a federal construct. After the Treaty of SaintGermain-en-Laye, the peace treaty between German Austria and the Allied powers, had ruled out any political union between Germany and Austria, the only contentious issues remaining were the separation of Vienna from Lower Austria which was a crucial question for Red Vienna; the establishment of a Federal Council (Bundesrat), that is, a body alongside the National Council (Nationalrat) representing the states (Länder); and the nature of the office of the federal president based on the model of either a parliamentary or a presidential democracy. In all three of these issues, the Social Democrats prevailed: Vienna became an independent federal state; even though a Federal Council was set up, it had the same proportional distribution of seats as the National Council, and the office of the federal president was designed following the model of a parliamentary democracy. However, these issues resurfaced, in modified form, in 1929 in the draft constitution proposed by the Schober government,7 which 3 StGBl.

no. 1–7, November 15, 1918, 4. These parts included Vienna, Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Tyrol, Vorarlberg, and, after 1921, also Burgenland. 5 See Karl Renner, Staat und Nation (Vienna: Dietl, 1899); Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung Ignaz Brand, 1907). 6 Hans Kelsen, “Die Stellung der Länder in der künftigen Verfassung Deutschösterreichs,” in Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht 1 (1919/20): 118. 7 The government—which consisted of nonaligned ministers and representatives of the Christian Social Party, Pan-German People’s Party, and Rural League (Landbund) and was headed by former police commissioner Johann Schober—ruled from September 26, 1929 to September 30, 1930. 4



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was rightly judged to be an “offensive by Austrian fascism” and thus opposed by the Social Democrats.8 Apart from their state-building influence in the drafting of the Federal Constitutional Law of October 1, 1920, and with the exception of welfare legislation adopted during the coalition government with the Christian Socials,9 the Austrian Social Democrats were no longer able to shape legislation at the federal level after they left the government in July 1920. The Social Democrats never made up for this loss, not even with the legislative power that they acquired when Vienna gained independence as a separate state. Further reading Olechowski 2009 Seliger 1980 Stadler 1986

1. Hans Kelsen The Constitution of German Austria First published as “Die Verfassung Deutschösterreichs, I. Die Revolution,” in Jahrbuch des öffentlichen Rechts der Gegenwart, no. 9 (1920), 245–49. Translated by Nick Somers. As Hans Kelsen (1881–1973), one of the most renowned Austrian scholars on constitutional law at the time and coauthor of the first republican constitution of German Austria, points out in his commentary on the same, the “Decision on the Basic Organs of State Authority” adopted by the Provisional National Assembly on October 30, 1918, represented a “break in legal continuity” and hence a revolution. As a result of this step, the monarchy was formally and effectively dissolved. Kelsen’s argumentation refers to the legal entitlements not only of the monarch, however, but also of the states (Länder), which had convened state assemblies at the same time. The idea of a break in legal continuity put a stop to the claim of the states that they should determine for themselves their status with respect to the nation. I. The revolution The collapse of the Austrian imperial state in the autumn of 1918 did not leave any of its constituent nations unprepared. All of them were ready to establish themselves sooner or later as independent states. No serious resistance was expected, not least because the complete military defeat had removed the last possibility of preventing the process of dissolution. In view of the Czechs’ and South Slavs’ rapid progress toward independence, the Germans in Austria too were forced to secure their future as soon as possible and to build a home [Haus] of their own, even if only a makeshift one. In early October the pan-German parties within the Austrian House of Deputies proposed to convene all German members 8 See

Julius Braunthal, “Die gescheiterte Offensive,” Der Kampf 23, no. 1 (1930): 1–7. The coalition government of Social Democrats and Christian Socials had been formed after the national elections of February 16, 1919, and remained in office until July 7, 1920. 9

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of the Austrian Imperial Council [Reichsrat] to a German national assembly. On October 10, 1918, all of the German parties in the Austrian House of Deputies reached an agreement based on a resolution by the Social Democratic Party, which advocated the formation of a German-Austrian state comprising all the German regions of Austria. The parties also expressed a willingness to negotiate with representatives of the Czech and South Slav peoples on the transformation of Austria into a federation of independent national entities. It is worth mentioning that the Germans did not intend to dissolve Austria, they only considered its restructuring. The same or a similar thought was expressed in the imperial manifesto of October 16, in which the monarch announced his decision to transform Austria, in accordance with the will of its peoples, into a federal state in which every nation would form a state entity of its own within its territories. Today it is clear that the manifesto came too late, for only the Germans were still interested in this program at the time. On the day of its promulgation it must already have been seen by all thinking people as an unavailing attempt to bring together the diverging forces in the state. [. . .] A few years earlier, a manifesto of this nature might have marked the start of a positive development that could have averted the World War and consolidated Austria. Under the present circumstances, however, it was now merely a sign of general dissolution sent from the highest level. On the same day the manifesto was announced, the German parties in the Austrian House of Deputies decided to convene a plenary assembly of all German deputies. This plenary assembly took place on October 21 as a “national assembly.” The members elected three presidents with equal rights and obligations in accordance with its three major participating parties (Pan-Germans, Christian Social, and Social Democratic). The assembly adopted a decision to constitute itself as a “Provisional National Assembly of German Austria” and elected an executive committee of twenty members, who were to submit motions to the National Assembly on the constitution of the German-Austrian state. In other words, the assembly adopted a decision to form the independent state of German Austria. This state formation was completed in the next meeting of the Provisional National Assembly on October 30 through the adoption of a “decision on the basic organs of state authority.” With this first constitution, which was implemented immediately and without opposition, the new state of German Austria was established not only de jure but also de facto. On November 11, Emperor Karl issued an (undated) announcement, countersigned by his last minister-president, [Heinrich] Lammasch,10 in which he recognized in advance whatever form of state German Austria chooses to adopt and renounced any involvement in the affairs of state. This statement, which referred only to German Austria and not to the Czecho-Slovak and South Slav states being formed at the same time, was not an unconditional abdication of the throne. It was formulated deliberately as merely a renunciation of involvement in the affairs of state. This is irrelevant in legal terms, however, since the old Austrian constitution would not have allowed either this limited renunciation or an unconditional abdication. According to that constitution, only death can end the monarch’s right or executive authority—the mere abdication of the throne does not. As the constitution does not explicitly mention abdication as grounds for termination [of the monarch’s authority], such termination, based on the actual state of affairs, cannot be inferred. Moreover, only the new German-Austrian constitution, 10 Heinrich Lammasch (1853–1920) was an internationally respected expert in criminal, constitutional, and international law and, from October 27 to 30, 1918, the last minister-president in the Austrian monarchy.



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not the former Austrian constitution, has the authority to interpret the statement of renunciation. But a statement of intent of this kind is also meaningless under the new constitution, which does not recognize the monarch as a state authority. There is no legal continuity between the old Austrian and new German-Austrian constitution. In particular, the Provisional National Assembly of German Austria cannot be regarded as one of the national councils mentioned in the imperial manifesto of October 16 since, as a national council, the German-Austrian National Assembly would not have been authorized to constitute German Austria as an independent state.11 Because and to the extent that it did this, it deliberately placed itself on a revolutionary basis. From a legal point of view, however, revolution is nothing more than a break in legal continuity. Such a break is still a revolution even if it takes place, as in the case of German Austria, without an external struggle or bloodshed, in particular even if the entire apparatus of the old state is willing to submit to the new constitution without resistance. The idea that the revolution created an unbridgeable schism between the old Austrian and the German-Austrian constitution, that Old Austria and German Austria are two completely different states that are not connected by a regular legal succession, is the necessary consequence of a point of view that understands the state as a supreme, irreducible, and hence sovereign order and, in legal terms, as a sovereign legal system. It is a hypothesis based on the primacy of a state legal system, which, applied in this case to the constitution of German Austria, necessarily implies a break with the political order of Austria. It is understandable that this point of view would be immediately adopted in theory and practice, in particular in the German-Austrian legislation—not only for psychological reasons, on account of the strong need to bring down the curtain on the sad and in recent decades painful history of old Austria and to turn over a new leaf in history with German Austria, but also above all because in view of the monarchy’s unnaturally great financial burden, an identification of German Austria with the old state would have meant that the new state would be economically ruined from the outset. It was not that the men who led German Austria wished to ignore all the commitments of their political legacy. From the beginning, German Austria was open to a fair distribution of the old state’s assets and liabilities among all of the new states created on its territory. However, the other nation-states energetically refused from the outset to accept any legal succession and in some cases even managed, under the aegis of the Entente, to put forward the view that they were to be counted among Austria’s victorious opponents. Because international law had decided to divide Austria into several new states, and because the pro rata parte apportionment of the national debt was not possible, German Austria—if it was not to be forced into the position of being considered the old Austria—was obliged to claim recognition as a new independent state with as little connection to the old Austria as had been recognized in the case of the Czecho-Slovakian and South Slav states. A legal construct of this nature—and this is the only one under consideration—is only possible, however, if the legal hypothesis of the primacy of the state’s own legal system is taken to its logical conclusion. If one takes into account international law in the sense that the international legal system is seen as having precedence over and delimiting the individual state legal systems, making the states part of a legal order in the form of a community 11

Original note: This opinion is affirmed by many others, for example, in the letter by the State Marshal [Landmarschall] of Lower Austria to the Provisional National Assembly (in the run-up to the second meeting of October 30, 1918, published in the Sammlung der von der Provisorischen Nationalversammlung für den Staat Deutschösterreich erlassenen Gesetze, ed. Dr. Ferd Kadečka and Dr. Hugo Suchomel, no. 1 [Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1918], 26).

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of coordinated subjects, in other words, if one assumes the primacy of international law, then there must necessarily be a legal continuity between German Austria and the old Austria, and one has to decide, as mentioned earlier, whether German Austria is to be regarded as identical with old Austria or only—together with the other nation-states created on its territory—as a legal successor to Austria. Regardless of the formal discontinuity with old Austria, which was fixed in the constitution of German Austria and in those of the other nation-states, for obvious reasons the substantive continuity of the law prevailed to a large extent in German Austria as in all of the states established on the territory of Austria. Paragraph 16 of the decision on the constitution, adopted on October 30, 1918, stated that all valid laws and institutions in Austria would remain in force until further notice, unless they were repealed or amended by that decision. This means that the vast majority of the laws in force in Austria are applicable to German Austria. It should merely be pointed out that the wording of this applicability clause is not very felicitous in terms of the argument of formal discontinuity. According to this argument, the norms of Austrian law do not remain in force—insofar as they are compatible with the decision on the constitution—but enter into force as new formal legislation.

2. Karl Kautsky Democracy and Democracy First published as “Demokratie und Demokratie,” Der Kampf 13, no. 6 (1920): 209–14. Translated by Nick Somers. Although democracy as a state form was never seriously questioned by the Provisional National Assembly, the communist idea of a soviet republic or dictatorship presented an abiding ideological challenge for the Social Democrats. The Communists reproached the Social Democrats for not going far enough with the overthrow of the monarchy, saying that democracy as a state form would not remove bourgeois rule but, on the contrary, would consolidate it. Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), a leading thinker of the German Social Democrats with close ties to Austro-Marxism, replied to this reproach—as did Max Adler and Otto Bauer12—with the argument that “bourgeois” democracy most strongly highlighted the class antagonism and was therefore the ideal basis for the transition to socialism. In the Berlin Freiheit of April 24 this year, comrade Crispien wrote at the end of his article:13 “After the start of the class struggle for political power, the class-conscious proletariat espoused bourgeois democracy, not to identify with this democracy but to use it as a weapon.” A few years ago this sentence would still have been very strange, since we generally assumed that when the proletariat entered into the struggle for political power it abandoned bourgeois democracy in favor of proletarian, socialist democracy. Today Crispien’s 12 See Max Adler, Demokratie und Rätesystem (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung Ignaz Brand, 1919); and Otto Bauer, Die österreichische Revolution (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1923). 13 Arthur Crispien (1875–1946) was chairman from 1919 to 1922 of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), a left-wing opposition splinter group of the German Social Democrats.



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sentence is no longer surprising, for since the appearance of the communist idea of a soviet dictatorship, the term “bourgeois democracy” has taken on a meaning that it did not have before. Since then, democracy has become a highly volatile and at the same time extremely disputed concept. At the risk of stating the obvious, it is perhaps worth clarifying the concept once again, since however familiar this idea is [to us], it is unfortunately still completely unfamiliar to too many proletarians. [. . .] Those who reject democracy must strive for a different political constitution. Apart from democracy, only two other key forms of government can be taken into consideration: autocracy and aristocracy. Autocracy is to be found where the various social classes, including the higher ones, are so weak and the apparatus of state, military, and bureaucracy so strong that they rise above and dominate all classes. As bureaucracy and the military are always hierarchically organized with a person at their head, this person becomes the sole ruler, an autocrat, with all political power and political rights concentrated in his person. He can decide as he pleases whether and how much he is willing to share with his favorites. With aristocracy, by contrast, one single class is so strong that it is able to monopolize all political rights and to establish this monopoly as a political constitution. Aristocracy differs from democracy not only in that the former is a kind of class rule and the latter is not but also because in an aristocracy this class rule is established constitutionally and protected by the state, whereas in a democracy it is not. Neither of these two conditions apply in the latter, where the ruling classes change as a function of the balance of power in society, whereas in aristocracy it is always one and the same class that possesses the authority of state. It would be nonsensical to ascribe a specific class character to democracy as a political form, whereas it is the very essence of an aristocracy. Democracy is not by any means in a position to overcome class antagonisms on its own. On the contrary, they are expressed most strongly through it, because they are not concealed by any other circumstance. In an aristocracy, the class antagonisms within the nonprivileged classes are suppressed through their common struggle against the aristocratic class. This struggle is above all a struggle to overthrow the constitution, whereas in a democracy, class struggle takes place within the framework of the constitution. [. . .] A perfect democracy does not exist anywhere. But it is wrong to point to the shortcomings in individual democratic states and to infer from them that democracy has no value. These shortcomings merely create the need for the proletariat everywhere to strive for full democracy. The proletariat has this task more than any other class, because more than any other class it has an interest in full democracy. Of course a nation’s constitution on its own, however perfect it might be, cannot satisfy the needs of the proletariat. The damage caused by capitalist exploitation cannot be overcome constitutionally. We strive for democracy not because it appears idyllic to us but because it provides the best foundation for resolving the class antagonism between capital and the proletariat. Nor do we believe that democracy alone can solve all the problems of state policy present today in the age of socialization which, briefly put, arise from the task of transforming the state from a ruling apparatus into an administrative apparatus for social purposes. Apart from the entities that have been created as a result of general suffrage, groups of experts, professional organizations such as unions, workers’ councils, and guilds will play an important role. We still have a lot to learn in this area and will be able to derive some useful lessons from the experience of the Russian soviets.

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In other words, democracy alone is not sufficient for organizing socialist production. But in terms of the issue of equal entitlement for all or sole entitlement of a single class, democracy or aristocracy, we must decide in favor of democracy even in preference to a proletarian aristocracy.

3. Karl Renner The Free State on the Danube First published as “Der Freistaat an der Donau,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, January 1, 1922, 1–2. Translated by Nick Somers. On January 1, 1922, the State Constitution Act regarding the separation of Vienna and Lower Austria as two states entered into force just three days after it had been adopted. From that day, the city of Vienna was an independent state on a par with the other states in the republic. The separation of Vienna and Lower Austria had previously been one of the main bones of contention in the Constituent National Assembly. The Social Democrats had made their agreement to the establishment of a federal republic contingent on this separation and on the city of Vienna having the same autonomy and representational rights as the other states. Although the separation was the result of a compromise, Karl Renner (1870–1950), one of the leading figures of the SDAP at the time and Austria’s chancellor until 1920, welcomed it with an enthusiasm that revealed the political significance of the new independence. He said that for the “working people,” Vienna was not merely a state like the others but a “free state,” a “republic,” and a (Paris) “commune.” The first day of January 1922 is a historic day of the highest order for the city of Vienna. To the casual observer it might appear merely to be the moment at which identical laws come into force on the separation of the old crown land of the Archduchy of Austria below the Enns River into two independent states in the republic, putting an end to the lamentable situation of their unsustainable administrative union; merely the moment at which each state achieves its long-sought autonomy and can from now on administer its own territory and citizens, its own taxes and institutions. But behind this momentary view is a historic event that marks the end of a long development and the promising start of a new era. The city of Vienna is today a free member state of the free Republic of Austria and hence itself a republic with all the attributes of a state. At the same time, it is a leading member state within the federation. [. . .] If Vienna had a politically minded bourgeoisie, it would assume this new role with courage and consciously act it out. But it allows itself to be represented by the advocates of the court, the church, and the aristocracy, the Seipels and Czernins, the champions of the imperial generals and bureaucrats, the Vaugoins and Schmitzes, the abdicated candidates for the Habsburg Black Hundreds, the Jerzabeks and Kunschaks.14 Thus it was left 14 Renner lists the prominent reactionary members of the Christian Social Party: Ignaz Seipel (1876–1932), a Catholic prelate, was chairman of the Christian Social Party from 1921 to 1930, and chancellor from 1922 to 1924 and 1926 to 1929; Ottokar Czernin (1872–1932) was minister of foreign affairs from 1916 to 1918 and a declared opponent of parliamentarianism; Carl Vaugoin



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to us Social Democrats to bring about not only bourgeois democracy as a whole but also the bourgeois independence of Vienna as the final break with the past. But the Vienna of the future belongs first and foremost to the working people. For them, the Republic of Vienna is at the same time the Vienna Commune. It still struggles for its very survival, and it still lacks all the material resources it needs for creative social work. But the boldness with which its administrators, particularly its city councillor of finance, have conducted and continue to conduct the bitter struggle for economic survival is not only a guarantee of success—Vienna will survive the economic crisis—but also promises rich yields, as soon as the struggle for existence sets free minds and resources for reform. [. . .] Vienna today is the largest municipal authority in the world to be administered by workers! And it is being administered in the face of unparalleled and previously unseen difficulties with the most complete success that a party has ever achieved in such a short time. The city, which according to enemy prophecies was supposed to be stagnating, the city that shortsighted fellow countrymen compared to a bloated head [Wasserkopf ], this city is not only financially and economically viable. Thanks to the prowess of its administrators it has also risen in constitutional and political terms and been guided to complete independence. The republic and commune of Vienna is a great inheritance, a powerful new creation, a precious jewel for the future. Workers of Vienna, it has been handed to you—treasure it, protect it, secure it for those who come after you as a most valuable legacy.

4. Robert Danneberg The German-Austrian Financial Constitution First published as “Die deutschösterreichische Finanzverfassung,” Der Kampf 15, no. 7 (1922): 198–212. Translated by Nick Somers. In the introduction to his commentary on the Financial Constitution Act, which regulated the division of tax revenue between the federal state and the individual states, Robert Danneberg (1885–1942), party secretary of the Social Democrats and one of the party’s key legal experts, once again speaks of the conflicting political points of view of the parties in the Constituent National Assembly. He mentions the advocacy by the Social Democrats of a centralized national state, Vienna’s newly acquired autonomy, and the dispute over the composition of the Federal Council (Bundesrat). Several drafts of the constitution by Christian Socials had foreseen a fixed number of representatives of the states in the Federal Council (between three and five) that in no way corresponded to the difference in size of the states in terms of population or tax revenues. In Danneberg’s words, this would have made it a veritable “Christian Social house of peers.” The law ultimately adopted called for proportional representation as proposed by Hans Kelsen. (1873–1949) was minister of defense from 1921 to 1933; Richard Schmitz (1885–1954) was minister of social affairs, minister of education, vice-chancellor and, from 1934 to 1938, mayor of Vienna; Anton Jerzabek (1867–1939) was a member of the National Council from 1920 to 1930 and in 1919 founded the Anti-Semites League (Antisemitenbund); Leopold Kunschak (1871– 1953), a rabid anti-Semite like Jerzabek, was a member of the National Council from 1920 to 1934 and chairman of the Christian Social Workers’ Association (Christlichsozialer Arbeiterverein). “Black Hundreds” were nationalist/monarchist organizations in czarist Russia.

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The great questions of principle that dominated the discussions on the constitution in 1918 and 1920 are once again on the agenda. They were not completely resolved in the consultations on the federal constitution. The constitution is a compromise. In this country neither the Christian Socials nor the Social Democrats are strong enough to shape the state entirely as they would like. The republican state system was not disputed. Among the monarchists, the reluctant supporters of the republic have the upper hand. They do not think the time is right for monarchist propaganda and accept the fact that the republic exists. But they want it at least to be as reactionary as possible. A centralized national state would give Vienna a stronger position. Federalism, which favors the autonomy of the states, would loosen the republican structure and weaken Vienna as a revolutionary center. It is true that the stupid talk of Vienna as a “bloated head” has long ceased. The fools who try to persuade us that German Austria will be viable only if Vienna is not part of it now understand that the states would have no chance of survival without Vienna. The headstrong farmers cannot even feed themselves, let alone the industrial population. According to official estimates, imports to German Austria in 1920 cost 1,761 million gold kronen, of which no less than 740 million were for foodstuffs. They have to be paid for with industrial products. Of the 969 million gold kronen earned by Austrian exports, 820 million came from industrial products, compared with 67 million from wood, minerals, and magnesite. We cannot live without exports, and it is above all in Vienna and the adjacent industrial region served by the Austrian Southern Railway [Südbahn] that these export goods are manufactured. Be that as it may, they still hate Red Vienna and set themselves in opposition as the black states.15 These states are changing their political stripes, and once the rural workers acquire a class consciousness, the power of the Christian Socials will be deeply shaken. For the time being, however, most of the rural population are still under their sway and therefore support federal politics. Apart from Vienna and Carinthia, the Christian Socials are in a stronger position in all states than they could ever attain in the National Council. Their political ideal is therefore a federal state with autonomous member states. They have won formally. Austria has become a federal state. But the supporters of the federalist ideas do not tire of admitting that this federal state is not one in reality. The states are hanging in the air. However much they would like to act like grand masters, the federal constitution itself restricts their authority, and the federal government has sole control over the printing of banknotes, an indispensable requisite today for governance. The unity of the economic area has been generally maintained. The rejoicing of the reactionary federalists at the autonomy of the states is spoiled as well by the fact that Vienna has also become a state in its own right, and the most populated and economically powerful one at that. Whatever power they manage to wrest for the states always applies to Vienna as well, however painful that might be for the Christian Social state leaders. Then they thought they could make democracy disappear through the construct of a federal state. But they have failed there as well. They wanted to create a second chamber alongside the National Council to represent the states, with every state having equal representation. This would have created a Christian Social house of peers. But they were unable to get their way. They have a Federal Council, but one in which the states are represented within certain limits according to their population, and its political composition is no different from that of the National Council. It is good that the work of the Federal 15

In the chromatic scheme of Austrian politics, the color red stands for the Social Democratic movement and the color black stands for the Christian Social Party.



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Council is ignored and that it is regarded generally as a superfluous body. It shows that we have in fact managed to parry the attack on democracy. A Federal Council that is merely a political copy of the National Council cannot become dangerous but is merely boring. If the states are weak in comparison with the federal state, they are also not independent and completely autonomous with regard to the municipalities in them. The federal constitution grants these communities a minimum number of inalienable rights. The absence of a proper local administration is one of the most serious shortcomings of our state system. Ensuring that the possibility for development in this direction was not completely lost was one of our concerns when the constitution was created. The federal constitution contains less than we wanted, but much more than the Christian Socials ever imagined.

5. Oskar Trebitsch Jurisdiction and Class Struggle First published as “Rechtsprechung und Klassenkampf,” Der Kampf 16, no. 8 (1923): 258–64. Translated by Nick Somers. No catchword was more prominent in the Social Democrats’ criticism of the criminal justice system than the concept of “class justice.” Historically the result of relevant experience with a justice system that despite the December Constitution of 1867 had been used as an instrument to suppress the labor movement, the term “class justice” in a democracy was, however, the subject of increasing criticism. As a blanket judgment of the administration of justice it ran the risk within the proletariat, as the Social Democratic lawyer Oskar Trebitsch (1886–1958) discusses elsewhere, of “destroying respect for the idea of justice.”16 To counter this danger, Trebitsch presents a cautious analysis of the term. Class justice? The accusation that class justice is real is rejected with loud and no doubt mostly genuine indignation every time parliamentary and journalistic representatives of organized labor raise the issue. The administrators of justice and the judiciary hasten to emphasize that the only aspiration of all judicial bodies is to promote justice and only justice and that they will continue, undeterred by unprincipled and demagogic reproaches, etc., etc. I believe we have the duty and also the right to point out that we have here one of those misunderstandings that can become highly dangerous, namely a terminological one. When we talk about class justice, we use the term to mean both more and—given that we always already challenge the ethics of those responsible for this class justice—less than the indignant defenders, mostly official ones, of “nonpartisan administration of justice.” And thus, we continue to speak even more at cross-purposes than is perhaps avoidable in discourse between Marxists and fundamental representatives of the capitalist legal system. It is true that we talk of class justice in reference to blatant examples of bad faith, perversion, delaying, or denial of justice that are not excusable solely on the grounds of a judge’s intellectual shortcomings. And we also talk of class justice when the most heinous of all crimes against the spirit of humanity is committed, namely when pronouncements 16 Oskar

Trebitsch, “Die Rechtsidee und der Sozialismus,” Der Kampf 12, no. 31 (1919): 717.

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that conflict with the wording and evident spirit of “justice” are made by appointed and paid scoundrels in judge’s robes under the cover of legal proceedings in a deliberate attempt to pervert the law. [. . .] The villainy of the judge is not usually evident, and we therefore also dismiss, with an undertone of moral indignation, verdicts as class justice that, albeit reasoned with such a degree of intellectual mediocrity, are nevertheless couched in subtle sophistry—there’s method in this madness; we have good reason to suspect that this strange judicial stupidity is merely simulated in order to obtain the desired wrong judgment. Obviously, the formation of a judicial opinion based on free consideration of the evidence is an internal process, and the dirty tricks by the court cannot be proven, even if there is a credible suspicion that they exist—to use the fine distinction in the Code of Civil Procedure. Although it is difficult to prove that a judge is a villain if that judge declares that villain is not a slanderous term, the probability is high that he is one. We also speak of class justice with the same feeling of moral reprobation with reference to a further, very common category of verdicts, when the letter and the spirit of the law are observed but the sentence is cruel and inhuman, designed and intended to serve the idea of persecution rather than legal prosecution in a moral sense. We speak in this regard of class justice in Horthy’s Hungary,17 where judges usually apply the law in force objectively and also in the spirit of that young nation. And yet, what kind of examples of humanity are people who sit down calmly to dinner after sentencing a sixteen-year-old girl to fifteen years’ imprisonment for distributing communist leaflets? [. . .] But with all these groups of verdicts—the rare instances of breaches of the law that can be formally demonstrated, the more frequent instances of objectively evident breaches of the law that cannot be formally demonstrated, and finally the very frequent formally correct verdicts stigmatized by their inherent inhuman or subhuman component—we always associate class justice with a negative value judgment of the judge concerned, and it is only in that sense that judges understand our general criticism of class justice. Hinc illae lacrimae!18 But we understand class justice as something else that is not so easily understandable and familiar to minds unschooled in social criticism, namely all of the effects in judicial consciousness of the prejudice connected with the general ideology of a particular class. Gustav Radbruch aptly pointed this out in his explanation of the Görlitz program:19 We define class justice as the interpretation and application of the law according to the assumed opinions of a certain class of people. This means that class justice is not equivalent to perversion of the law. Its essence is to be found not in twisting the law but in prejudices associated with class, exercised for that reason in good faith. Class justice is not a moral reproach delivered or rebuffed with indignation, but a sociological observation. It is an inevitable consequence of class rule and can be fully overcome only if this is also overcome; it can nevertheless be fought and limited within that framework. 17 After the defeat of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic under Béla Kun in 1919, Miklós Horthy (1868–1957) served as the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary, which had been restored as an authoritarian state. 18 “Hence the tears!” 19 Original note: Gustav Radbruch, Rechtspflege: Erläuterungen zum Görlitzer Programm (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1922).



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[. . .] I have already attempted to discuss how important it is in the formation of a consciousness favorable to a socialist culture for us to develop the proletariat’s notion of justice.20 In spite of all antagonism toward existing objective justice, it is important for us to diligently guard against discarding moral respect for the idea of justice, which is also the essential basis of every socialist system of justice. The more determined we are to use the proletariat’s ideal of justice—that of justice in a classless society—as a motor for a major reform in awareness in the direction of socialism, the more zealously we must work at the same time to debunk the myth that in a class-bound society, the objective administration of justice—completely divorced from the procedural conflict between class interests—is possible at all. This belief in the possibility of completely class-neutral jurisprudence is already the foundation of all judicial ethics. It is the truly great tragedy of the judiciary that, while it readily sees the need to uphold this belief, every socially critical analysis of its function confronts the well-intentioned judge once again with the subjectivity of his actions and hence the class-bound nature of his verdicts. As a way of revealing this tragedy of the judiciary not as an inescapable law of nature but as a resolvable result of history—of showing up bona-fide class justice not so as to cast aspersion on the profession but to draw attention to it—the oftenattempted casuistic exposure of wrongful convictions will be less useful than a Marxist critique of justice, a critique that reduces all judicial institutions and their members to their conscience-forming basic essence and thus shows how they are determined by class.

6. Friedrich Austerlitz The Murderers of Schattendorf Acquitted! First published as “Die Mörder von Schattendorf freigesprochen!,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, July 15, 1927, 1–2. Translated by Nick Somers. The acquittal of the three defendants in the Schattendorf trial was the immediate reason for the bloody riots on July 15, 1927, when the Palace of Justice burned after spontaneous mass demonstrations by Vienna’s workers, and eighty-four protesters were shot by the police.21 Historians generally agree that the events that July marked the turning point in the history of the First Republic. Friedrich Austerlitz’s (1862–1931) passionate editorial front-page commentary on that day not only reflects the workers’ violated sense of justice but was also intended to serve as an outlet for it. This sense of violation was amplified by the failure of the Social Democratic Party leaders to call for official protest actions once the verdict became known, and for good reason. The acquittal was decided by a jury court, 20 Original

note: “Die Rechtsidee und der Sozialismus,” Der Kampf 12, no. 31 (1919). During a violent confrontation between members of the Front-line Soldiers’ Union (Frontkämpfervereinigung Deutsch-Österreichs), a paramilitary organization of the political right, and the Republican Protection League (Republikanischer Schutzbund) in the small market town of Schattendorf, Burgenland, on January 30, 1927, two people were shot and killed and five were wounded. The public prosecutor’s office in Vienna brought charges under section 87 of the Criminal Code of “public violence through malicious actions under particularly dangerous circumstances.” 21

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an institution that had long been defended by Social Democrats as a means of countering bourgeois class justice. Nothing will happen to the three defendants who on January 30 deliberately fired deadly shots into a crowd of people in Schattendorf, killing two and wounding five others. Nothing will happen to them, not a hair on their heads will be touched. The perjured members of the jury acquitted them of all guilt, and to the jubilation of the World War front-line veterans’ groups [Frontkämpfer] gathered there, these men, who had two lives on their conscience, were immediately set free. This acquittal is a scandal, the like of which has rarely if ever been seen in the annals of justice. It cannot be said that the verdict was lenient because the jury, uncertain of their guilt, preferred to acquit rather than to condemn them. Nor is it any excuse that a jury recently acquitted a woman who had killed her husband. The jury might hesitate in condemning a murder if there is a possibility that the murderer was not in command of his or her senses when the act was committed. In this case, involving the inhuman shooting into a crowd of people, there can be no doubt that the act was deliberate and planned. These three veterans took their weapons with them in the morning. As the public prosecutor pointed out, they had built a stronghold where they could hide and aim their hunting rifles at the assembled Protection League [Schutzbund] members. Nor were they acting in self-defense but simply gave vent to their thirst for revenge. And this unspeakable deed remains unpunished! It should also not be overlooked that the presentation of the case by the court made it possible for the jury to recognize diminished responsibility and hence allow the most lenient punishment. The jury was simply asked whether the defendants, by shooting into a crowd of people, were guilty “of committing an act in the awareness—given the easily and generally knowable consequences—that it represented a danger to life or physical safety.” The three veterans shot into a crowd of people, shot blindly into the assembled group. And yet they are supposed not to have been aware that they posed a danger to the life and limb of the people they pointed their weapons at? And yet, this conclusion was acceptable to some members of the jury, to enough of them to bring about an acquittal. According to the jury, therefore, it means nothing to shoot at people; if the perpetrators are veterans, then it is a permissible pleasure of the hunt. These people who trampled so disdainfully on the oath they had taken, who ignored right and justice so brazenly, are not jurors but dishonorable lawbreakers who deserve the loathing and contempt of all rightthinking people for their shameless acquittal. They will receive this condemnation as well. The truth to be inferred so shockingly and annoyingly from this acquittal, which is a disgrace to jurisprudence as a whole, is that when Hakenkreuzler and veterans shoot at workers and kill Social Democrats, they can always be sure of acquittal. The murder of Birnecker, the murder of Still, the murder of Kovarik, all of these remain unpunished.22 And so the veterans in Schattendorf could also assume that nothing would happen to them if they added a few people to the list of Social Democrats already murdered, with the apparent result that they felt no inhibitions in shooting. And why should they? 22

The three cases cited by Austerlitz had left a deep impression in the popular memory of the Social Democrats and are cited as examples of offenses committed by radical right-wing organizations that were not adequately punished by the courts: Franz Birnecker was murdered on February 18, 1923, by members of the monarchist Ostara group; Karl Still on May 4, 1923, by two Nazis; and Franz Kovarik also by Nazis on September 23, 1923, at the age of just sixteen during a workers’ festival. In all three cases, the perpetrators merely received lenient sentences or fines.



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[. . .] But to all those who have once again tried the patience of the working people by acquitting the murderers who shot the people’s fellow workers: let it be said that they are playing a reckless and dangerous game. If the workers are forced to recognize that there is no justice for them in this capitalist system, then that justice is reduced to a joke when it comes to punishing a wrong committed against the working man, and their belief in this justice will be destroyed and their confidence in it undermined. The denial of justice is the worst thing that can be done to working men and women, and if they recognize and become aware of this depressing fact, the legal system will be finished. The bourgeois world warns continuously of the possibility of civil war; but is this plain and annoying acquittal of people who have killed workers—because it is workers they have killed—not already civil war? We warn them all, because the seeds of injustice planted yesterday can only produce a disastrous harvest.

7. Therese Schlesinger Criminal Justice and Psychoanalysis First published as “Strafjustiz und Psychoanalyse,” Der Kampf 23, no. 1 (1930): 34–40. Translated by Nick Somers. Therese Schlesinger’s (1863–1940) article is typical of a series of essays in Der Kampf applying psychoanalytical or sociological theories to the practical interpretation of the law.23 Her considerations as a women’s right activist and Social Democratic representative are to be seen in the context of one of the two main trends in criminal justice at the time, namely social criminal law reform. This reform called for the transformation of punishment as retribution into punishment serving social aims, and the extension of the general deterrent purpose of punishment to include special deterrent measures based on the specific threat posed by the criminal. In the last few years we have seen repeatedly how two young sciences that originated from two completely opposing points of view have converged to support and complement one another. While sociology, the older of the two, studies the laws of the development of society, the younger, psychoanalysis, reveals the mechanisms by which the individual adapts to the needs of society and civilization. It has always been known that social integration involves a difficult adaptation process from birth, and that education offers only pointers to this process but does not replace the child’s own learning process. It was Sigmund Freud, however, who made the great discovery that the basic asocial instincts that control everyone are not extinguished in civilized persons by education and traditions but merely suppressed in the unconscious. They continue to act there, and many of our thoughts and actions can be seen as an unconscious rebellion against suppressed instinctive desires and as an escape from the recognition and enactment of these desires. These drives are adapted in civilized society by sublimating some of the suppressed antisocial instincts and transforming them 23 See Robert Pollak, “Vom Strafrecht zum Schutzrecht,” Der Kampf 25, no. 3 (1932): 125–33; Therese Schlesinger, “Strafjustiz und Strafvollzug,” Der Kampf 24, no. 4 (1931): 183–86; and Oskar Trebitsch, “Das Problem der Richterbestellung,” Der Kampf 18, no. 11 (1925): 425–31.

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into permissible and even socially acceptable ones. The infant develops its ego through perceptions of the outside world and by gradually recognizing to what extent—if at all— its own characteristics are compatible with its wishes. The unrestricted living-out of its drives is physically kept in check at first by parents and educators and later by prohibitions. An initial urge is transformed into a “you should” or “you must not” in the child’s consciousness, and its desires (its ego) are constrained by codes of conduct (the superego) or, as it is better known, the conscience. But a person’s thoughts, feelings, and actions are only partly controlled by this conscious mentality; they are also partly controlled by unconscious drives. These drives conflict with the rules of civilized society so forcefully that the conscience does not only reject them but is forced to suppress them from its consciousness. Sometimes this adaptation remains merely incomplete, sometimes it is inhibited either by a pathological disposition or, much more often, by unsuccessful education or other indignities that the child’s psyche experiences through its environment. The success or failure of the emotional adaptation process, most decisively influenced by childhood experiences, therefore depends on constitution and environment, with the result that imperfect suppression and sublimation should be understood as developmental defects in the same way as a hunchback or clubfoot. [. . .] An educated judge normally knows very well that his verdicts cannot take the defendant’s personality into account. As early as the 1880s, the famous criminologist Franz von Liszt advocated concepts that made him almost seem like a forerunner of psychoanalytical criminal theory.24 He wanted to punish not the crime but the criminal, which is tantamount to recognizing the duty of the judge to consider the perpetrator’s psyche. According to Liszt, every criminal is a victim of his environment and education. The professional judge has difficulty in assimilating such findings. He flees from responsibility into the world of the written law. Academic jurisprudence is removed from everyday life, making it incompatible with our modern sense of justice and humanity, however imperfectly such a sense has evolved up to now. Public conscience has increasingly demanded a kind of justice based upon individual psychology. For this purpose, the authority of the judiciary has been expanded and lay courts have been established to foster intuitive and sensitive judgment of even the most serious offenses. From this point of view, however, jury courts can be seen as flawed because they can find a defendant guilty or not guilty but have no influence on the extent of the punishment and the way it is carried out. Psychoanalysis can make an essential contribution to an understanding of the decisions of juries, which frequently conflict with the letter of the law. As we have seen, man comes into the world as a “criminal,” in other words as a socially maladjusted person. The more favorable the material situation in which he lives the less he will be required to suppress his drives. The more loving and understanding his educators the better he will succeed in suppressing and sublimating these asocial drives. Inadequate suppression or sublimation reveals itself later in the form of neurosis, psychosis, or cruelty, the latter manifested much more frequently in a form tolerated by society than in one disdained as criminal. Various outlets are available for the usual kinds of suppressed criminality such as dreams and fantasies, duels, boxing, bullfighting, and belligerent patriotism.

24 See

Franz von Liszt, Der Zweckgedanke im Strafrecht (Marburg: Pfeil, 1882).



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As such, asocial ideologies are mostly formed as a function of parental authority; they cannot be attributed to the conscious ego versus the superego. The misfortune of neurotics, psychopaths, and criminals lies in the fact that they fail very early on because of their inability to resolve their relationships with their parents and siblings in the form of social adaptation. The attempt to suppress drives is common to all people, but the use of the psychic apparatus is different for each individual. In the case of the criminal disposition, censoring fails to a large degree, but it almost never fails completely, and thus even in the mind of a criminal there is a constant battle between the superego and the unconscious drives. [. . .] The better developed a person’s superego, the less he is threatened by the eruption of suppressed drives and the less he feels the demand for retribution. Every person naturally regards the criminal as his personal enemy, because criminal actions threaten his own safety and that of his loved ones. This makes him demand protection but not retribution. The retribution tendency is connected less with the perpetrator than with a person’s own unconscious drives, and the harshness of the punishment is intended to help the person’s own weak superego, which does not always function reliably. “An enthusiastic espousal of the idea of retribution,” according to Alexander and Staub, “is a diagnostic feature of strong, unprocessed asocial tendencies.”25 When criminals of any kind make contradictory statements in court, it is less a sign of their deceitfulness than of the fact that they are not aware of the drives motivating their acts; they are aimlessly and unsuccessfully seeking causal factors. They do not realize that they are motivated much less by external factors than by an unconscious feeling of guilt. They long for a punishment that will liberate them from this feeling of guilt. The fact that the pre-crime longing for punishment is usually replaced by a post-crime fear of punishment does not disprove psychoanalytic theory. On the contrary, psychoanalytic theory is confirmed by the often outright carelessness of clever criminals who enable themselves to be tracked down by even the most inept authorities.

25

Franz Alexander and Hugo Staub, Der Verbrecher und seine Richter: Ein psychoanalytischer Einblick in die Welt der Paragraphen (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1929).

“How the Breitner tax is being used—‘that’s luxury,’ the Anti-Marxists scream.” Der Kuckuck, April 17, 1932. (Courtesy of VGA.)

CHAPTER TWO

FINANCES AND TAXES Veronika Duma

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ed Vienna built the financial basis for its comprehensive political reforms on a broadly redistributive tax plan. This became possible after Vienna’s separation from Lower Austria to form its own state in 1922. This separation gave the Social Democratic city government a stronger position vis-à-vis the conservative federal government in matters of taxation policy.1 For example, Vienna possessed independent legislative authority, its own property taxes, and a right to a portion of federal tax revenue. Even though the Social Democrats never made it into the federal government after 1920, Vienna and its tax laws remained under their control. Named after the city councillor of finance Hugo Breitner, the Breitner Taxes applied to luxury goods and consumption, as well as to automobiles, horses (and horse racing), and domestic employees. The tax on foodstuffs, drinks, and tobacco was levied on businesses categorized as luxury establishments. The entertainment tax applied to various public events, such as circus performances, variety theaters, cinemas, balls, and operas. Especially important were the welfare tax paid by employers and the progressive housing construction tax (Wohnbausteuer).2 The latter applied to all properties within the city’s jurisdiction and was aimed at villas and private homes, while leaving working-class residences relatively untouched. The tax brackets were arranged such that small apartments were negligibly affected, while luxury properties were taxed at extraordinarily high rates. The purpose was to transform indirect taxes into strongly progressive direct taxes and to avoid taking out further loans. From the beginning, the Social Democratic city government was subjected to fierce criticism from bourgeois, conservative, and right-wing elements, and when it came to Breitner, the political attacks often had an anti-Semitic character. In political opposition to the Social Democrats stood an alliance of the federal government, the Central Federation of Industry (Hauptverband der Industrie), banks, businessmen, as well as the church and the military. The city used its taxation policies and the corresponding welfare policies—comprising investments in social and public infrastructure, employment measures, and municipalization—to intervene in the economic crisis following World War I. By 1922, as in Germany,

1 See Robert Danneberg, Der finanzielle Marsch auf Wien (Vienna: Verlag der Organisation Wien der Sozialdemokratischen Partei, 1930), 4. 2 See Laurenz Widholz, “Die Wiener Wohungsnot und die Wohnbausteuer,” Arbeiterschutz: Zeitschrift für soziale Gesetzgebung—Organ der Reichskommission der Krankenkassen Österreichs, February 15, 1922, 27–29.

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the inflation caused by the war had grown into hyperinflation. The League of Nations took over the guarantees for a foreign loan, which was made dependent on certain fiscal policy conditions. The federal government, together with the finance committee of the League of Nations, proposed a plan to “restructure” the state’s financial position, calling for a reduction in state spending and prescribed austerity measures. The next wave of economic crises, following on the heels of the 1929 stock market crash, struck Austria just as severely as it struck Germany. The United States had previously offered credit to a number of countries running a deficit. Austrian banks also took out large lines of credit and either passed what was often only short-term credit to industrial development projects as long-term loans or bought shares in those interests. With the collapse of the Creditanstalt in 1931,3 the crisis hit its peak, and the ranks of the unemployed swelled. While the Roosevelt administration responded to the crisis in the United States with the New Deal, the federal government of Austria’s First Republic—in parallel with Brüning’s measures in the Weimar Republic—enacted austerity measures, which were marked by strict spending cuts. The Austrian government once again sought loans from the League of Nations and proposed another “restructuring” measure for the federal budget. The socialist and communist press demanded to know who would bear the cost of the crisis. Leaders of the women’s movement, in particular the movement of women workers, drew attention to the gender dimension of the crisis in numerous articles.4 The Social Democrats criticized the budget-cutting policies, but nevertheless went along with some of the austerity measures at the federal level. Meanwhile, the crisis was making itself seen in the finances of the Vienna city government: decreased spending and rising unemployment meant less income. As the crisis progressed, the federal government only increased the financial pressure on the Social Democratic government of Vienna to institute cost-saving measures. The city of Vienna tried, especially with regard to housing, to continue its investment programs, if only in a more limited way. But they also looked to save money. The federal government enforced an ever more authoritarian policy of austerity. The dismantling of the socialist infrastructure, from employment measures to the protection of workers’ rights, was accelerated by so-called emergency measures (Notverordnungen), which bypassed the Parliament and any other democratic decisionmaking process. The government and representatives of the finance committee of the League of Nations did not hide the fact that they saw parliamentary democracy as an obstacle to their reworking of the state’s finances. They justified the establishment of authoritarian structures on the grounds of economic necessity. The justice minister at the time, Kurt Schuschnigg, declared in 1932 that parliaments were not well suited to counteracting a crisis. After the military put down the workers’ protests in February 1934, the Austrofascist regime dissolved the municipal government and replaced it with a government 3

The Creditanstalt functioned as a point of transfer between the nations of the former AustroHungarian Empire and those of Western Europe. As the largest bank in central Europe it played a crucial role in the international credit system and in industrial investments. 4 See, for example, Käthe Leichter, “Frauenarbeit und Wirtschaftskrise,” Die Frau 35, no. 9 (September 1926): 2–4; E. F., “Fraueninteressen im Budgetausschuss,” Die Frau 39, no. 1 (January 1930): 9–10; Anonymous, “Die größte Sorge der Sozialdemokraten: die Arbeitslosen! Der Finanzausschuß berät den Finanzplan der Regierung,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, June 11, 1931, 2; Adelheid Popp, “Verdrängung der Frauenarbeit,” Die Frau 43, no. 2 (February 1934): 2–4; Käthe Leichter, “Wem nützt es?,” Die Frau 43, no. 2 (February 1934): 7–9; Emmy Freundlich, “Wirtschaftskrise und Parlament,” Die Frau 40, no. 8 (August 1931): 2–4.

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commissioner. One of the first changes from the new administration was the abolition of the progressive taxation system. Housing construction projects were largely ended, rents were raised, and the social safety net and the social infrastructure dismantled. The Social Democratic Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers’ paper), which was already banned at this time, summed up this “reform”: “the millions given to the rich and the super-rich have ripped a large hole in the public budget. They have plugged that hole by building no more housing, by taking an axe to services for the poor, by letting the school system collapse.”5 Further reading Ausch 2013 Duma and Hajek 2015 Eigner 2019 Kernbauer 1995 Kernbauer and Weber 1985 Klingenstein 1965 Knittler 2013 Maier and Maderthaner 2012 Stiefel 1988

1. Robert Danneberg Finance Politics in the City of Vienna First published as “Die Finanzpolitik der Stadt Wien,” Rote Revue: sozialistische Monatsschrift 1, no. 8 (1921–22): 294–305. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. The jurist and Vienna city councillor Robert Danneberg (1885–1942) designed Red Vienna’s taxation system, together with the city councillor of finance Hugo Breitner, whom he succeeded in 1932. In the Rote Revue, the theoretical journal of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland, he presented his tax policy as the answer to the post–World War I crisis. The republic inherited the monarchy’s debts, including billions worth of war loans.6 During the inflationary period of the 1920s, at the suggestion of the League of Nations, the budgetary plans prescribed increased revenue and decreased spending which were carried out to the detriment of broad swaths of the population. Social Democratic municipal politics, however, proposed the direct taxation of the wealthy and property owners in contrast to the indirect taxation of the rest of the population in form of a value-added tax (“mass tax”).7 The Social Democrats declined to take out loans or lines of credit. 5 Anonymous, “Die schwarzen Schuldenmacher. Die Folgen der Diktatur über das Volk in Wien,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, November 3, 1935, 7–8. 6 See Robert Danneberg, Steuersadismus? Streiflichter auf die Rote Rathauswirtschaft (Vienna: Verlag der Organisation Wien der Sozialdemokratischen Partei, 1925), 3. 7 See Hugo Breitner, Seipel-Steuern oder Breitner-Steuern? Die Wahrheit über die Steuerpolitik der Gemeinde Wien. Rede des Stadtrates Hugo Breitner. Gehalten am 31. Jänner 1927 in der Volkshalle des Neuen Wiener Rathauses (Vienna: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1927), 6–7, 9.

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In one fell swoop, the catastrophe of the World War has brought the Social Democrats, who in German Austria had been kept out of the public office in peacetime by smallminded restrictions on voting rights, into power in hundreds of industrial communities, including Vienna. Here, the working class has found an abundance of tasks, but also empty coffers. In no belligerent nation were so few tax increases imposed during the war as in Austria, because the fragile state did not dare impose such a burden on its peoples during wartime. Instead, it helped itself by printing more money and by postponing all the public works that it could. This is why, when the empire dissolved, all the coffers of every municipal authority were empty, the revenue service was neglected, and the currency’s loss of value was shockingly obvious. [. . .] Taxing an economic organism that had been sucked dry, an industry stopped in its tracks, or the homeless, hungry, and freezing masses was out of the question. At that time, the Social Democrats took it upon themselves to take Vienna—which had transformed from royal residence of an empire of fifty million to a revolutionary center antagonized by reactionary peasants and clergy of Alpine Austria and which seemed to have been abandoned to decay—and to make it a livable city once again. Opposing the Social Democratic majority—100 of the 165 members of the Municipal Council were Social Democrats—were the former rulers of the city, the Christian Social minority, voted in by homeowners, by the overgrown portion of the petty bourgeoisie, and by the reactionary elements in the public administration. Nevertheless, the new Social Democratic council did not have complete freedom to maneuver. The old Austrian legal code, which gave municipalities broad autonomy in other matters, imposed strict limits on their financial accounts. The municipal budget was primarily dependent on contingencies from the federal taxes. There was only one specifically municipal revenue source and that was a dog tax, which produced a total of 450,000 kronen in all of 1913. Three-quarters of all revenue in the city of Vienna came from the taxation of rent. In other words, the terrible housing shortage in Vienna was the Christian Socials’ main source of revenue. The consumption tax on meat, alcohol, etc. brought in about a tenth of their revenue. Revenue from business and inheritance taxes were negligible. The city, unsocially, extracted twice as much net profit from its monopolies—the gasworks, the electric utilities, streetcars, etc. To reform such a municipal budget, to replace the burden on the broader population with property taxes, and thereby to fund the city’s colossal spending increases— that was the goal of the Social Democratic finance policies. The task was made all the harder when the continuing devaluation of the krone undermined the existing revenue system. The expenditures increased. [. . .] The Social Democratic city councillor of finance, Hugo Breitner, a keen observer of economic life, recognized the problem early and built another system of taxation alongside the federal system, in spite of various obstacles and the difficult environment, one built on a completely different tax concept. The Social Democratic majority has overcome the wailings of the bourgeoisie and passed the necessary legislation, which, without excessive burdens on the population as a whole, used twentytwo municipal taxes to generate two hundred times as much revenue in 1922 as in 1913. To generate tax revenue from the housing shortage or from the daily bread of ordinary people—that we have refused to do. On the contrary, the city of Vienna became the most energetic champion of tenants’ rights. [.  .  .] The rent deferrals, which went into effect over the course of two years, as prescribed by the rent control laws, have allowed the municipality to do away with the excise tax on rent altogether and replace it with a

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progressive housing construction tax on all homes, considered a regulatory tax that is earmarked for particular uses and does not constitute municipal income. Only the renter’s tax on businesses flows directly into the city’s coffers. [. . .] * * * [. . .] Naturally, this taxation system was met with fierce opposition from business interests. Businessmen took to the streets in public protests, threats were levied against the city councillor of finance, because the city coveted diversified sources of massive income to offset its massive and growing expenditures. The taxes levied on some businesses were so large and so complex that it was not entirely unjustified to claim that the city had to some degree become a stakeholder in the businesses it was taxing. But Vienna can be proud of having survived the critical period of currency devaluation, even as all her enemies prophesied her demise. Today the difference between socialist Vienna and the cities governed by the bourgeois parties is clear to see. Those cities are on the verge of collapse under the weight of their debt and now reach for one Vienna-style tax after another, those same taxes the members of their ruling parties had fought against so fiercely. The Vienna system has become instructive. The successes of its finance policies have gone a long way to build the prestige of the city and of the party.

2. Hugo Breitner Capitalist or Socialist Taxation? Who Should Pay Tax? The Rich or the Poor? First published as Kapitalistische oder sozialistische Steuerpolitik: Wer soll die Steuern bezahlen? Die Armen oder die Reichen? (Vienna: Verlag der Organisation Wien der Sozialdemokratischen Partei, 1926), 3–16. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. The tax policy of Red Vienna provoked fierce protests and criticism from the Christian Socials as well as from wealthy property owners.8 Their political offensives were often aimed at the person of Hugo Breitner (1873–1946), after whom the progressive, graduated system of taxation was named. As city councillor of finance (1919–1932) and as a former bank director, he led the taxation policies definitively away from those of the Christian Social city government. Not all businesses in the city worked for profit. The tax revenue, which flowed into various investments, was meant to enable the independent financing of the city. Breitner declined to take out loans that would put the city in debt. In 1933 he accepted the honorary directorship of the Vienna Central Savings Bank (Wiener Zentralsparkasse), before his brief arrest in 1934 ended his career. After a short introduction, what follows is the text of a speech in which Breitner responds to the openly anti-Semitic Christian Social member of the Vienna Municipal Council Leopold Kunschak. The bourgeois attacks on the Vienna city government. The capitalist press of Vienna has begun a new campaign against the socialist city government of Vienna. The signal to attack was given by the Municipal Council member Leopold 8

See, for example, Anonymous, “Wiener, rettet Wien! Auf zur Demonstration gegen die Wohnbausteuer,” Reichspost, April 2, 1922, 7.

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Kunschak at the Christian Social Party convention, when he accused the Social Democratic government of ruining Vienna with their “sadistic taxation” [. . .] by sticking to their tax system rather than take on foreign debt. A response to this demagoguery was given by City Councillor Breitner in his speech marking the completion of the municipal budget. Breitner’s response. It is neither surprising nor pleasant that we have become the object of passionate and embittered criticism. This only goes to show that the Social Democrats are doing things differently than ever before, and succeeding. On the day that our tax policy meets with the approval of Herr Kunschak, we would do better to turn over the burden of government to his party right away. From 1918 until today, the great deciding question of our times, one being fought over in every country, has been: Who should pay the costs of the war? The French were until recently under the delusion that Germany should be left with the bill and that their own country should feel no financial aftereffects whatsoever. This dream is gone, and for months now the world has been able to see the fight over the allotment of the tax burden between the grand bourgeoisie on the one hand and the petty bourgeoisie and the working class on the other hand. In Germany the discord among the working class has led to an erosion of the eight-hour working day and, as a result of rising rents, an immense decrease in working-class purchasing power. In Italy the Fascists have demolished the labor unions and largely freed the bourgeoisie from any tax burden. Here in Austria the Social Democrats have been and remain strong enough to prevent similar assaults. There can be no doubt that the devastation of our four-and-a-half-year war is so terrible that every part of society must feel some pain from it. In Vienna we have succeeded in forcing the propertied classes to pay taxes at rates never before seen. This is the simple reason why our opponents are simply frothing at the mouth as they rage against Red Vienna! Herr Kunschak’s “math.” At the Christian Socials’ Convention, Herr Kunschak calculated that the annual tax burden on the population of Vienna came to 1,309.093 krone per capita. His math is correct—but everything else is wrong. This is what characterizes Vienna’s taxes, and what distinguishes them from the Christian Socials taxes of the past: the tax obligations of each part of society are profoundly different from one another. Why do workers care about the domestic employee tax? Who among us, from workers to middle class, can afford two domestic employees?9 This is a tax that must be removed from the calculation. The Viennese only pay the tax on the subletting of rooms in exceptional circumstances. This cost has clearly only made its way into Herr Kunschak’s calculations by mistake. Neither laborers nor office workers, nor for that matter small business owners, own a car. So, the forty-five billion in revenue from the motor vehicle tax should likewise be taken out of the calculation. Since proletarians rarely keep horses, whether for riding or dressage, we can throw out the horse tax too. People in working-class circles rarely go to art auctions, so they are untouched by the public auction tax. They do not own franchised businesses and therefore pay no franchising tax. The capital gains tax, the advertising tax, the public signage tax—they all have no bearing 9 The

domestic staff tax applied to the second domestic employee and increased with each additional employee. Households with a single employee were exempt from this tax.

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on most of the population of Vienna. The taxes on foodstuffs, drinks, and tobacco, since two-thirds of all businesses are legally tax-free, apply almost exclusively to the upper classes. This is also true in large measure for the entertainment tax. This brings us to another great advantage of the Viennese tax system: they leave the necessities of life untouched and only affect other forms of spending. Workers and employees, not being property owners, pay no property tax and no real estate fees. The additional fees on totalizers and bookmakers don’t fall on the working classes of Vienna either. But everyone does have to pay the housing construction tax, and that’s why it is calculated along a graduated scale, so that it starts at a factor of three hundred for small apartments and ends at a factor of six thousand for large home in villas and palaces. Simply dividing numbers, as I will show later by way of an example, leads therefore to a completely false conclusion. Herr Kunschak’s calculation is therefore not correct! Yes, if the ideal Christian Social tax program were ever to become reality, if the special taxes were to go away and be converted into the federal sales tax, then and only then would simple division of this sort be appropriate. The federal sales tax is structured this way. It affects the piece of bread the unemployed man buys with his meager support check in the exact same amount as the piece of bread that someone tears off during their elegant meal at the Sacher café. But the Viennese taxes paint quite a different picture.

3. Viktor Kienböck Foundations of Financial Policy First published as “Grundsätze der Finanzpolitik,” Reichspost, January 28, 1927, 2–3. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. The lawyer and Christian Social politician Viktor Kienböck (1873–1956) served from 1922 to 1924 and again from 1926 to 1929 as federal finance minister. In this position, Kienböck took out loans from the League of Nations and oversaw the “restructuring” of the state’s finances under then chancellor Ignaz Seipel. In the 1930s he became president of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, Austria’s central bank (1932–1938). Hugo Breitner sarcastically called him the “beacon of the Christian Social Party” and Robert Danneberg underlined that it had been Kienböck who, as finance minister, “had preached and led the crusade against the finances of Vienna.”10 Around 1933 Rost von Tonningen, the representative of the finance committee of the League of Nations in Vienna, noted in his diary: “Together with the chancellor and Kienböck we have judged it necessary to dissolve the Austrian Parliament, since this Parliament was sabotaging the reconstruction effort.”11 In the following speech Kienböck explains the foundations of his financial policy, which he was only able to implement as things took ever more authoritarian turns. A presentation from Finance Minister Dr. Kienböck. [. . .] 10 Breitner, Seipel-Steuern oder Breitner-Steuern?, 4; Danneberg, Der finanzielle Marsch auf Wien, 11. 11 Quoted in Klingenstein (1965, 98).

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In wishing to describe the task of creating a healthy finance policy, I would like to emphasize four points, which I consider the Guiding aims of finance policy First of all frugality in spending, a frugality that leads, in countries such as ours, to various forms of unfairness. But this unfairness cannot be avoided as long as items of state spending are of such great importance. To this point I would like to reiterate the role played here in Austria by the burden of pensions. We have 146,000 former public servants receiving pensions, compared to 200,000 currently employed. The cost of these pensions come to 204 million schillings per year, plus another 358 million schillings when you add in the railways. The assets, on the other hand, require 732 million schillings. We earmarked 94.5 million schillings for unemployment assistance and 53.3 million shillings for the war wounded. These are the burdens that fate has placed on us; nevertheless, it is necessary to consider where those numbers come from and what problems arise from them. The second point is that of coherence of spending policies at the federal level. This coherence is of special importance because we are a small economy, and because the cohesion of even such a small economy as this one will necessarily collapse if the spending policies of the various parts do not align with one another. The third point is the tax burden. In Austria it is not just a matter of the level of taxes, but rather of how they are levied. Because it is evident that the difficulty caused by the tax burden takes on a different character depending on how it is applied, the method of implementation is crucial. The fourth point is the healthy and proper treatment of debt taken on by the public body. In order to align with these four points, finance policy must be unified and well planned, otherwise it cannot succeed. [. . .] And that is true as well for the third point, that of the tax burden. In this regard we are doing quite poorly. The federal constitution gives the government certain tools for responding to new tax laws passed at the state level, but when it comes to existing taxes, we are quite restricted. Thus a certain degree of rigidity has emerged when it comes to state taxation. To speak frankly, the origin of the trouble is this: there is a tension between the policies of the federal government and that of the state with the largest economy, Vienna. The ruling party in Vienna has for various reasons refused to touch their taxes, it presides attentively and happily over the integrity of the inventory of these taxes. The other states are put in a difficult situation. They have far fewer opportunities when it comes to their tax policies and have in many ways turned toward Vienna’s examples in crafting their own plans. As long as the federal government is powerless in the face of the tax policies of the states, no decisive step in this matter will be possible. Therefore, the drastic measures we are obliged to call for are scarcely possible. It cannot be done from one day to the next. But if several other steps are taken first—and I am optimistic about that—I believe that reason leads to a recognition of certain facts that will break down the walls that still divide our attitudes. The fourth point speaks to debt policies. Much has been written on the question of whether the state should take on debt. In this question, too, I take an opportunistic perspective. Just recently, [Rudolf] Goldscheidt [sic] has published a handbook, in which socialist finance policies are clearly worked out. Goldscheidt praises Breitner’s policies. He begins with the assumption that the state must become wealthy again. He rejects a state indebted to capitalists and calls for a reclaiming of the state. These theories are just a series of maxim-like sentences, and I reject them. Is it preferable for society that a great portion of the national wealth be in the hands of individuals or in the hands of the collective? I would like to answer that question on the basis of who would administer that wealth more productively.

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[. . .] The reason why the Social Democrats have positioned themselves against a unified finance policy is that they want to pursue the aims of their party in Vienna without restriction. A major part of this attitude is their wish to bring to fruition their views on housing construction. [. . .] We do not oppose the idea that the city government should be involved in the construction of housing but rather that in doing so, they hinder the healthy distribution of housing; for as long as the current structures governing the rental industry remain in place, the distribution of housing cannot follow its natural course, and so one cannot precisely determine the need for housing.

4. Anonymous On the Tax Policy of the City of Vienna First published as “Zur Steuerpolitik der Gemeinde Wien,” Die Arbeiterin 7, no. 1 (January 1930): 6. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. The Communist Party, which during the First Republic had no seats in either the Parliament or in the Vienna Municipal Council, was consistently critical of the policies of Red Vienna. The journal of Communist women in Austria, Die Arbeiterin (The woman worker), which appeared monthly from 1924 to 1931, published articles on the topics of women’s work and unemployment as well as labor disputes and the condition of working mothers. It held the Social Democrats responsible for social grievances, including Breitner’s tax policy, which it saw as insufficient. Even as Vienna took on savings measures during the crisis, the Communist women protested. Several issues of  Die Arbeiterin featured a column titled “Das Rote Wien” (“Red Vienna”) in which the editors offered critiques from a women’s point of view. The masthead featured the image of a pregnant woman being kicked out of the Homeless Shelter of the City of Vienna. Relieving the “overburdened” economy at the expense of the overburdened working class, that is the basis of today’s Social Democratic tax policy. In recent months the following taxes were cut by the city of Vienna: The automobile tax The advertising tax The welfare contributions of credit institutes (Further tax relief has been promised to the capitalists for the near future.) And how does Breitner intend to replace the money lost by these reductions? By raising: Streetcar fares The price of electricity The price of gas That is, through tremendous burdens on working-class households. Breitner takes the last few pennies from the pocket of the working woman! Breitner is taxing the unemployed to write massive checks for the capitalist millionaires.

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5. Gabriele Proft No! From the Finance and Budget Board of the National Council First published as G.P., “Nein! Aus dem Finanz- und Budgetausschuß des Nationalrates,” Die Frau 40, no. 3 (March 1931): 4. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. The women of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party between the wars discussed how the economic crisis affected men and women to different degrees. During the years of the First Republic, numerous articles address topics concerning the crisis as well as the restructuring measures and their consequences for women. The critique was aimed at the response to the crisis at the federal level, where the Christian Socials determined the government’s policies. The women politicized the budgetary decisions and by the same token questioned the organization of state income and expenditures. “G.P.” probably refers to the initials of Gabriele Proft (1879–1971), longtime Central Secretary of the women’s organization of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. She entered the Vienna Municipal Council in 1918 and was a member of the Constituent National Assembly from 1919 and of the National Council from 1920 to 1934. Two years after the stock market crash of 1929, she reports on the budget debates in the National Council in the journal for Social Democratic women. Everywhere we go we hear complaints about the state of business, stagnation of the market, bankruptcies, and closure of businesses and shops. The crisis! Businessmen demand tax relief, factory owners demand cuts to “social burdens,” agriculture demands help from the state. Variations on the same theme naturally come up during the weeks of negotiations over the federal budget in the budget committee. And rightly so, to some degree. But has the crisis only affected trade and transport, industry, factories, property owners, and farmers? Has it not also affected those that no one talks about, the workers, the low-level employees, those at the bottom of the ladder? Them most of all! For it is from them that we are trying to withhold wages, save on welfare costs. They are made to pay more taxes, so that the system of direct taxation can be dismantled, so that agriculture can get the help it needs. The industrial and rural proletariat has only one advocate: the Social Democratic Party. Comrades of both sexes have also advocated for the particular demands of women. To make it clear from the outset: The answer was always “no!” It is one of our government’s great sins that it failed to ratify the Maternity Protection Convention, 1919, which would have guaranteed support for pregnant workers and protected their jobs after they give birth. Germany did so more than two years ago. And this year our minister of social affairs gave another “no.” Access for all women to health insurance, which has so far been denied them? No. Enrollment of house maids in unemployment benefits? No. Equal support for unemployed women? No. Continued support for unemployed youth? No. Reason? The crisis. In times of crisis, everyone should be protected, but we are still taking from working people, especially from women and children. The latest resolution of the Industrial District Commission of Vienna is appalling. Beginning on March 1, all emergency support payments for men are to be reduced by 10 percent. But for women—20 percent!! Why? Because they need less, replies the minister for social affairs. But their contribution is not in any way reduced. They will still be robbed as a matter of right. The young jobless will no longer

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get twenty-four or forty-eight weeks of support, but now only twelve weeks. Why? The crisis. But didn’t we just have to start an entirely new program because our youth are suffering so intensely from lack of employment? “Youth in Dire Straits,” we read in every newspaper. Collections were taken up, centers opened, soup and bread distributed, a bit of warmth given out. This bodily and morally suffering youth will now have their unemployment support taken from them after only twelve weeks. Is such a thing even possible to understand? A Christian Social speaker addressed the matter. He said the budget should include something for the desperate young people. “The girls should stay at home, sewing and mending, getting ready for their vocation as wives. But for the boys, we need to come up with something.” The minister declined. Women and girls, take note. A woman from the Social Democrats asked him how the girls should work at home, in a house where everything had long been sold or repurposed. The boys also have to pay their contribution to social security. Give them what is theirs by right, and they won’t have to go begging. Then the young generation won’t have to accept so much “charity,” if we recognize their hard-earned rights. And the girls? Do you think that they don’t make any contribution to social security? But when they come looking for support, they get sent home to get ready for their wifely duties. One day that girl will probably be the wife of an unemployed man, and that requires a very specific kind of job training. A preparation that is unfortunately only too important in our capitalist society. [. . .] In other important domains, for example agriculture, trade, and finance, the female members of the budget committee represented the interests of the buying public and of the cooperative societies. As always, our male comrades support us in representing the advancement of women in firm solidarity.

6. Anonymous In the Sign of Austerity. Meeting of the Vienna Municipal Council First published as “Im Zeichen der Sparsamkeit: Sitzung des Wiener Gemeinderates,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, June 13, 1931, 5. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. The pressure on the city government of Vienna from the federal government to institute austerity measures in the state and city budgets grew over the course of the crisis. At the same time the effects of the crisis were making themselves felt in the city’s finances in the form of falling tax revenue. While the federal government pursued a course of austerity, Vienna persisted with its infrastructure projects. In particular the investments in the domain of housing were supposed to continue. Continued construction was, in addition to a measure against housing shortages, a comprehensive job creation measure. A radical change only became possible after the 1934 arrest of the Social Democratic city government and the takeover of the city administration by Richard Schmitz, a representative of Austrofascism. In a busy session yesterday, the Vienna Municipal Council agreed to a series of proposals in keeping with the imperative to save during a time of financial crisis. However, at the same time they also endorsed further spending for job-creating initiatives, primarily the construction of new housing. The Municipal Council endorsed without debate the new construction of streets near the Quellenstrasse housing units in the Favoriten District, the new construction of canals

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in the districts of Hietzing and Brigittenau, the purchase of a plot in Ottakring, as well as land swaps with the federal government. Vice Mayor Emmerling spoke about cutting the cost of streetcars by putting on hold new acquisitions, because of the city transit corporation’s finances. City Councillor Tandler reported on the cancellation of contracts with hospitals. The city had contracts with the hospitals Alland, Weidlingau, Strengberg and Grimmenstein which obliged it to pay for the contractually obligated beds when they are unoccupied. In a time of cutbacks, the city can no longer afford to do so. The cancellation should not be taken to mean that the city is in any way itself unoccupied with the matter of hospitals, however. Objections from the Christian Socials Motzko and Arnold were addressed in Tandler’s closing statement: We must find ways to save in every nook and cranny, and I am fighting for every last penny because I know at least as well as you do how bad it is. No one will believe that we are taking any pleasure from making these cuts. There can be no talk of cutting back on tuberculosis care. In 1930 we had 1,392 beds in tuberculosis wards; in 1931 we have 1,432. This includes the 100 beds we built in just one tuberculosis pavilion in Lainz. Here, too, we are working as hard as possible. City Councillor Weber reports on the construction of the laundry and baths and of two houses in Brigittenau, designed by the architect Rudolf Perco. The cost is estimated at 1.62 million schillings. According to the design, it will contain thirty-five new apartments.

7. Otto Bauer The Budget Restructuring Law: A Speech given on October 9, 1931 by Dr. Otto Bauer before the Delegates of the Postal Union First published as Das Budgetsanierungsgesetz: Vortrag, gehalten am 9. Oktober 1931 von Dr. Otto Bauer vor den Vertrauensmännern der Postgewerkschaft (Vienna: Verlag der Postgewerkschaft, 1931), 2–16. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. After the collapse of the Creditanstalt, representatives of the federal government traveled to Geneva in 1931 to negotiate the conditions of new loans from the League of Nations. Chancellor Karl Buresch subsequently made a proposal to the Parliament for a new restructuring law, which called for hefty spending cuts in the federal budget. After their experience with inflation, the SDAP acted on the premise that maintaining a stable currency value through a balanced budget was a necessity. There was, however, a debate as to “where there should be cuts and how they should be implemented.”12 In this speech before some of the affected civil servants, Otto Bauer justified why the Social Democrats supported the restructuring law of 1931. How the city of Vienna is run. To understand our position, I must remind you what we have done in the city of Vienna and in the other municipalities where we have governed. You know that the cities are in just as bad a position as the state. That much is obvious. When the economy gets knocked 12 Bauer,

Das Budgetsanierungsgesetz, 7.

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down, then the operations of the cities feel it too. The worker who is employed rides every day in the streetcar. The unemployed worker does not. That means that every bit that the unemployment rate goes up is also a hit to the streetcar’s budget. And it is just the same way in every branch of city services. For example, the electric works. When factories shut down, then they don’t need any electricity, and the electric works record less revenue. This is how the communities we govern got into difficulties. The city of Vienna is approaching a crisis, after a reduction in revenue that necessitates a cut in spending by ninety-eight million schillings. The other cities governed by Social Democrats are in a similar spot. And what have we done? First of all, we have saved, saved where we could. But that approach has its limits. We have made appreciable savings. We could have saved ninetyeight million schillings on material expenditures alone if the city of Vienna had simply decided not to pay anyone’s wages. I am thinking of the ninety-eight million schillings the city spends on housing construction. We could have said that we were suspending all construction, so we don’t need any manpower. But that would have left us with another ten thousand unemployed, condemned to bitter poverty, it would mean further constraints on the production of consumer goods, which would mean a further loss of tax revenue. That must not be allowed to happen, as you will agree, and so the city of Vienna was compelled to turn to its workers and say, “negotiate with us, we have no wish to dictate!” [. . .] We Social Democrats do not dispute the need to balance the government’s budget if we want to avoid another period of inflation. [. . .] We have previously demanded that the rich pay more and that unproductive spending be cut, so that the number of victims of the federal policies be as small as possible, so that it is smaller than the government has suggested. We will not support savings taken from productive spending, such that we build fewer roads, etc. That we cannot support, because to do so would mean creating more joblessness. The struggle in Parliament. The struggle began in Parliament, and it gave rise to a chaos in Parliament such as I have never seen in my twenty-five years in the legislature. In the famous night from Friday to Saturday, the situation was as follows. The scene is the chamber of the finance committee, a meeting room larger than the one in which we find ourselves today, with a long, horseshoe-shaped table in the middle. At this table sit the members of the finance committee and the members of the government and around them nearly every member of Parliament sits listening. The government has lost majority support for its restructuring law, and the Christian Socials no longer agree among themselves. But most of all the Christian Socials are no longer in agreement with their usual coalition partners, the Pan-German People’s Party [Großdeutsche Volkspartei, GdP]. The GdP pass themselves off as the defender of civil servants, by which they mean section chiefs and court councillors. (Laughter) They oppose the restructuring, and the pan-German high school teacher [Hermann] Foppa [1882–1959], their spokesman in this conflict, claimed with great passion that the GdP could never support the measure. On the other hand, a government could be formed from a coalition of the Christian Socials with the Rural League.13 But they had neither 13 After the dissolution of the coalition between the Social Democrats and the Christian Socials in 1920, the Christian Social Party formed a coalition with the Pan-German People’s Party (until 1932) and the Rural League (Landbund, 1927–1934), a pan-German and anti-Semitic farmers’ party.

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the GdP nor the Heimatblock,14 and they did not have us either. Herr Buresch negotiates. He negotiates with the GdP, he negotiates with the Heimatblock, all of which results in ever new constellations. When evening came it seemed that the government would win a majority made up of Christian Socials, the Rural League, and the Heimatblock. The members of the Heimatblock were prepared to vote for the government’s proposal. They demanded only a single condition, namely, that Starhemberg resume the post of minister of the interior.15 Doktor Buresch could not agree to that, although he really has no qualms about working with undesirable people. If he had, the schilling would have ceased to exist the following day. And so, after it had seemed for a few seconds that Herr Buresch would come to terms with the Heimatblock, the whole thing collapsed. Then he tried again with the GdP, but nothing came out of that. Around midnight it looked as though the Parliament would not come to an agreement and the government would have to resign. At around this time the news came from outside, the news that the foreign stock exchanges were cutting out the schilling. This was true of almost every exchange. Schilling notes were no long being accepted. Now the representatives of the savings banks [Sparkassen] came to the Parliament; naturally they felt threatened by a possible currency collapse. They warned the members of every party: “We call your attention to what is happening among the population.” We were given police reports from the bucket shop exchanges of Leopoldstadt. This was the situation: if nothing were settled by Saturday morning, if the Parliament failed in its task of balancing the federal budget, if the world had seen that the Austrian Parliament was not in a position to balance its budget, then I say to you that the catastrophe that would have hit the schilling that Saturday morning would have been inevitable. And that is why we decided to negotiate.

8. Anonymous The Financial Demands on Vienna First published as “Die finanziellen Forderungen an Wien,” Die Frau 42, no. 10 (October 1933): 7. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. A recurring theme for Social Democrats was the financial pressure from the federal government, which opposed Red Vienna’s fiscal policies. The economic and political crisis enabled the argument for strengthened cost-saving and “cost-sharing” measures. The government also sought to undo the fiscal independence achieved by the city through the separation from Lower Austria through the frequent revision to the taxation distribution law, which stipulated the division of tax revenue between the federal and state governments. Such revisions were fast-tracked after the suspension of parliamentary democracy in March of 1933, when it became possible to rule through emergency declarations and decrees that bypassed democratic decision-making processes. In June 1933 the Arbeiter-Zeitung wrote: “The government has 14

The Heimatblock was a political party in the First Republic and the political wing of the Heimwehr. 15 Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg (1899–1956) became leader of the armed paramilitary Heimwehr in 1930 and served from 1933 to 1936 as vice-chancellor and head of the Fatherland Front (Vaterländische Front), which functioned as an Austrofascist unity party.

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issued a new order ‘based on’ the martial economy authorization act (Kriegswirtschaftliches Ermächtigungsgesetz) [.  .  .]: by government order, the income of the city of Vienna was slashed by twenty-two million schillings with the stroke of a pen.”16 The Austrian government has declared that the city of Vienna has an annual so-called “cost-sharing” payment of thirty-six million schillings to pay for 1933 and 1934. What the purpose of this payment could be, that was announced in the “Wiener Zeitung”: for bank restructuring and for the deficit in the national railway. The “cost-equalizing” measure therefore consists in having the Christian Social regions pay nothing for the banks and the trains, while the red city simply pays for it all. What the working people of Vienna have to say about the matter has been heard in the Vienna State Assembly and at dozens of public demonstrations: the continued construction of homes and care for children and the elderly are being threatened! And thirtysix million schillings a year—that comes to twenty schillings per person per year! Only a few days had passed before yet another cut to the city’s revenue was made: the tax on foodstuffs, drinks, and tobacco was lifted. That means a loss of seven million schillings per year for the city of Vienna. Just as we saw with the “cost-equalizing” measures, when the other regions paid nothing for bank restructuring or to cover the railway’s deficit, once again the residents of places with bourgeois government keep levying the tax on foodstuffs, drinks, and tobacco, while in Vienna it has been lifted. Shall the fight against Red Vienna continue like this? The best answer comes from the Social Democratic call for the convocation of the National Council: “1,216,327 men and women have demanded that our freedoms, that the civil rights of workers, that the rights of our Red Vienna and our other communities not be decided by the federal government alone, but by the freely elected representatives of the people.”

16

Anonymous, “Die Regierung nimmt der Gemeinde 22 Millionen!,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, April 14, 1933, 2.

Austrian Research Center for Economic Psychology (Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle): “We Have Researched,” ca. 1934. (Courtesy: Archiv für die Geschichte der Soziologie in Österreich, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz.)

CHAPTER THREE

CONSUMPTION AND ENTERTAINMENT Marie-Noëlle Yazdanpanah

F

ood, clothes, media, and tourism—the

Austrian Research Center for Economic Psychology (Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle) (1931– 1935/37) surveyed consumers about their preferences, their purchasing behavior, and the effectiveness of advertising. Its clients included Austrian and foreign companies such as the grocery chain Julius Meinl and the Budapest Tourism Bureau. Among the organisation’s staff were Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda, and Hans Zeisel. Most of the center’s staff had Social Democratic leanings and worked on projects for Red Vienna—for example, for the Career Counseling Office of the City of Vienna and the Chamber of Labor (Berufsberatungsamt der Stadt Wien und der Arbeiterkammer). At first glance, it seems surprising that Social Democrats carried out consumer and market research for money. However, in the center’s sociological studies and in those undertaken by Käthe Leichter at the Female Labor Unit of the Chamber of Labor (Referat für Frauenarbeit der Arbeiterkammer), research and analysis of consumer behavior, everyday practices, and especially lifestyle choices were considered highly relevant.1 At the same time, many leftists rejected a popular mass culture that they saw as consumerist. Communists in particular disapproved of it for papering over the realities of class, seducing the workers and distracting them from the class struggle. But instead of suppressing (luxury) consumerism—as in the Soviet Union for example—Red Vienna sought to incorporate consumerism and entertainment into the financial basis of its reform program. After Vienna was constituted as a separate state (1922) and the governing Social Democrats gained the authority to levy their own state taxes, Hugo Breitner, the city councillor of finance, introduced direct, progressively increasing taxes according to living expenses. Taxes were imposed on land speculation, on ownership of land and housing, and on luxury goods and services: hotels, cafés, restaurants, theaters, cinemas, domestic servants, horses, dogs, and cars. The aim was for the rich to fund redistribution of wealth from the top down. However, the new taxes also affected working-class people when they visited cinemas, revue theaters, or soccer matches. This chapter focuses on the unequal opportunities for consumption and their causes, on the way advertising and opportunities for mass-culture consumerism were differentiated, and on attempts to adopt and reinterpret these concepts and opportunities for social democracy. The structure follows the various phases of economic development in 1

See, for example, Käthe Leichter, So leben wir . . . 1320 Industriearbeiterinnen berichten über ihr Leben (Vienna: Verlag Arbeit und Wirtschaft, 1932), and chapters 4 and 12 in this volume.

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Vienna—and the associated cultural development of consumerism—from 1918 to 1934: the first texts take as their theme the economic contradictions in the immediate postwar period. These were characterized, on the one hand, by the awareness that inflation, unemployment, and scarcity of food and raw materials were causing an existential crisis, and, on the other hand, by the new—and widely regarded as illegitimate—wealth of the “war profiteers.” The collapse of the currency, which had started during the war, continued accelerating rapidly until 1924. Despite food subsidies, which only drove up inflation further, the cost of living had increased by some 90 percent by the end of 1919. In addition to growing pauperization of large sections of the population, the consequences were flight of capital, the sale of factories to (often foreign) investors, the black market, and high-risk currency speculation. Those who had grown rich from war and speculation indulged in luxury consumerism and financed and frequented venues of popular culture. The “speculation kings” Camillo Castiglioni and Sigmund Bosel became synonymous with this excess: both enjoyed meteoric rises and falls; both were well-connected politically and both triggered fateful financial scandals. When literary and journalistic writers discussed the changes to society caused by the speculation boom, they generally had these two men in mind.2 Some focused on the fact that both men were Jewish, thus using them as examples for the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jewish profiteering. The working time restrictions accomplished at the national level by the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP), along with the minimum annual leave for workers of one week and the new concept of the weekend that started on Saturday afternoon, led to a growth of the culture of consumerism and free time. For the first time, these were—to varying extents—accessible to a relatively large group. Especially during the brief economic recovery from the mid-1920s to the start of the Great Depression in 1929, a new urban culture flourished. This new urban culture received and adapted to outside influences and encompassed cinema, radio, sport, fashion, tourism, and motoring as well as new gender norms. Technological innovations enabled new forms of visual design in advertising and fashion; taste and demand increasingly shaped what was available for consumption. Advertising became ever more present and was increasingly aimed at the middle and working classes: it fueled new desires and promised future participation in the coming prosperity. Revues and jazz conquered Vienna only slightly later than they had other major cities internationally, and a sterotypical image of America came to serve as an ambivalent symbol of this consumerist popular culture and the (albeit somewhat muted) mood of change. The texts in this chapter focus not just on aspects of change, innovation, and freedom (even if the crisis, especially in later years, became increasingly relevant); they also illustrate the varied attitudes among Social Democrats toward consumerism and popular culture. Further reading Breuss and Eder 2006 Gruber 1991 Hauch 1999 Mattl 2016

2

See, for example, Karl Kraus, “Metaphysik der Haifische,” Die Fackel 25, nos. 632–39 (1923): 150–58.



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1. Anton Kuh The Soda-and-Raspberry Existence First published as Anton, “Das Soda-mit-Himbeer-Dasein,” Der Morgen: Wiener Montagsblatt, July 14, 1919, 7. Translated by Paul Richards. With his laconic observations about everyday city life, Anton Kuh (1890–1941) was, somewhat like his contemporary Joseph Roth, a commentator on the social and political changes and continuities in Vienna after 1918. In his polemics, essays, and impromptu speeches, he warned against the provincialization of Vienna—of conservatism, phony moralism, and the longing for the old-fashioned middle-class idyll. Published in the arts section of a newspaper in the first summer after the war, this article is a good example of his writing style. Kuh wrote it under the pseudonym “Anton.” Raspberry-flavored soda is shown here as the consumer good that comforted the Viennese as they faced scarcity in the immediate postwar period. It stands for an attempt to cling on to the last remnants of a leisured lifestyle and urban culture. Kuh exposes this strategy as deceptive: the cheap drink symbolizes the pretense, the facade that is propped up in an economically and politically “shrunken” Vienna—against its citizens’ better judgment. For the outsider who visits big little Vienna these days, all impressions condense into a single symbol: soda and raspberry. People creep like maggots between hot-baked apartment dungeons and suck the last meager drops of juice from the city, a giant’s shrunken corpse. A handful of chemicals, it seems, is enough to prop up the picture of metropolitan life and bustle. A few milligrams of protein, carbohydrates, and phosphorus, rounded up and visible from every stomach like an X-ray, still guarantees the continuation of the tragicomedy called metropolis [Weltstadt]. A miracle of mock vegetation, a drama of blossoming wiltedness. Undernourishment wears a delicate bloom in its buttonhole. At the café tables, behind mirrors and between pots of ivy, we see the latest fashions, shepherd’s check shirts, sharp creases, all grouped around a red fizzing drink. It used to function as a suicide draught, available from weathered pink street stalls. Three kreuzer for a glass without carbonation, five Kreuzer for a glass with carbonation. A drop for the dust-dry wretched city folk, with which to wet their bacilli. Today it is the last decorative pleasure that luxury has managed to wrest from scarcity. A cooling, sickly, cellulose-colored nothing, from which the yellowed and crumpled inhabitants take a sip of “metropolitian consciousness.” Behind them: dust, rot, hunger—in front of them: in the mirror, inviting and courteous, a glass of soda and raspberry. And the remarkable thing: it really is just about this glass of soda and raspberry, as the very stuff and glory of life. What kind of contradiction would this seem otherwise, to see thousands sitting with their good clothes and their airs and graces for the afternoon concert on an isle of beggars? What kind of contradiction, that forged banknotes should demonstrate such luxuriant power?! You can take up your heavy political armaments against it in vain! For the existence that you are beholding, high on the battlements of luxury and indolence, economically and sociologically inexplicable—is a soda-and-raspberry existence. The many and countless people who are still clean shaven and cheerful, their legs crossed; they just want to sit in the shop window of life. They leech onto the straw from which they suck soda and raspberry. They do not live; they wait. Their coat, their flesh, their breath—all synthetic. The only genuine thing is the soda and raspberry in front of them. And even that consists of seltzer water and raspberry flavoring. Is there a better symbol for Vienna?

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2. Margarete Hilferding Black Market First published as Margret Hilferding, “Der Schleichhandel,” Der Kampf 12, no. 7 (1919): 300–304. Translated by Paul Richards. Toward the end of the war and in the period immediately afterward, hunger and malnourishment were virulent in Vienna. The new state and customs borders with Czechoslovakia and Hungary hampered food and fuel deliveries after the end of the war. Even within Austria, there were hardly any deliveries over regional borders. The black market and price gouging flourished. This is why, after the “Hunger Winter” of 1916/17, catastrophic undernourishment once more loomed in 1918/19 and 1919/20. This crisis was mostly alleviated by supplies from the Allies. The city administration also tried to take countermeasures, for example, by means of free school meals. In this analysis published during the time of upheaval,3 physician and individual psychologist Margarete Hilferding (1871–1942) discusses the black market (Schleichhandel) and its smaller-scale variant, foraging or stockpiling (Hamstern). She analyzes the connection between these illegal practices and the scarcity of food as well as the consequences for the economy, and she calls for countermeasures. In all countries isolated by the war from the world market, the inevitably constantly growing food scarcity has created a new form of trade in goods, the black market. In addition to the state administration of food supply that has proved incapable of taking control of all available resources and distributing them, a private food supply service has emerged. This service operates more quickly, safely, and effectively than the state. The private food supply service obtains its provisions from two groups: the stockpilers [Hamsterer, who went to the surrounding villages in the countryside to buy food] and the black marketeers. Both use the same ways and means in their “work”; both carry relatively small quantities (“backpack transport”). Their aims differ—the stockpilers are primarily concerned with their own provisions, whereas the black marketeers sell supplies to others. For one group, hoarding is a form of emergency self-help; for the other, it is a business. When I talk of black marketeers here, I also include stockpiling, because it is itself a form of black marketeering. The private food supply service has developed according to particular laws that approximate those of free trade. Initially small and hesitant, it grew beyond measure in scope and price as the hunger of the population worsened. Every reduction of a ration, every disturbance and uncertainty in food supply has driven up the prices on the black market. The rare case of an increase in the ration (e.g., the return to the full bread ration in August 1918) automatically resulted in a drop in black market prices for flour and bread. Whenever the black market is obstructed by means of bans, penalties, and legal threats or confiscations, the prices go up; whenever it is eased by means of less rigorous checks, they go down. The maximum price restrictions [of the public authorities] failed to bring prices down; in fact, they immediately became minimum prices. After every priceregulating measure imposed by the government, the goods disappeared from open trade and reappeared on the black market. The smaller the total amount of food provided by the state, the more extensive the black market. After all, the laws of supply and demand still applied. All state interventions to improve market conditions have brought about nothing 3

See also Margret Hilferding, “What does adequate nutrition cost?,” Der Kampf 13, nos. 2–3 (1920): 101–5.



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but a deterioration and have had a price-boosting effect greater even than the farmers’ and retailers’ lust for profit. On the black market we pay not only the high prices of the producers, who are not satisfied with the statutory tariffs, but also the expenses of the black marketeers, money for transport and bribes; we also pay for the professional risk taken by the black marketeers, who often put not just their capital but their liberty and life on the line. The price for the contraband includes the value of umpteen confiscated rucksacks. [. . .] There is suspicion of financial abuses at grocery distribution centers, bulk-buying societies, wartime soup kitchens, community food services, company food services, large grocery companies, and wholesale operations. These abuses can be traced back to the practice of shifting around large volumes of goods, a practice which has come to be known in Germany as a “shifting scam” (Schiebung). In Vienna’s most elegant coffee houses on the Ringstrasse as well as in the Leopoldstadt, deals in flour, sugar, rice, and coal are being closed by the wagonload even today. Authorized and unauthorized dealers, the latter often from the most elevated strata of society, share in the profits. Even the smaller quantities, those stolen from the railways and warehouses, are significant in this situation of widespread crisis. [. . .] Since the goods from the private food supply service, with the exception of the shifting scam, are only transported and sold in small quantities (backpack transport), it can be assumed that an army of workers earns their living in this distribution system. Black marketeering is therefore not only a source of food for large sections of the population that would otherwise be abandoned to hunger but also an opportunity for paid work for thousands of unemployed and partially disabled people who cannot live from handouts alone. Small grocery shops, which would have to close down if limited to selling solely the municipally allocated goods, earn money from black marketeering. A larger number of people accept bribes for expediting the transport of contraband at railway stations and regional and district borders. Regular trading brings in little money today. Black marketeering puts large, but unfortunately noncalculable sums into circulation that are not accounted for in any tax declaration and cannot be accessed easily for taxation purposes. These amounts are not just rich people’s money; the middle class and the absolute poorest join in with all their energies. For, with the complete failure of the state food supply service, which in the form of rationing barely meets a quarter of our basic physical needs, those without means are compelled to scrape their existence with the aid of the private food-supply service. Everyone uses it, either constantly or temporarily, on the basis of their own financial means. We are not able to calculate the amount of black market goods in circulation, but we can hardly go wrong in assuming that it approximates, and perhaps even exceeds, the figure for food within the official supply system. To identify this food and bring it as fully as possible into the food supply service is an urgent task of our Food Agency, only superseded in urgency by the endeavor to increase imports from the Entente [Powers, especially France, Great Britain, and the United States]. [. . .] The injustice of the fact that the wealthy have better access to food is one that we cannot eradicate for the simple reason that we are still stuck in a capitalist system. Once again here we are experiencing the tragedy of a socialization at the wrong moment. What factory downtime and shortages of coal and raw materials mean for the socialization of industry, shortage of food means for our ambition of finally socializing the food supply. If we had enough food, there would be no black market. For it is only hunger that has caused it and sustains it. We can clearly see that it is the task of our food supply service to put as much food as possible into circulation, first, to end hunger and associated ill-health suffered by broad

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swathes of society, and second, to cut the ground from under the black marketeers’ feet. At the same time, however, we must not pretend that the difficulties we face in this task are anything but virtually insurmountable. Fully accounting for all the stock available in the countryside is impossible without the cooperation of the agricultural producers and their organizations. Will the authority of the state, which in every previous period has been defeated, gain the upper hand after the harvest of 1919? But if large stocks remain in the hands of the farmers, they can take no other route than that of black marketeering, since free trade for most products has been eliminated. Even if domestic food production were controlled by the authorities, it would still not be enough to end the famine. Austrian production must be supplemented by imported goods in quantities and at prices suitable for feeding the whole population. [. . .] If we were in a position to purchase all the goods we need on the world market— which would require not only the lifting of the blockade but also transport methods and above all financial solvency—then any discussion of a crackdown on black marketeering would be irrelevant, because it would disappear without a fight. That, unfortunately, is not where we are. We have to accept that black marketeering or another supplementary means of food supply will exist, perhaps for years, alongside state-managed supply as an important factor in any attempts to feed our people.

3. Ludwig Hirschfeld The Paper Calf: Valuta Miniatures First published as “Das papierene Kalb. Valutaminiaturen,” Neue Freie Presse, October 19, 1919, 11–12. Translated by Paul Richards. Ludwig Hirschfeld (1882–1942), editor of the Neue Freie Presse, dramaturg and critic, describes the social changes brought about by the currency speculation as a rapid, feverish, and deluded descent into chaos. The “idolatry” of currency, which had become worthless, culminates for him in very different spaces: grocery shops, whose owners had become small-time speculators, and hotels, which had become the embodiment of the postwar economic misery and inflation. The hotels’ cosmopolitanism was no longer considered something positive. Instead, the British, American, Italian, and Hungarian guests lingering there, profiting from the low value of the crown, were a reminder of the lost war, the incompetence of the ruling class and the harshness of the victorious powers. In a demonstration against price increases in December 1921, widespread resentment was expressed against these spaces, and many cafés and luxury hotels in central Vienna were looted and destroyed. It would be entirely wrong to say we are dancing around the golden calf. It has been a long time since an idol of gold was within our means. We cannot even afford silver, or even nickel or copper; in fact, we are going to run out of iron soon. We have nothing but paper, paper, and more paper. That is our only surplus, and we are wallowing and reveling in it. In our rare moments of sober, calm reflection, we know full well that this is but self-deception, this cornucopia of paper, the uncannily accumulating notes, these sums and assets that merely rustle, but have no weight, no power. We know it is all comfortless and meaningless. But still the dance goes on. The ancient dance of humanity around the paper calf, collaged together from banknotes, pensions, and other allegedly valuable papers. This dance



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has never been danced so ecstatically, with such grotesque figures and contortions; never has the idol money been adored so desperately. Sometimes it seems as if there are only two words you hear in this city any more: krone, in combination with a number that declines day by day, and above all valuta [the exchange value of a currency]. It’s a magic word, dominating all thought and feeling, all passions, plans, and relationships. All of Viennese life now plays out under the sign of valuta. Devaluation, crash: these have become everyday, almost trusted terms that everyone counts on and many speculate with. In this paper chaos, two contradictory phenomena may be observed: the compulsion to get hold of as many kronen as possible and the anxious endeavor to get rid of them again as quickly as possible. We worship money and we fear it. It’s quite possible that Babylon was a more orderly business environment than this Valutaville on the banks of the blue, paper money Danube, this city that has lost all resemblance to its former self. To observe Viennese life and Viennese people today is to recognize that it is not merely the krone that has been devalued but human beings themselves, and that everyday life has reached an alarming nadir. In the hotel lobby. People also call it the “rail yard” because so many trucks are “shunted” here. It once was a first-rate exclusive hotel; now it’s something between a bucket shop and a racketeers’ cafe. You cannot even describe its patrons as a mixed clientele, since the figures crowding in the foyer and the lobby are pretty much all of one type and they are all here to pursue the same goal: to do business; if absolutely necessary, even legitimate and clean business. They conduct their transactions outside of any office, far from any ledger and cash book, and although they are anything but officer material, they have one quirk in common with [General] Wallenstein: in general, they never put anything in writing. You can see curious groups here: questionably dapper, newly minted gentlemen in cozy fellowship with incorrectly dressed types who seem to reject grooming as a matter of principle. Someone you know for sure to have been only recently a shady salesman or buyer makes a proud and refined entrance here, every inch a racketeer. You hear every imaginable language and accent here: most often Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Italian, but also French and sometimes even German, although never perfect German. You can get anything in this hotel lobby: food, boys’ clothes, antiques, or galoshes, but only by the truckload. The most popular commodity, however, is foreign currency. It is what everything revolves around here. You can literally see the fluctuations in the krone, the mark, and the lira, and there are significant price differentials between one end of the lobby and the other. People here continuously smoke expensive cigarettes, drink real coffee, send telegrams, place long-distance phone calls, and tip waiters. Money is no object here: after all, it is just kronen. And you can count yourself lucky if you leave this valuta hotel without incriminating yourself somehow. The valuta grocer. It does not matter if it is a big delicatessen or a little corner shop. It is the same everywhere. These days, not even the smallest grocer is satisfied with making his normal petty bourgeois income through buying and selling. He too is under the spell of valuta, the krone exchange rate, and he joins in the speculation in his own primitive but profitable way. The whole shop is full of foreign produce: French and Swiss chocolate, Italian sausages, American canned goods, Portuguese sardines, Polish schnapps. All these goods are sold at market price, which only goes up day after day. It’s a stock exchange in miniature, with the prices dictated by the simple-looking man with the red hands and a white apron. A few years ago, no doubt, he did not even know the meaning of the word valuta. Now he knows exactly, because every morning he notes the various foreign exchange rates and currencies. And then he goes to his shelves and starts recalculating, and then a kilo of chocolate, which yesterday you could still get for 80 kronen, costs 120 kronen, and even the sardines, dumb fish that they unfortunately are, cannot protest that they are suddenly

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twice the price. And when the customers find the courage to express their surprise or even indignation, they quickly get the answer that the krone is falling at the Zurich stock market and that the prices are already ridiculously low and in fact are out of date. Will the times ever return when the Viennese grocer knew nothing of Zurich or valuta? [. . .] How long will this dance go on? How long will we continue to circle around the paper calf in senseless stupor? [.  .  .] Declining daily, the krone exchange rate has long since ceased to be any real standard, since ultimately for any country there is only one true valuta: that of work—of output, of production. Admittedly, in Austria this valuta is also in a wretched state. We are producing nothing but paper and more paper, and when it is a particularly big piece of paper it is called the financial plan. It is no longer even possible to imagine how this can continue, what this winter will look like. What other horrors could be in store? We will freeze and starve in the dark; the krone will continue to fall. But however bitter and harsh this valuta winter becomes, we can say with comforting certainty: the krone cannot fall below zero.

4. Julius Klinger The Holy Every Day First published as “The Holy Every Day,” in Poster Art in Vienna (Chicago: Julius Wisotzki, 1923), 6–7. Julius Klinger’s (1876–1942) polemical text on modern poster art is a provocative statement in favor of “democratic consumption” and a “humane capitalism.” Recalling the manifestos of the Dadaists, he declares the artistic design of everyday life as his highest objective and optimistically and ecstatically celebrates mass culture as the basis of advertising. Klinger, one of the most influential poster artists and commercial illustrators of the German-speaking world, saw advertising as “everyday art.” America, for many in the 1920s a symbol of urban, democratic mass culture and of modernity, acts as a role model here: Charlie Chaplin, Karl Kraus, and Charles Martin4 become “gods” and film, fashion, and socially critical literature are declared to be equally worthy as sources for advertising. “The Holy Every Day” was published in a pattern book for functionalist advertising design that presented, in addition to works by Klinger, images by Hermann Kosel and other illustrators. It was intended for the English-speaking market, and made the Viennese group of advertising illustrators around Klinger internationally famous. We reproductionists love that Every Day on which our sober work celebrates fantastic feasts. On holidays the prearranged thoughts of those who work without fire paralyse us. We leave it to them to amuse themselves and seek for the so-called beauty. Our working-day penetrates everything living, but the dead appear to us only as spent life.

4 Charles

Martin (1884–1934): French painter, illustrator and designer, who also worked for magazines and the theater.



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The hum of the rotating machine rouses us to a state of ecstasy, although we feel that in its rolling cylinder human folly is flattened out. Our Gods are: Charlie Chaplin, Karl Kraus and Charles Martin. Charlie Chaplin because from Hollywood he can make the solemn Chinese laugh. Kraus because in this city by the skill of his words he has set down imperishably for coming generations the plain truth of our times and the Parisian Charles Martin because by his delicate line he has been able to influence America’s fashion. But we welcome also gay butterflies, nightingales, sunsets and barock-fountains. Only it disturbs us to have to share these delights with those who find straight avenues, overland wires and stately cupboards quite ordinary. A painter engaged in depicting Nature arouses our silent laughter. Every evening we go to a cinema in which no pompous Berlin film is to be seen. But when a Prevost or Daniels is shown we do not hesitate to go to a suburban movie.5 We esteem individuality, personality, and even names, when we recognize them in works which belong to all and everybody. But the advertisement heroes of art publishers are more than hated by us, they are indifferent to us. The backs of our sober designs are smeared all over with paste, but on their fronts, we build up our world picture with maddening conscientiousness, just as if it were a question of preserving our work for all time. In order to be able to picture a razor blade indelibly we steep ourselves in the mysteries of paleolithic art. We hate militarism; we are enthusiastic for self-control and discipline. The power of our day is Money. We see no reason why we should scorn this fact hypocritically. In Capitalism we see the creative power, in Money the creative universal means. We consider as a towering symbol of the capitalistic supremacy a well-planned skyscraper which protects the work of ten thousand happy people. Our native land, the soil on which we were born and to which we belong body and soul, is the World City. And yet we also hear the brooklet babbling. VIENNA. September 1923

5. György Bálint Jazz Band First published in German as Georg Balint, “Jazz-Band,” Kunst und Volk: Mitteilungen des Vereines “Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle” 3, no. 6 (February 1929): 156. Trans. P. Richards. The characterization of jazz as the epitome of a popular culture in the 1920s that was “American,” modern, urban and at the same time wild and chaotic, is central to this poem by György Bálint (1906–1943). It imitates the driving pulse of jazz rhythms and borrows motifs and aspects of style from expressionism. Jazz, dance, and excess, it seems to say, are not enough to let the crisis be forgotten. The poem was published simultaneously in Hungarian 5

Klinger is probably referring to the Hollywood actresses Marie Prevost (1898–1937) and Bebe Daniels (1901–1971), who were popular in the 1920s.

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and German. The Hungarian original “Jazz-band a Szilveszter éjszakában” (“Jazz Band on New Year’s Eve”) was published by “Pesti Napló,” a bourgeois-liberal newspaper that printed texts by writers critical of the Horthy regime. György Bálint—a writer, commentator, and English translator as well as Communist Party activist—wrote for publications including the Arbeiter-Zeitung of Vienna, the Frankfurter Volksstimme, and Pester Lloyd. He also worked as Budapest correspondent for English-language media. The following is based on the German language version of the poem, translated by journalist Stefan I. Klein. Jazz Band Brother, now the jazz is playing and won’t let you sleep in your camp, now the saxophone is roaring like a lion in heat, now your blood and your muscles and your torments and your stolen hope wrap themselves in champagne and vibrating dance and in soft silk on the women’s breasts: Brother, now the jazz is playing now the colored glass cones are chiming, and scented rays creep like cats and the moon drowns in the morning behind the mountains; Brother, now the jazz is playing and the night worker pours uncounted gold onto the table of his frock-coated master, whom he doesn’t even know, now the saxophone is roaring, and the dance glides over into the empty, silent, black abysses, and an underfed nag’s four legs stretching toward the heavens cast crooked shadows on the radiant table cloths; Brother, now the jazz is playing and your stomach rumbles: soon it will be morning, this world is the best of all worlds, and in an hour some zealous young men, anxious not to be too late, will already wish the Lord a Happy New Year.



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6. Neon Revue First published as “Revue,” Kunst und Volk: Mitteilungen des Vereines “Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle” 3, no. 6 (1929): 153–55. Translated by Paul Richards. Edited by David Josef Bach, the mission of the magazine Kunst und Volk was the repositioning of culture for the workers’ movement. For example, whereas Else Reventlow wrote of “mass culture as problem,”6 the journalist Robert Ehrenzweig (1904–1984), who also published under the pen name “Neon,”7 saw the phenomenon of the revue as an expression of the zeitgeist. Alongside cinema, the revue was an entertainment medium that could grasp the tempo, simultaneity, and contradictions of modern life. Ehrenzweig rejected the critique of popular culture as a means of illusion and distraction. Quite the reverse, he argues, a revue does not have to be a decorative bourgeois spectacle; it has the potential for political satire. In several articles in Kunst und Volk he formulates the ways in which the medium’s qualities of spectacle and humor could be used in the class struggle. Ehrenzweig was cofounder and member of the writers’ and actors’ collective Political Cabaret (Politisches Kabarett), an initiative of the Socialist Performance Group (Sozialistische Veranstaltungsgruppe, founded in 1926 by university and high school students), which performed thirteen shows, including several revues, between 1926 and 1933. The bank director rides in his new six-cylinder along Kärntner Street. Illuminated signs glare in the Leuna plant. “Attention! Brown vapors are dangerous!,” “Attention! Green vapors are dangerous!,” “Attention! Red vapors mean death!” On the Dachstein mountain, two skiers freeze to death just five minutes from the mountain shelter in the icy winter night. In the holy mosques of Calcutta, electric fans rotate. F.A.C. beats Hertha 5:0 (2:0) after an intense [soccer] match. A trade union congress is opened. Hundreds of thousands of children work up to twelve hours a day in the factories of Shanghai. At the same time, a film in the cinemas of Vienna shows the suffering endured by the young bodies. A lad kisses a girl. Columns of workers march strictly in line with thundering footsteps. Jazz whips up the blood. The flames of the neon signs burn in the streets. Hindenburg speaks on the radio. Be beautiful with Elida.8 The revue is the very stuff of our age. The revue offers the opportunity to reproduce the essence of this age in its external forms. Breathless haste. Tempo and sensation. Eroticism and advertising. Jazz and humor. Sentimentality and cynicism. High spirits, ecstasy, illusion, satire—time is pearls on a string. The cinema is suitable for capturing the tempo and variety of the maelstrom of events in our time. On the stage, it is the revue in which scene chases scene, location chases location, time chases time, mood chases mood, in the intoxicating rhythm, the nerve-numbing, nerve-soothing dynamic that our blood loves. This revue has only been enabled

6

Else Reventlow, “Massenkultur als Problem,” Kunst und Volk: Mitteilungen des Vereines “Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle” 2, no. 3 (1927): 12–14. Reventlow (1897–1984) was a Social Democrat and feminist. 7 Another pseudonym, Robert Lucas, became Ehrenzweig’s offical name in 1947. 8 “Be Beautiful with Elida” (“Sei schön durch Elida”) was the slogan on a popular contemporary advertising poster for cosmetics.

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by the development of stagecraft technique. Its dependence on a revolving stage, light effects, film etc. is the dependence of any artform on its material. Today, the revue is not yet an accomplishment. It is a potential. The revue’s truly artistic forms of expression are yet to be found. The revue is not a state of mind. It is not inherently bourgeois, nor socialist—just as expressionism, the “New Objectivity,” modernist architecture are neither bourgeois nor socialist. It can be harmlessly bourgeois: the theater of illusion. Or its spirit, its flames, can spring from a will to political change: political satire. If the revue stays within bourgeois confines, its most essential devices are the colorful display of splendor, naked legs, erotic titillation. But its wit is constricted within its narrow framework [of topics and forms and expression]. Either it moves to the deep, deadly boring paths of already hoary Jewish jokes about Jews or drunks or it becomes wittily aesthetic; in which case, only the small circle of coffee house literati and their relatives understand it. If the humor is to be meaningful, to become a satire on society, it needs to break out of the bourgeois structure. Since, however, the bourgeois revue is unwilling to get on the wrong side of any part of its audience and, at the same time, to entirely give up the piquancy of the topical political joke, here and there it sticks a political flower on its bright dress, dancing a cute tightrope walk between right and left. This bourgeois revue, in which everything ends so happily, is dangerous for the proletariat. It gives the workers the illusion that things are not that bad after all. If there are material worries, they are quickly and painlessly remedied, either with a lottery win or a stinking rich prince, who might also be a successful speculator from [the City of] Olomouc. And all the women are so beautiful and young and all the men so dapper and such good lovers—what space is there in this pink world of contentment for the red class struggle? Certainly, the soporific lulling and the mental enfeeblement of the thinking mind is dangerous, but what puritanism can be so brutal as to deny those weighed down by work and care an escape into a happier unreality, even if only for three hours, even only for flirting and frippery, for the showgirls and garlands of the stage? We need the theater of illusion too; life is intense and bitter enough for us to need the dream ripped from us, to feel that the happy ending is followed by the unhappy sequel. Originally, the revue was strongly political in color. The old French shows commented wittily on political matters big and small. This satire, borne by one or two characters wandering through the motley scenes, was the essence and the value, the meaning and the reason for the show. Gradually, especially under the influence of America and the tourist trade, humor has been pushed out to make way for the grandiosely kitschy stage design, the visual spectacle. Offensiveness has given way to nudity, the baring of the mind to that of the body, political stimulation to erotic stimulation. However, in recent years a turn toward the better has emerged, which will perhaps lead to a happy synthesis. After all, the naked girls have become so boring. The mindlessness of the show has become too much even for the mindlessness of the audience. For example, the theaters have tried to bring revues half-way up to a respectable standard; instead of the “big revue” there was the “small revue,” with fewer girls and a bit more intellect. Political agitation and satire offer inexhaustible possibilities for the revue. Here, contradictions can clash with each other with shocking directness. Here, out of the mad rush of impressions, from photography and grotesque distortions of reality, a meaning can crystallize that smashes and unifies these contradictions. The revue is the theater of the times; it demands to deal with political raw material. “The Last Days of Mankind” [Karl Kraus], “Hoppla, We’re Alive!” [Ernst Toller] and the Viennese “Political Cabaret” point the way toward what that should look like.



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7. Anonymous Dance around the World: The GÖC Revue First published as “Tanz um die Welt. Die ‘GÖC’ Revue,” Der Kuckuck, December 8, 1929, 5. Translated by Paul Richards. The Social Democratic Bulk-Buying Society of Austrian Consumer Associations (Großeinkaufs­ gesell­schaft österreichischer Consumvereine, GÖC) advertised to consumers with films, product exhibitions, posters and, after 1929, a “propaganda stage.”9 The aim was to persuade them to buy GÖC products without—as in capitalist advertising—luring them into living beyond their financial means. The GÖC promoted organized consumerism, strictly calculated according to demand. But the pleasurable aspects of shopping were not entirely eliminated: “Tanz um die Welt” (“Dance around the world”), the advanced revue advertising GÖC’s own-brand products, combined consumerism and contemporary popular culture. It staged a cultural cornucopia of colonialist exoticism, desire, and eroticism as inducements to consume, using dance, play, and movement as means of freedom and self-actualization. And it was successful: In 1929, highly praised by advertising experts, the revue toured Vienna and the Austrian provinces, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia and Germany, and was performed more than 100 times. In 1930 it was followed by the revue “Flieg mit mir durch Österreich!” (“Fly with me through Austria!”). A fortuitous idea to combine the pleasurable with the useful led to the GÖC Revue, which is now celebrating its fiftieth performance and will be put on daily in various Austrian cities until well into the spring. The proof of the idea’s success can be seen in the sold-out performances and the tumultuous applause that have greeted this revue. Funny gags take the audience to wherever in the world there are goods that are shipped to the consumer via the GÖC. In true revue style we are taken, dancing, on a journey to the coffee plantations of Brazil, where the negresses, who naturally are also good dancers, persuade us that GÖC coffee is the best. The famous recurring theme—which every revue must have—takes us to a circus of wonders, which as we near Christmas is very topical; the living toys, naturally from the GÖC department store, perform comical acts. The next tableau takes us to a puppet theater that elicits delighted laughter from the children, although even the jokes have the very serious underlying message that it is best to shop for your everyday needs at the distribution centers of the GÖC. We also enter the realm of bubbles, home to some genuine Viennese laundresses who might even be able to wash the Brazilian negresses white with the GÖC soap, since naturally the world travelers savored not only the Brazilian coffee but also the negresses who served it up. Naturally it’s a given that they accompanied the world travelers, which prompts more funny scenes. In between, dresses and coats come to life and wander as lovable mannequins across the stage, prompting incandescent delight from the female audience members as soon as their relatively low prices are revealed. There is also a scary murder ballad to see. Eerie figures with dark lanterns and break-in tools creep onto the stage to force open the iron cash box, painted very skillfully on the backdrop, and it is only thanks to the lucky chance that a watchful employee has the flawlessly functioning GÖC matches with him that the thief can be caught. The next tableau, based on the artistic poster by the architect George Karau, offers the opportunity to artistically exalt the GÖC matches with a flame dance splendidly performed by Maria Lenz. And there 9 See

GÖC, Bericht für das Geschäftsjahr 1929 (Vienna, 1930), 67–70.

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is much more dancing besides, as one should expect from a revue. Beautiful showgirls personify the GÖC own-brand products in artistically created masks, while funny gags ensure that the tea, egg noodles, and other famous GÖC packages keep the audience in high spirits with their agile dancing legs. To ensure that the cup of enjoyment is always full, the popular dancer Gisa Geert performs the wedding dance in most shows. A serious matter has draped itself in the color and hilarity of the revue, and its success demonstrates that this was a sound idea. After a day’s work, it is a pleasure to let the wellthought-out scenes wash over you, and you can learn more about a serious subject, consumer cooperatives, with a smile of amusement. The sets, designed by the architect Artur Berger,10 are extremely effective and the world travelers Dr. Karl Denk, Hans Gregor, and Ferry Micheler keep the audience in high spirits. It is therefore no surprise that the revue has been enthusiastically received everywhere.

8. Ernst Fischer I Am Conducting an Economic Study on Myself First published as E. F., “Ich untersuche mich volkswirtschaftlich,” in Arbeiter-Zeitung, January 6, 1931, 5. Translated by Paul Richards. In this comment piece published only a few months before the height of the economic crisis in Austria—the collapse of the Creditanstalt bank in 1931—an individual analyzes his consumer behavior. He is shocked to discover that he behaves in an economically irrational way, failing to support the global economy and prioritizing “luxuries” (cigarettes, alcohol, cinema, café) over “nourishing foodstuffs,” even in a crisis. Linking consumption to entertainment and asserting an individual’s demand for excess constituted in a culture of consumerism, the text, written in a parodic style, notes that even working-class people prioritize their wants over their needs. At the same time, it is an ironic critique of the functioning of the global economy and its dominance over human beings. Signed “E.F.,” the article was probably written by the socialist and writer Ernst Fischer (1899–1972). I, a consumer, and therefore diligently registered in statistical reference books but so well hidden within gigantic numbers that even my best friend could not find me; I, a person for whom grain is cultivated, coal mined, electricity generated; for whom factories work, steamers cross the ocean, industrialists rack their brains; for whom clothes, shoes, cigarettes are produced, customs treaties signed, and rational machines invented; I have decided to carry out an economic study on myself. I start by mentioning that while I have read a few relevant books, I do not know much about economics, and thus one could with justice call me an ignoramus; it is just that I can see that the global economy is in no way functioning, and I wonder if I as a consumer am doing my bit, whether I am behaving correctly. Now: I have come to the highly somber, the truly disturbing, conclusion that I am not living my life as a rationalized component of the economy should live. I will start with the most serious offense: for a long time I was unaware what I should be living on, how I should pay for my dinner and my basic needs; at that time I was able to observe how one should behave as a consumer in a crisis. In brief: completely 10 Art(h)ur

Berger (1892–1981), film production designer and architect, also directed the election campaign film Die vom 17er Haus (1932) for the Social Democrats.



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incorrectly. The economy could have justifiably assumed that I would first give up luxuries, superfluous expenses—but the economy had me all wrong. I first cut back on the absolute necessities, and even when I could not afford a meal I had enough for cigarettes and, I am ashamed to admit, sometimes also for alcohol. I often had the choice between these destructive poisons and nourishing foodstuffs—I chose the destructive poisons. But if I miraculously had some money in my pocket, I felt the urge neither to pay off my debts nor to buy shoes; instead, I found myself lured by the coffee houses and the cinemas; never had I craved entertainment more than in those worst of times. The global economy has produced useful things for me in vain, and if you had told me: “Your duty as a human being and a consumer is principally to feed yourself properly and therefore to rid yourself of your vices!,” I would have rejected such advice unambiguously. I noted similar traits in myself at times when I was better off; my wants grow faster than my earnings; my living standard (that is what it’s called, isn’t it?) has a tendency to make itself independent of my income; I live beyond my means, but since ultimately I cannot spend more than I earn, at the same time I live within my means; that is to say, I could spend significantly more on food and significantly less on luxuries. Unfortunately, I have no desire to do so—and the global economy must pay the price. For example, the economy produces too much grain for me, because it simultaneously produces prettier, if more superfluous, things. But it is not just in myself that I have observed such behavior; I see that [demand for] luxury [goods], or to give it a fancy name, culture, has grown everywhere. I am no moralist and am all in favor of it, but well-off people do not like it; they demand that the poor spend their groschen on bread, not cinema, tobacco, silk stockings, winter sports, and other such vices. Now, the working-class girls who have to save desperately wear pretty stockings and go skiing, but eat almost nothing, and the less money you have, the more you tend to spend it uneconomically. “When I’m hard up, I at least want to live a bit!,” said a young working-class man to me recently, and I encouraged him in this, perhaps to the detriment of a rational global economy. I cannot, however, spare the global economy the reproach that it is always putting new temptations in our way, seducing us into living beyond our means: certainly, a gramophone, a radio, an automobile, skis, everything that is pleasant and nice, is completely superfluous; but, even though statisticians take a serious look at us, we are frivolous enough to be obsessed with pleasant, nice, and superfluous things and rather neglect our primitive needs than our more complicated desires. And I bet that this year someone will once again invent something that tickles an intensive craving in us, and we will eat even less bread in order to be able to afford the new luxury. That is how it is: in a rationalized world our life has remained irrational. We do not adapt to the economy; the economy does not adapt to us; we cannot come together; something is not quite right there. In fact, nothing at all is right—that is the dubious outcome of my economic selfanalysis. For example, if I were a capitalist (though I lack any aptitude to be one), I would not care a fig for capitalism. I would leave it to the servile intellects to justify and glorify it: I would also have little interest in the long-term survival of capitalism, but I would damn well be interested in the play for power, the adventures and tribulations of my capital. I would experiment, in pursuit not of profits (what good would they do me?) but of some phantom, some illusion of power and fate, something altogether irrational. And I cannot lose the dark suspicion that many of the great capitalists are such power players, and that they are happy to leave the economy, the rational interpretation of their irrational existence, to the professors. Yes, I cannot lose the dark suspicion that it is impossible to observe the economy as completely separate from people, that psychological problems

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permeate and pervade the economy—and that is why the economy does not work. And the question is whether the economy will ultimately violate us or whether we will subjugate the economy. But I am going too far; I only wanted to examine myself for my economic fitness, and my findings are extremely disappointing. If I also fear that most people live against the economy (in the same way that the poor frog who ate no mealworms lived against Brehm11), this is the fear of an ignoramus who understands nothing.

9. Anonymous The Discovery of the Housewife First published as “Die Hausfrau wird entdeckt!,” Der Kuckuck, May 3, 1931, 10. Translated by Paul Richards. This text from the Social Democratic magazine Der Kuckuck complains about the transformation of the housewife from a producer to a consumer as a result of rationalization and automatization. It is remarkable not only in its regressive tendencies, which seem to be diametrically opposed to Social Democrats’ convictions but also, and in particular, in its reduction of working-class women to the role of housewives. In this, it was entirely in line with Social Democratic policy toward consumer cooperatives: in connection with consumer issues, working-class women were constantly treated as housewives.12 As such, they were the focus of advertising strategies, which were almost exclusively aimed at women. The aim was to discipline them and educate them to become “conscious” consumers. As organized cooperative members, they were capable of resisting the capitalist advertising industry and could contribute to changing economic structures. The latter is the only noticeable difference from the bourgeois concept of the housewife. Bourgeois gender roles were also reproduced in the advertising campaigns—for example, entertainment evenings with film, coffee, and sewing tips—as well as in the consumer cooperatives where men considerably outnumbered women both as members and in the management committees. What is this heading supposed to mean? There have always been housewives. Why do we need to discover housewives now? Well yes, there have always been housewives, but now we have a new, special housewife, and that is why she needs to be rediscovered. On the surface, the housewives of today are the same as the housewives of yesterday, and on the surface the beloved household has stayed the same as it was a hundred years ago. Goethe’s mother still seems to us today to be a housewife just like the ones we all know, and yet she was a fundamentally different type of housewife. If you stand in the homely old kitchen in the Goethe House in Frankfurt, you will immediately see how different it looks. There is a coffee roaster, because at that time you still had to roast your own coffee at home; today we buy coffee in the shop, freshly roasted every day and ready to brew. We can see the bread tin there, since in those days every housewife still had to be able to bake not just cakes but bread, and the one who baked the best bread was the best housewife. And if we travel a little further back through the centuries, we even find 11

The author here refers to the German zoologist and writer Alfred Brehm (1829–1884), whose reference book Brehms Tierleben became synonymous with popular zoology. 12 Consumer cooperatives were also described as “trade unions for housewives.”



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kitchens with equipment for brewing beer or dipping candles or tubs for boiling soap. Who has not seen the old pictures of the housewife with the maternal bonnet on her head, the wide apron and her big bundle of keys as gatekeeper of house and garden, the mistress of the house, who had command of the servants, journeymen, and laborers when the man of the house was temporarily absent or traveling cross-country on business. Only our Civil Code still recalls this housewife, who owed her obedience to the man as the head of the household and who was obliged to vouch to the man of the house for the obedience of the children and journeymen, servants, and laborers. Yes, in those days, there was still the big chest with the linen supplies, the big attic where the cloth that had been neatly woven in the winter was stored to provide the material for adults’ and children’s clothes. Fruit and vegetables were stored and throughout the house there was no quilt and no piece of linen that had not been produced by the industrious hands of the mistress and the maids. That was the housewife who still lives in the law books and who still shapes people’s ideas and indeed the ideas of women themselves to a large extent. But how does it look today? Of the many pantries of former days, only a meagre cupboard remains, perhaps a chest; that is enough for any dowry; in Germany [these days] a young woman often gets vertigo if she sees a wardrobe with three drawers. Vegetables, fruit, quilts, and beer brewing: where have the old notions gone? The machine has taken everything from the housewives, and with the machine the housewife has lost many of her tasks, especially most of her creative and genuinely productive ones, and nothing has remained but the living room and the kitchen, sometimes just a cooking niche and a shopping basket. And that is why the housewife needs to be rediscovered. The old housewife of the past is dead; she can never be brought back to life. In Russia even the kitchen is now being taken from the housewives; many new homes are being built without kitchens, and the people have to eat in the big communal kitchens, because the woman is supposed to become an industrial worker; the labor shortage is too great. And if another economic boom happens here today, we too will no longer be able to provide all industrial labor needs with men’s hands alone. And then here too the housewives will lose their saucepans—many women with full-time jobs already have to do this—and there will be nothing left but the consumer who buys and has to earn in order to buy. And this consumer “housewife” is what has been discovered. The buyer who has to spend the money to provide for the family, who needs to go out every day armed with shopping bag and purse to meet the needs of a family. This housewife is only seemingly a Cinderella. In reality she is a wonderful queen, courted by all who have something to sell, a magnificent queen for whom an uncouth court is kept: the advertising bosses, who constantly have to think of inventions to appeal to the housewives, are her courtiers. Then there is a big poster industry, a calendar industry, all set up so that women learn to find this and that indispensable. The housewives have to buy, because only then will the factory owner, the merchant sell their goods; only in this way can the housewives be recruited for the interests that are often not their own, because after all, they are only needed for buying things, whether they actually need them or not. This is the reason, the only reason, why the housewife was discovered. But we already have housewives who have discovered themselves. Housewives who do not want to be queens, who are seemingly served but who are obliged to perform services for others. The housewives who have discovered themselves; these housewives want to take their future into their own hands. That is why they are o ­ rganized, why they

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have come together as consumers and are eager, through their organized consumption, to become the directors and founders of their own factories, to develop their own economic world. These housewives are confident because they want to gain their freedom not only as citizens but also as economic actors. And as loyal cooperative members, as enthusiastic members of our consumer cooperatives, when they take up their shopping bags they are also working for their freedom and their future.

Part II Philosophies

“Joy for work,” table of the Social and Economic Museum (Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum) in Käthe Leichter, So leben wir: 1320 Industriearbeiterinnen berichten über ihr Leben (This is how we live: 1320 female industrial workers tell about their lives).

CHAPTER FOUR

EMPIRICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH Ingo Zechner

T

interpreted the world in their various ways, asserted Karl Marx in a much-cited thesis, but what really matters is to change it. Empirical social researchers in Red Vienna intended to overcome this antithesis: to change society it is necessary to understand it first. The knowledge of how things are belongs alongside the awareness that they could also be different. This demand for evidence-based policy is what creates the space for utopias that are more than mere fantasies, but it also becomes a utopia in itself when facts no longer form the basis for political decisions. At a time when sociology in Austria was not yet clearly distinguished from economics, political science, and philosophy, some of the most original contributions to its development as a discipline came not from the universities but from research institutions closely connected to three people and their circle in Red Vienna: Käthe Leichter (1895–1942), Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (1901–1976), and Marie Jahoda (1907–2001). Käthe Leichter worked from 1925 to 1934 at the Austrian Chamber for Workers and Employees (Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte) in Vienna, where she founded and directed the Female Labor Unit of the Chamber of Labor (Referat für Frauenarbeit der Arbeiterkammer). As a sociologist, commentator, and activist, she is one of the outstanding personalities of Red Vienna. She had gone to court to obtain the right, as a woman, to study political science at the University of Vienna from 1914 to 1917. But she still had to go to Germany to sit for her final exams, earning her doctorate in 1918 at the University of Heidelberg under the supervision of Max Weber. In 1919 she became Otto Bauer’s research assistant. Her study of women industrial workers, published in 1932 by the Chamber of Labor, is of extraordinary significance, not least in the form in which it is presented: quantitative findings are embedded in qualitative ones, no statistic is left without commentary, and no numerical relationship lacks reflection as to its methodical, social, and political implications. One particularly vivid chapter is devoted to typical life stories and corresponds with the visualization of statistical relationships with pictograms from Otto Neurath’s Social and Economic Museum (Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum) in Vienna. Internal contradictions or unexpected and inconvenient results are not covered up but are critically articulated. The unfussy prose is never polemical; its power unfolds from a deep-seated understanding of the lived situations it presents and from a strong respect for the individual women in these situations. In the epilog, Leichter repeats a single phrase thirteen times, bridging the gap between observing and acting, between a constative speech act and a performative one: “It is a fact but not inevitable that . . .” he philosophers only

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Leichter’s study of women industrial workers was the culmination of a series of studies in the late phase of Red Vienna in which advanced social sciences joined forces with emancipatory politics. The project has been unjustly overshadowed by the more famous study of unemployment in Marienthal, which was published by the Austrian Research Center for Economic Psychology (Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle) in 1933 and which Käthe Leichter was the first to review. The research center, founded in 1931 as a nonprofit association, was directed by Paul F. Lazarsfeld until 1933 and then by Hans Zeisel and finally by Marie Jahoda (initially in partnership with Gertrude Wagner). Lazarsfeld and Jahoda had studied from 1926 under Karl and Charlotte Bühler at the Vienna Psychological Institute and had married in 1927.1 They separated in 1932. Karl Bühler was president of the research center; Lazarsfeld was research assistant to the Bühlers in a post funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and as such responsible in particular for statistical calculations. It was also the Rockefeller Foundation that financed the Marienthal study in partnership with the Chamber of Labor. The appendix to the Marienthal study includes a short outline titled On the History of Sociography, a history into which the Marienthal study confidently wrote itself. Its originality consists not only in its expansion of a quantifying sociography that includes questions of psychology, but also in the expansion of psychology to include questions of class affiliation and the social situation. If its theme is original, its choice of sources and methods is even more so. Official statistics were combined with open and covert surveys to record the effects of unemployment on a whole village. Alongside election results, membership figures for clubs, newspaper subscriptions, and loans from the library, the study includes records of how people used their time and the meals they ate,2 observation transcripts about the turnover in the pub and in various shops, lists of topics of conversation, records of school achievements, and even a list of Christmas presents. Interviews about life histories were placed next to disclosures from informants, as well as notes from observations and self-observations that were gathered from home visits and medical check-ups. Writing three decades later in the preface to the new edition of the Marienthal study, Paul F. Lazarsfeld said the coming revolution would need economists, the victorious revolution engineers, and the lost revolution social psychologists. Red Vienna, he continued, had been the start of a new age, and its end, already foreseeable during the economic crisis, would be of vital importance to those seeking to explain the era’s disappointed hopes. But disappointment aside, the fact that the large- and smallscale studies had placed the desires and hopes of the workers into the center of the research preserved these aspirations for the future. Käthe Leichter’s research and the Marienthal study succeeded in closing the gap between the general, vague nature of statistics and the singular vividness of social reportage. They achieved this because of their mastery of the art of conceptualization, an art—as Theodor W. Adorno once broadly claimed—that was altogether lacking in empirical social research.

1 Karl

Bühler (1879–1963) was professor for philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna from 1922 to 1938. Charlotte Bühler (1893–1974) was a lecturer at the Vienna Psychological Institute (founded by her husband) from 1922 to 1938 and then promoted to professor in 1929. Their research into developmental psychology through life histories formed the starting point for the social-psychological questions investigated by the research center. See also chapters 7 and 15. 2 See chapter 17.

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Further reading Fleck 1990, 2007 Steiner 1973

1. Käthe Leichter The Housing Situation (from How do the Viennese Homeworkers Live? A Survey on the Working and Living Conditions of 1,000 Viennese Homeworkers) First published as “Wohnungsverhältnisse,” in Wie leben die Wiener Heimarbeiter? Eine Erhebung über die Arbeits- und Lebensverhältnisse von tausend Wiener Heimarbeitern (Vienna: Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte in Wien, Verlag Arbeit und Wirtschaft, 1928), 43–46. Translated by Paul Richards. This study is an early milestone of empirical social research and one of the two great sociological masterworks for which Käthe Leichter was responsible: “How do the Viennese Homeworkers Live?” asks the Female Labor Unit of the Chamber of Labor. Under Leichter’s direction, the unit investigates the relationship between social class and gender, since these “homeworkers”— self-employed workers who used their own apartment as a working space—were almost exclusively women. Three of the study’s findings, simple and devastating at the same time, show that “homework is above all women’s work”; that it is “only in rare cases a sideline, almost always a main job”; and that it predominantly affects older women who often do not have any alternative paid employment. Furnished with numerous statistical analyses, the survey is based on 1,000 completed questionnaires out of 4,000 that were distributed in 1927, the year when homework had undergone a significant increase as a result of the austerity policies pursued by the Christian Social–led Austrian government. The chapter on the housing situation provides insight into the living conditions that Red Vienna’s housing construction program was intended to remedy. There is no group within the working class for whom the housing question is of such lifeor-death importance as for the homeworkers. A homeworker’s flat is a place to work as well as to live. If it is cramped, he must live, sleep, eat, and practice his trade in the same room. This wretched situation may be further exacerbated by the length of the working hours, the number of children in the homeworker’s family, the involvement of family members in the work, and the use of machines. Our survey shows that the normal homeworker’s flat is the standard Viennese proletarian flat, which consists of only a bedroom and a kitchen. If this feels cramped enough for a married factory worker who practices his trade outside the home, this applies on quite another scale for the homeworker, who spends not just his private life here but his working life too. In terms of available space, the differences between the different branches of homeworking are very slight. The bedroom-kitchen flat predominates in all of them. Another common variant is a flat consisting of nothing but a Kabinett [small room] and kitchen, so that 42.9 percent of homeworkers’ flats only have one room other than the kitchen, a room that has to be everything: bedroom, living room, and workroom. Only piecework masters tend to have a flat that consists of bedroom, Kabinett, and kitchen. The job of piecework master, however, is associated with the need to have a separate workshop and the frequent employment of external assistants and, to a greater

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extent, of a man’s wife and children, also requires more space. A situation with a separate workshop room in addition to the living rooms is only ever present in the flats of pieceworker masters, and even among them it is extremely rare. The homeworkers who have a flat with a bedroom, a Kabinett, and a kitchen—that is, one of the better flats—are likely to be either piecework masters or working in linen production, as well as in garment manufacturing, embroidery, and paper manufacturing. But this kind of flat, especially once you take into account the large number of children that female homeworkers have, is still a proletarian dwelling. Larger flats that give the impression of a little more prosperity can only be found in greater numbers in the embroidery trade, where their presence can be explained by the influx from the middle classes. But here, too, they are in the minority. Cases of three or four rooms in addition to the kitchen, that is, rooms in which an appropriate separation of working and living spaces would be possible, remain extremely rare, as are cases in which homeworkers live in a settlers’ house. Cases of the most squalidly inadequate housing are all the more common. Homeworker families who live in just one room, one kitchen; whose shelter is a basement or the workhouse; homeworkers who practice their trade while living as subletters or bed lodgers. For example, the single-room dwelling that is often found in the embroidery trade—consisting of just a bedroom, Kabinett, or kitchen—can be explained by the large number of younger single female homeworkers. In the knitted goods and hosiery sector, it is the dreadful housing conditions in the countryside that make it so common for whole homeworker families to inhabit a single living room. The number of homeworkers who are subletters is particularly large in the embroidery industry. Female bed lodgers, who during the day do their homeworking while sitting on their rented bed, can often be found among the seamstresses, embroiderers, and felt-slipper makers. For more than one in ten of all female homeworkers, the meagre earnings make it essential to take in lodgers, making the flat even more cramped. This is most common in the chemicals industry, where even though the wages are a little higher, the unregular pay forces workers to seek a long-term source of income. The same applies to garment manufacturing. In the embroidery trade, it is only because the flats are often a little larger that embroiderers can take in lodgers. In the paper-goods trade, the low wages force workers to take in lodgers, even though these are the families that generally have the most children. In general, the widest social variation, with both better and worse flats, is to be found in the embroidery industry, then among piecework masters, while in most other branches of homeworking the standard of housing is more uniform, that is, more uniformly poor.3 The housing conditions in the individual branches of homeworking are often exacerbated by the particular circumstances associated with each manufacturing process. In garment, linen, and knitted-goods production, it is the noise of the sewing or knitting machines, the dust and wool fibers; in felt-shoe production it is the felt dust; in the paper-goods trade and chemical industry, the odor of rubber and adhesives; in the leather-goods industry the smell of skins and leather. In all trades, the materials are lying all around, taking up much space. In rubber-mackintosh production, the use of petroleum means constant fire risk—in flats that often consist of only one room plus a kitchen, in which two rooms plus kitchen are enough to put a flat in the better class, and 3 Original note: It is interesting that according to the investigation by the Labor Statistics Office (Arbeitsstatistisches Amt) in 1901, the housing conditions of the homeworkers back then were rather better than today—homeworkers generally had a flat with three rooms. By contrast, according to this earlier study, 16 percent of homeworkers took in lodgers, compared to only 11 percent in our research.

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consequently suitable for taking in lodgers, thus creating even more cramped conditions. In these flats, women have the hopeless task, in addition to their paid work, of keeping the household in order—generally even more difficult than if they did their job outside the home—keeping a corner free for the children to play or learn and to have good night’s sleep. It is the very thing that many women hope for from homeworking—being able to better combine their domestic and maternal tasks with their paid work—that is made impossible for adults as well as children by the amalgamation of working, sleeping, and living rooms. It is only by examining housing conditions that a complete picture of the social conditions under which the homeworkers live and work can be obtained.

2. Käthe Leichter Housework (from This Is How We Live: 1320 Women Workers in Industry Report about Their Lives) First published as “Hausarbeit,” in So leben wir: 1320 Industriearbeiterinnen berichten über ihr Leben (Wien: Verlag Arbeit und Wirtschaft, 1932), 78–83. Translated by Paul Richards. This text comes from Käthe Leichter’s second sociological masterpiece: a monumental work of empirical social research that broadened the discipline to include new, previously under­ used possibilities in form and content. Its title reads “This is how we live”; “how we live” here means “how we work.” For women workers with their threefold burden of job, household, and family, there could be little or no distinction between work and life. The study is based on 1,320 completed questionnaires of 4,000 that were distributed by the Female Labor Unit of the Chamber of Labor to female industrial workers in Vienna in 1931, at the height of the global financial crisis. It distinguishes carefully between age groups, in which quite clear generational differences are apparent. The questionnaire also insists on asking about what effects a woman’s marital and family status has upon her living situation. The section on work in the home is given equal standing to the one on work in the factory. “For the women, home is just the start of a new shift!” writes a working-class woman. A female worker’s “second” working day is spent in the household. Cooking, sewing, cleaning, washing, shopping, looking after children—these are the tasks that almost every female worker has to do in addition to her factory work, and they double or triple the length of their working day. The working day. The working day is long, the night’s sleep short. Female workers get up: before 5 am at 5 am between 5 and 6 am at 6 am between 6 and 7 am at 7 am not specified

7.1% 24.2% 35% 22.1% 6.9% 1.7% 3%

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For two-thirds of female workers, therefore, the working day starts before 6 am; for 20.3 percent of single and 39.7 percent of married working women, it starts at 5 am or even earlier. It ends late in the evening. Female workers go to sleep: before 9 pm at 9 pm “ 10 “ “ 11 “ after 11 “ not specified

3.9% 15.3% 53.8% 20.3% 3.3% 3%

For three-quarters of female workers, therefore, their day ends sometime between 10 and 11 pm. For single female workers, the working day generally begins a little later; for married ones it begins earlier and lasts longer. 6:30 am to 10 pm— the 16.5-hour working day is the rule. For the married female worker, the working day can also last 17 or even 18 hours; for only a few, it is 14 or 15 hours. But is it possible to describe a female worker’s whole day as a “working day”? Certainly, there are times of day when she does not work, when she rests, goes for a walk, or seeks entertainment. That is no doubt correct and applies especially to single female workers. But if we consider the scope of the work that female factory workers have to do at home on top of their paid job, it becomes clear to us that it is work, and only to a slight extent rest and relaxation, that takes up the long day of the female worker, that makes it start so early and end so late. Before starting work. Only 27.3 percent, that is, hardly more than a quarter, of female workers have no work to get done before the start of their factory job. 72.7 percent, that is almost three quarters, have to do housework early in the morning before they go to the factory. The heavier load borne by married female workers is very tangible here. 42.8 percent of single female workers, but only 17.1 percent of married ones, go to work without having worked in the home beforehand. The morning work in the household consists of: cooking cleaning both shopping looking after children other

All 21.6% 29.2% 17.4% 2.5% 5.5% 0.5%

Single 10.4% 22% 12.3% 2.5% 3.2% 0.2%

Married 31.3% 34.6% 21.2% 2.5% 7.2% 0.8%

Making breakfast, cooking in advance for lunch, cleaning shoes and clothes, cleaning the flat—one or all of these tasks belong, as a matter of course, to the morning’s work for the great majority of married female workers even before they start work in the factory. Children are looked after, the shopping is done on the way, added up, rationed—this is how the female worker comes to the factory! Not with unspent energy, very often without having sufficiently recovered from the work done until late the previous night, with their thoughts on the home that they have left. Will their husband take the boiling water from

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the stove in time? Will the youngest child be dressed warmly enough? Will there be enough lunch for everyone? These thoughts and worries do not stop at the factory gates; the female worker takes them with her to work, and they accompany her throughout her day at work. Lunch break and eating. It is time for the lunch break. This time is spent: at home in the works canteen In a pub or cafe In the factory building

19.7% 9% 3.3% 68%

Even in the earlier section on the working day, it was already clear that the break, whether it lasts an hour or longer, only means that they are “not working”; it hardly ever means rest, change of atmosphere, or relaxation. Those who hasten home mostly work even in their lunch break there. Not much significance is attached to feeding themselves. Sixty-eight percent, that is, more than two-thirds, take their lunch with them into the factory, where there are almost always facilities to heat it up. Nine percent go to the works canteen to eat; 3.3 percent go to pubs or cafes. In both cases, they usually order a cheap fixed menu. Even in the pub, they often only order vegetables. One-fifth eat at home. They eat: without meat with meat sometimes meat cold food

43.8% 29.4% 21.7% 5.1%

The female worker’s lunch most commonly consists of bread and vegetables that are warmed up on a chafing dish. There is often also a piece of sausage, more rarely a piece of meat with it and a pastry. The female workers who say that they sometimes eat meat often add that this is only the case on Sundays. Instead of vegetables, some have coffee and a piece of bread with sliced sausage, or coffee and a pastry. And 5.1 percent have only cold food, that is, only bread with sausage and during summer, most likely fruit and milk. There is often only a chafing dish available. So as not to waste valuable break time by waiting, the food is wolfed down cold. It is anybody’s guess whether this supplies the female worker’s metabolism—energy-intensive as it is on account of the sheer volume of labor—with the necessary nutrients for renewing its ability to work. In fact, what seems to play out here is the well-known phenomenon that in times of economic hardship, women cut back above all on their own food,

which is a particularly troubling state of affairs in the case of women undertaking heavy work. In a particularly telling remark, a mother of two children whose husband’s unemployment insurance has expired, writes: “Lunch consists of leftovers, but it is very doubtful that anything will be left over.”

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After the job. But for the female worker, the real housework begins after her paid work is done. We have familiarized ourselves with this paid work and have seen that it is by no means easy “women’s work”; that it is fatiguing and exhausting. Between 4 and 5 pm, sometimes as late as 6 pm, the female worker comes home, where all of the housework is usually waiting for her. To the question of what housework they have to do after their paid work, the female workers answer: everything that needs doing in the household cooking cleaning shopping sewing no housework

All 60.8% 4.1% 13.5% 7.1% 17.2% 8.6%

Single 40.1% 4.1% 20% 10.2% 26.7% 17%

Married 76.4% 4.1% 8.6% 4.8% 10.1% 2.4%

Not even one-tenth of female workers are spared housework. For all the others, housework is waiting for them after their factory work, and for three-fifths, the entire amount of housework is waiting for them. The very significant differences between single and married female workers are clear here. Of the single women, 40 percent have to perform all the housework. If we remember that only 34 percent live independently, that is, not with their parents, it is clear that a number of young single female workers also have to take care of the housekeeping for their families, their parents, or their siblings. Among single female workers, it is more common that they only have to carry out a particular portion of the housework. There are some who only cook for themselves in their parents’ household, or who relieve their mother of the work of cleaning or shopping while the mother cooks for them. For seamstresses, their contribution to the housework is often that they sew and mend for the other family members. For the majority of single female workers, it is only part of the housework, rather than all of it, that burdens them. Seventeen percent of them are completely free of it. For the married female worker it is very different. The few who are free from any housework are exceptions, living as lodgers or with their parents. For more than three-quarters, the full weight of the housework falls on them. Cooking, cleaning, shopping, mending—there is no light or heavy task that the married female worker is spared. The number of those who are relieved of part of the housework because they share a home with their mother or mother-in-law, and therefore only have to clear and sew or to shop and cook, is small. The overwhelming majority is burdened with all the housework. Wash day. Now, once or twice a month, into this world filled with daily housework, wash day falls—enough of a burden for the housewife, who only has to manage her household, but effort beyond measure for the female factory worker, overwhelmed by the daily factory and domestic work. Of 100 female workers, the number who wash once per month twice per month not at all

50 43 7

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And when it comes to observing wash day, there are no significant differences between married and single female workers. The single ones also generally do their own laundry—but the married ones have to wash for the rest of their family. But both groups have to do the laundry once per month, very often twice, and only in exceptional cases have someone else do it for them. Only thirty female workers who do laundry at home have access to the major convenience of a central laundry room with machinery and the associated labor-saving process. The others have to wash in the damp, steamy washhouse or kitchen—and as the day is not long enough, they work into the night. Help with housework. But is it conceivable that the women really do this work all on their own? We asked the female workers about this and it became clear that in fact 42.7 percent of the female workers surveyed received help with housework. Since 8.6 percent state that they do not do any housework, it can be concluded that 48.7 percent, that is, almost half of female workers, have to do the housework without any help, while the majority of female workers do get some support with the housework from one or two family members. These female workers get support from: mother or mother-in-law husband children siblings Neighbors, maids, female lodgers

51.9% 14.2% 13.9% 14.9% 5.1%

It is, however, mainly the single female workers (three-fifths of whom, as we saw earlier, do not have to do all of their housework) who say that they have help, who are indeed often only helpers themselves in their parents’ household. The following comparison shows how much the workloads of single and married female workers differ: Domestic workload: Housework done with help No housework done Thus, the proportion doing the   housework without any help

For single female workers 50.9%   17% 32.1%

For married female workers 36.6%  2.4% 61.1%

This means that almost one-third of single female workers, but more than three-fifths of married ones, are burdened by the need to do all the housework without being given any support at all. Are these inalterable facts, or is it not also the power of tradition that inflicts the entire burden of housework on the married female worker? Two hundred and eleven husbands of the married women are unemployed, but only eighty of these regard it as within their dignity to relieve their wives of at least a small part of the housework, their wives who toil the whole day, who return worn-out from the factory. It is much easier to find adult children who are unemployed than those who help out with housework. But is it not possible that the old prejudice held by the woman herself, that she could not possibly “put upon” her husband, her son, to perform menial household work, plays a role here? Certainly, some do rebel against the senseless division of labor that places a two- or

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threefold burden on the woman. For example, a forty-year-old married female tobacco worker asks us “to help in motivating the men to support working women in the household. The smallest service would be a help.” Fortunately for the female worker, the helpful pixies of the proletarian household can be found here too: The grandmother, the woman next door, the landlady, the daughter who is still going to school, and, doubtless to a greater extent than was previously the case, husbands and sons. And yet: 61 percent of married female workers do their housework without any help! Only one female worker can afford the luxury of a charwoman. Can these harassed women ever rest during the day? Only 12.6 percent find the time and opportunity to lie down during the day, even if only for a moment, to restore their energy. 85.9 percent of single and 93 percent of married female workers report that this is inconceivable. Indeed, no question disconcerted the female workers as much as this one. To lie down during the day, to rest—that might be possible for ladies, but for working women there is no such thing.

3. Paul F. Lazarsfeld On the Career Attitudes of the Young Working Class First published as “Zur Berufseinstellung des jugendlichen Arbeiters,” in Jugend und Beruf. Kritik und Material (Jena: G. Fischer, 1931), 157–74. Translated by Paul Richards. Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s political training was in the socialist youth movement. Having studied mathematics and physics, he was earning his living as a high-school teacher when he joined a working group led by Charlotte Bühler in 1926 and contributed this small study. Five years later he included it in an anthology edited by himself. The questionnaires that were analyzed—from young people aged 15–23, of whom 875 were male, 283 female—were originally used by Otto Felix Kanitz to organize the youth camps of the Socialist Workers’ Youth (Sozialistische Arbeiter Jugend, SAJ).4 Lazarsfeld set himself no less a task than interrogating class consciousness as a defining factor in the emotional development of young people. In his secondary analysis he concludes, “the young workers are satisfied even if the work they have had to choose for purely external reasons is halfway bearable.” But how much space is left over for aspirations when poverty and daily financial needs define a young person’s choice of occupation? And does it make any sense to still talk of life ideals in this context? [. . .] [W]hen asked what they wanted to achieve in their lives, they answered the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

A general phrase A specified social situation An individual economic goal An individual psychological goal A situation of personal happiness

[Boys] 14.6% 3.9% 11.2% 9.0% 9.4%

[Girls] 12.4% 1.4% 7.1% 10.6% 8.1%

4 Otto Felix Kanitz (1894–1940), director of the Schönbrunn School, a teacher-training college for youth workers, teachers, and kindergarten assistants, chairman of the SAJ in Vienna from 1926 and Austria-wide from 1930, and member of the Federal Council of the Austrian Parliament from 1932 to 1934.

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Political work Other work Learning Nothing, reason given Nothing, no reason given

10.5% 8.5% 3.4% 5.3% 24.2% 100.00%

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7.4% 10.6% 4.6% 7.1% 30.7% 100.00%

The examples that we now want to provide for each of these points may at the same time give an insight into the type of answer overall. 1. Many answers read: freedom; socialism, to be a decent person etc. It is not easy to determine how many of these answers are well thought-out and how many are clichés. On the one hand, as we will hear, they are especially common with older respondents, which has implications for assessing their meaning; on the other, it repeatedly happens that within a whole local group one person copies down an answer from another, making a whole series of questionnaires almost worthless on this point. It is different with the type of answers in section 2. In this section we have grouped instances in which a general social situation is visibly desired as the product of personal experience. If, for example, a seventeen-yearold girl states that she wishes to work in a nursery, that she does not like the behavior of the boys toward the girls in the organization, and then answers our question with “equality for women,” then that is a perfect example of social projection of a personal desire. The same applies to a twenty-year-old lad who says his desired career is: “music; art is my dream,” and then says of the question discussed here: “I want to widen access to art to include the proletariat.” Incidentally, these are the most comforting kind of answers if you come from such people as we have summarized in section 3. One can see just how far the soul of a young person can deviate from the objects of bourgeois vocational psychology when, in answer to the question, “What do you want to achieve in your life?,” he replies, “That in my old age I don’t have to die like a dog.” Or another says: “I want to achieve so much that I can live properly until my death and don’t have to nibble scraps and often go hungry like now.” However, we have also placed in this section all those who stated “secure employment,” “higher wages,” “pension,” and the like. 4. We have applied the classification “individual psychological goal” to everything that the young person desires to possess in terms of noneconomic values, such as satisfaction, a long life, health—all aims that appear surprisingly often; including from this seventeen-year-old girl: “A good, honest, Social Democratic husband”; or from a twentyyear-old woman the typical desire of adolescence: “Above all to meet someone I can talk to about everything that captures my interest and to help my fellow human beings to achieve what is necessary for a socialist state.” The necessity of this section 5. was a result of the fact that many answers point to a diffusely imagined state of happiness, such as: a better life, something good, a lovely future, and the like. 6. There is no need for examples of a desire for political work; it can be found on a scale ranging from the intention to become a good shop steward to a plan to become chancellor of Austria. We also note the following answer for the simple reason that it is psychologically interesting in another context: “member of Parliament or record-breaking runner.” 7. This section contains all desires that relate to specialist professional work, and is interesting insofar as it presumably contains all the answers of those who have a special functional relationship to their work and therefore also fall back on discussions of their occupation where the others move on to more general prospects; however, the answers

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recorded here also include those in which the occupation is purely the framework for a general striving for recognition, for example, becoming a foreman, achieving something in one’s career etc. 8. Finally, because it seemed interesting to us, we determined the percentage of young workers who managed to preserve their desire for intellectual experience while in a state of oppressive poverty; it is small. 9. The number of answers that were refused with a reason given for doing so is also not large because it presupposes a high level of conscious self-criticism to say, “You can’t say that exactly”; or a high level of objective insight to say: “Being a diligent worker; I don’t have a set aim; no one knows that as they make their way through life.” 10. For the majority of questionnaires that were not filled in at this point, the reason is above all that such an abstract question is incomprehensible to many who have only attended elementary school and since then have carried out soul-crushing factory work.5 In addition, the questionnaire has the error that there is an explicit question near the top about the respondent’s desired profession, which makes an easy understanding of our question even more difficult.

4. Lotte Radermacher On the Social Psychology of the Popular Education Centers’ Students (A Survey of 21,749 Course Participants) First published as “Zur Sozialpsychologie des Volkshochschulhörers (Eine Untersuchung von 21749 Kursteilnehmern),” Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie 43, nos. 5–6 (1932): 461–86. Translated by Paul Richards. The discrepancy between career aspirations and career realities is the basis for adult education. Although Lotte Radermacher (1907–?) was a key figure in early empirical social research in Austria, only a few of her biographical details are known. In the foreword to her study of female industrial workers, Käthe Leichter thanks Radermacher for her help in developing the questionnaires and tables. Before joining the Austrian Research Center for Economic Psychology (Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle, founded by Paul F. Lazarsfeld) as research assistant and office manager in 1931, Rademacher had completed her dissertation in political science in 1930. The work would form the basis of this essay published in 1932. The study is based on 21,749 questionnaires filled in between 1927 and 1929 by students of the courses at the Volksheim Ottakring and other popular education centers run by the association Volkshochschule Wien Volksheim. Founded in 1901 by the historian Ludo Moritz Hartmann (1865–1924) and the literary scholar Emil Reich (1864–1940) in the working-class district of Ottakring, the Volksheim was considered politically neutral but with Social Democratic leanings. 5

Original note: It is not possible to provide a picture here of the uneducated handwriting, the clumsiness of the expression and the poor standard of orthography in the questionnaires. As an example, a few of the forms in which the idea is expressed that theatre is a particular attraction of the organization: “Theaterspielen” [German for “acting”] is spelled “Teatter,” “Dieaterscbiel,” “Anterschpiel,” “Diearterschbilen,” “Tieatter spiel,” “Ortahschpiel,” “Diarta,” “di Ater schbilen,” “Duatter schbiellen” etc. etc.

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The professional breakdown of the students and its significance for the number of courses [. . .] We have based all considerations of the relationship between occupation and educational interest on a classification of occupations that we have developed after numerous preparatory trials. We are confident that this classification is psychologically significant because each category only contains occupations that exhibit the same or very similar tendencies in terms of their educational interests. For example, it proved correct to classify the male workers as metalworkers, printers, and other qualified workers, because even though the printers are of a very different character from the other workers, the four hundred tailors, three hundred builders, and three hundred woodworkers proved very similar to each other and to the smaller groups of qualified workers in terms of the distribution of their chosen courses. For the women it was enough even to simply classify them into groups of garment workers (tailoresses, milliners, etc.), other qualified workers, and assistant workers, although it also became necessary to create a distinct group, “domestic personnel.” For the men we created a group to include state employees, including postmen, school caretakers [Schuldiener], and streetcar conductors, that is to say, mostly the “little guys,” because we assumed that their most prominent characteristic would be the material security of government employment. As will be seen, we were correct as regards our main problem, but some details may have escaped us because we did not sufficiently differentiate the various job types that are bundled in these categories. Among the white-collar workers, we distinguished between office and commercial employees depending on whether the job was at a sales counter or sitting at a typewriter. For both sexes, there was also a separate section for “school pupils and students,” which has remarkable numbers of respondents. Finally, we bundled the teachers, welfare workers [Fürsorger], artists, and the like under the “free professions,” and small-scale craftsmen and small businessmen under “self-employed tradesmen.” Among women we left “self-employed” in the category “other” because there were so few of them. The section “private individuals” contains, for women, housewives who do not have jobs outside the home. Among men it primarily contains pensioners. [. . .] Above all, the numbers are interesting quite simply as evidence of the kind of material a teacher in the Volksheim has to work with. Table 7 Occupation

Men in %

Women in %

Blue-collar workers Junior white-collar workers Occupations requiring higher-level   school qualifications Housewives

40.0 32.0 15.2

19.2 34.2 9.8

—

School pupils and students Others

10.4 2.4 100.0

26.9 (3.7% of whom in higher education) 9.5 0.4 100.0

Gender ratio (number of M per 100 W) 240 110 [sic] 130 — 126 776

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But what is highly important for the ongoing discussion is the following summary, which is based on the point in the questionnaire that asks about prior school education. Because it emerges that 72 percent of the men and 77 percent of women only attended elementary school until the age of 13, that 10 percent of both sexes are school pupils, and that only the small remaining number have a higher education. See Table 7 for details. We can summarize this data as meaning that the visitors to the Volksheim principally come from the noneducated strata of the population, with “noneducated” intended to mean that their school career was limited to elementary school and lower secondary education [Bürgerschule]. [. . .] Main proposition about the educational function of the Volksheim The male professional groups who frequent the Volksheim seek two things there: first, they want to fill educational gaps that are causing problems in their work and life and, second, they want to conquer uncharted educational territory beyond the current world of their work and life. The types of educational gaps they want to fill can be used to identify two main classes of Volksheim students, the H type and the A type, so named because the first is most clearly represented by manual workers [Handarbeiter] and the second by white-collar employees [Angestellte]. The H type needs to catch up on or revise elementary educational basics (elementary arithmetic, writing, reading), while for the A type, which as a matter of course has to be familiar with the elementary subjects already, it is foreign languages that seem to represent this kind of educational gap. In relation to the uncharted educational territory, the difference between the two types is that the H type’s interest is principally connected to his practical work and is therefore specifically varied in the various trades, while the uncharted educational territory of the A type is of general social character and encompasses unspecific objects within the humanities and arts in all professional categories. For the women, these relationships can only be found in an implied way, because what is characteristic about their position vis-à-vis the Volksheim is that female students attend courses largely unrelated to their occupations. To turn now to evidence for the proposition [. . .]: We begin with the educational gaps of the H type. In fact, we find all proletarian trades, with the exception of printers, to be exceptionally interested in the basic courses [.  .  .]. All other professional groups reject the basic courses. One of the reasons why we treated the printers separately is that earlier studies had given us reason to expect that here too they would be between the H and A types, and this indeed turned out to be correct. By the same token, the commercial and office employees were strongly interested in the language courses, while all proletarian trades, again with the exception of the printers, reject these courses. The different behavior toward the basic courses and the language courses therefore does indeed seem to be a suitable starting point for distinguishing the two classes. Incidentally, the two types can be observed in their purest form when one notes that the metalworkers and the office employees really do demonstrate opposing tendencies in every course group, line for line. One can then assess the other professional groups according to their distance from these two standard columns. We turn now to the uncharted educational territory. The metalworkers who primarily work with machines are indeed mostly interested in engineering, physics, and mathematics courses. The other qualified manual workers, who presumably work less with machines

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but depend more on their individual dexterity, consequently prove interested not in the engineering and physics courses but in mathematics and drawing. Here we introduce the state employees, who we categorized above as “little guys.” Because of their rejection of languages and preference for the basic courses, in this too they are labelled as belonging to the H type. To what then is their uncharted educational territory oriented? The answer can be taken from the common parlance: they work on the machinery of state and therefore have a preference for law and political science courses. In more serious-minded terms: they presumably use the Volksheim to familiarize themselves more thoroughly with the field in which they work, perhaps also to help them in the tests that are aimed at helping them climb the bureaucratic career ladder, and they obtain the necessary legal and [. . .] mathematical knowledge in the Volksheim. Their uncharted educational territory is therefore also job specific. The assistant workers show, finally, the educational gaps of the H type very clearly (basic course), but do not demonstrate a particular preference for any further courses. Ultimately, what we have said about the uncharted educational territory can be given a somewhat different twist, albeit based on an assumption that in the context of our material can only be applied speculatively. It is not improbable that a significant aspect of the search for voluntary education is connected to attempts to gain social status. If so, our results contain evidence of a major difference in the direction of upward mobility of the A and H types; to put it extremely simply, for the blue-collar worker the path leads through the machine shop and for the white-collar worker through the boss’s drawing room. Or more objectively formulated and as a pointer for further study: in terms of educational psychology the blue-collar worker’s opportunity for advancement is connected more with his working process and the white-collar employee’s more with his general social interactions.

5. Marie Jahoda Life Fulfillment (from Anamneses from the Poorhouse) First published as “Lebenserfüllung,” in Anamnesen im Versorgungshaus: Ein Beitrag zur Lebenspsychologie (PhD thesis, Psychological Institute, University of Vienna, 1932), 83–86. Translated by Paul Richards. To a person who has ended up in the poorhouse, it would only be natural to regard the question of a fulfilled life with sheer cynicism. This dissertation, submitted by Marie Jahoda to Karl Bühler and approved in 1932, pushes beyond the bourgeois life model that formed the center of Charlotte Bühler’s Lebenspsychologie (life psychology). Jahoda’s work is based on fifty-two interviews that Jahoda conducted and took down in shorthand with people in four Vienna poorhouses about their life histories. Using the medical term “anamnesis” to refer to these open-ended, nonstandardized interviews with people entering the final phase of their lives at the margins of society, both the content and the methodology of Jahoda’s study broke new ground. When you read the life stories and take in the mood in which the respondents tell their stories, you find yourself asking whether these lives have been lived well or poorly. And the question emerges: how should you categorize this impression and by what criteria should you assess it?

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The question about the well-lived life emerged early on in Charlotte Bühler’s approach to the problem of Lebenspsychologie [life psychology], and she posed it in the form of a question about fulfillment in life. In our constant engagement with this term “life fulfillment,” we have attempted to contribute to a clear formulation of it, and we must bluntly admit that we have not succeeded. We tried one approach after another to extract the phenomenon of life fulfillment from our material, and one after another our approaches sputtered out. But we could not bring in the criterion of fulfillment from outside because, at the time of our work, it had not been finally formulated in the Bühlerian system. Just before the end of this study, Charlotte Bühler has now succeeded in conceptualizing the term fulfillment in an extraordinarily wide-ranging fashion and has brought it to life with reference to her biographical material. We want to use this meaningful formulation to explain at least why our material was particularly unsuitable for deriving a result that would have been along the lines of the Bühlerian concept of fulfillment. Charlotte Bühler now understands fulfillment as full success in life that is both subjectively perceived and objectively provable as a result of needs being met and tasks completed in all areas and phases of life. But this definition is not the essential point for us; within the framework of our study, we would not even be able to explain it fully. What is important for us is above all the three conditions to which the emergence of the phenomenon of fulfillment, according to Charlotte Bühler, is linked. The first condition is dedication, fully given by the person. Without it, there can be no fulfillment, but even with it there needs to be another aspect for fulfillment to emerge. We can after all dedicate ourselves to the wrong thing, thus letting our actual task pass us by: the right correlation between the self and the environment must therefore be established. This correlation is the second condition. But even then, fulfillment might remain absent through unfavorable external circumstances, so the absence of external difficulties is the third condition. Whoever has followed the material of this work with careful attention will immediately see that in the great majority of these cases the three conditions cannot be present because the selection principle on which the biographies are based—end of life in the poorhouse—makes fulfilled life stories seem improbable. If we go through the three conditions, it is in particular the third that is absent, because the simple fact of being in the care home means previous experience of poverty. That we have any existences at all at our disposal other than afflicted ones is in any case thanks only to the fact that inflation has appended a sad ending to successful personal histories, but as this occurs late in life and is determined by purely external circumstances, it is not able to significantly modify the previous structure of these long lives. But the first condition—the full dedication of the personality—is improbable for a large number of these cases because, from another perspective, we would have had to recognize all these examples, in which the extraordinarily low expectations of life seem so characteristic to us, as life stories without the dedication of the person. They are all presumably excluded as candidates for fulfillment. What remains, therefore, are those few cases of highly developed attitudes to life that we were able to bring in. [. . .] These lives objectively give the impression of resolution and clarity that the fulfilled life stories cited by Charlotte Bühler provide, while the subjective satisfaction with life, which is of the essence of fulfillment, is also present. But we cannot prove any details of the reality of fulfillment for individuals, because at the time the case histories were made, the question was still not yet conceived from this perspective. Thus the histories lack the fine nuances necessary to decide on the questions that flow from the above definition of fulfillment.

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This now brings us, in conclusion, to the point from which this attempt must be viewed. It was possible to apply the Lebenspsychologie process to personal histories that had previously been inaccessible to scientific study. But the case histories were carried out at a moment when the terminology of Lebenspsychologie was itself still in its infancy. We only fully realized the scope and capacity of its propositions and terms during the process of collecting material. So, this work is only a first step. Here and there a gap can be seen that is still waiting to be filled. In retrospect we are above all convinced not only that the phenomenon of fulfillment could have been proved with reference to this material but also, in reverse, that it could have been a productive road map for the survey. We hope that there will be an opportunity to use the experiences and results of this first attempt in subsequent phases of Lebenspsychologie work, until, as the terminology and scope of investigation are continuously expanded, the complete facts of the course of a human life can be seen under the so fruitful aspect of Lebenspsychologie.

6. Marie Jahoda Meal Plan and Budget (from Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community) First published as “Speisezettel und Budget,” in Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal: Ein soziographischer Versuch über die Wirkungen langdauernder Arbeitslosigkeit; mit einem Anhang zur Geschichte der Soziographie, ed. Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1933), 22–28. Translated by Paul Richards. “First comes the grub, then come the morals,” says Bertolt Brecht in The Threepenny Opera. But what do people eat when they are dependent on unemployment benefits that are too meagre to live on? And what about their morals? Which is to say: What still motivates them in life and what ethics do they live by? From November 1931 to May 1932 a project team from the Austrian Research Center for Economic Psychology (Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle) carried out field research in Marienthal.6 From the 1830s onward, this village had developed around a textile mill approximately thirty kilometers south-east of Vienna. When the mill closed in 1929–1930, almost the whole industrial village was suddenly unemployed. “The Tired Community,” is the title of one of the chapters; another is “Attitude”; a third “Resilience”: examples of concepts in which statistics and observations are indissolubly combined, descriptively and analytically. We added a brief statistic on the question of nutrition right at the start of this section: about schoolchildren’s lunch. From food diaries that were kept by forty-one families for one week, discussions in the doctor’s clinic—which in part formed good control material for the food diaries—and some household account books that were kept by individual families, a series of data emerged that we list here. 6 Lotte Schenk-Danzinger (1905–1922) stayed in the village for six weeks and carried out the research in partnership with ten other participants. Marie Jahoda wrote the main text of the study; Hans Zeisel (1905–1992) put together the outline “On the History of Sociography,” which was published as an appendix, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, who also was responsible for the study as director of the research center, wrote the introduction. See also chapter 17.

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If the 287 days logged in the food diary are arranged according to the number of meals per day, the following overview is produced: Number of daily meals 2 3 4

in days 6 210 71 (7 X 41 =) 287

in % 2 73 25 100

Three meals—morning, noon, and evening—are therefore the rule. In exceptional cases there are only two meals per day; sometimes there is a snack in addition to the three meals. Of the forty-one families, the following ate meat during the week: Number of meals with meat per week 0 1 2 3 4

Number of families 6 22 8 2 3 41

in % 15 54 19 5 7 100

All twenty-two families that ate meat once per week, ate it on Sunday [. . .]. All those who ate meat more often also ate it on Sunday. Of the fifty-six meals with meat that were reported, thirty-four were horse meat, eighteen roast rabbit, two beef, one “mince” and one pork. One unemployed man says that cat meat is also eaten: Cats are always disappearing. Mr. H.’s cat disappeared just a few days ago. Cat meat is very good. Dogs are also eaten. But even that was back when I was working. For example, they roasted a dog at J.T.’s one time. Just a few days ago a man was given a dog as a present by a farmer on the condition that he would kill it painlessly. He ran all over the place looking for a pot for the blood and was finally given one. He had to hand over a piece of dog meat for it. The pot came from Family A.

The butcher’s boy explains: While the factory was still in operation, we slaughtered twelve pigs and six cows per week. Now it is six to eight pigs and one cow; but they’re not bought by the people in Marienthal; it’s the people in the surrounding area, who never used to do their shopping here. The Marienthal people have switched from beef and pork to horse meat. Marienthal used to only have one horse meat butcher, but now a second one has set up shop in the past year. Both did good business at the start of the unemployment; but after the first few months two horsemeat butchers proved too much for the town. The later arrival is surviving; the first is going under.

The 287 evening meals consisted of: Coffee (mostly black) and bread Leftovers from lunch Freshly prepared food

[Number of meals] 132 114 41 (7 x 41 =) 287

in % 45 40 15 100

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Twenty-five percent of the evening meals therefore consist of either the food from lunch or of the coffee that is regularly drunk in the morning.7 For small children, the black coffee—it is of course without exception malt coffee—is supplemented with milk or replaced with cocoa made with water. Some families report that they have not had any sugar at home for two years; for cost-saving reasons they only use saccharine, which is a substitute for the flavor but has no nutritional value whatsoever. In some cases, saccharine is used in rotation with sugar. People usually switch to saccharine in the second week after their first unemployment insurance payment [. . .]. The following are the food diaries of two families: Family 818 Minimal family, 57g per day and ­consumption unit. Monday B:9 Coffee and bread M: Erbswurstsuppe ­[reconstituted pea soup], Grießschmarrn [grits] S: — E: Coffee and bread with lard Tuesday B: Coffee and bread M: Cabbage and potatoes S: — E: Cabbage Wednesday B: Coffee and bread M: Potato soup and Krautfleckerln S: — E: Coffee and bread Thursday B: Coffee and bread M: Potato stew S: E: Friday B: M:

7

— Potato stew Coffee and bread Soup with potato noodles

Family 167 Average family, 98g per day and consumption unit. Monday B: Cocoa and bread rolls M: Lentils and dumplings S: E: Tuesday B: M:

Coffee and bread with lard Lentils and dumplings Coffee and bread Maggi soup and Krautfleckerln [noodles with cabbage] — Krautfleckerln and coffee

S: E: Wednesday B: Coffee and bread M: Soup, cabbage, and cauliflower S: — E: Coffee and bread Thursday B: Cocoa and bread M: Artificial soup, cabbage, and potatoes S: Bread with lard E: Coffee and bread with butter Friday B: Coffee and bread M: Soup and “Schinkenfleckerln” [noodles with ham, prepared here with horse meat]

Original note: The Austrian Research Center for Economic Psychology has only recently carried out a research project into the role played by coffee in the nutrition of economically disadvantaged social classes. The authors noted the peculiar double significance of coffee as a foodstuff that is at the same time clearly perceived as a semi-luxury and plays therefore, particularly for the poorest classes, a key role in many meals [im Mittelpunkt des Speisezettels steht]. 8 Original note: When the mother from Family 81 came with her three children to the doctor’s clinic, it was discovered that the children were having difficulties eating. The mother lamented that a good part of what little food she could offer them went to waste. In the doctor’s opinion, the children’s eating difficulties were connected to the lack of vitamins in their diet, although this cannot be ascertained purely on the basis of these individual cases. 9 Original note: B = breakfast, M = midday meal, S = snack, E = evening meal.

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— Coffee and bread

Coffee and white bread Soup and poppy-seed noodles

S: E: Saturday B: M: S: E: Sunday B: M:

S: E:

— Coffee and white bread

S: E:

Coffee and bread Potato soup and beans — Coffee and bread

— Coffee, bread, horse meat sausage Cocoa and bread rolls Horse meat stew and bread Bread with lard Horse meat stew and potatoes Tea and bread rolls Beef soup with liver dumplings, mince, and salad Tea Mince and salad, coffee

Although it was impossible for us, for material reasons, to monitor the management of comprehensive household statistics in multiple households, we are nevertheless presenting a two-week excerpt from the budget of an average family to complete the picture. Since at the start of this fourteen-day period between two payouts of unemployment benefit, all food had been eaten down to the last morsel and all that remained at the end of the period was a little fat, a quarter kg of salt and a few kilograms of coal, purchases are almost entirely equal to consumption in this section. Since, in addition, very narrow margins are applied to the variation of a budget at this level, several conclusions can be drawn from these figures from a relatively short period. They concern a family with seven people (two adults, five children under age fourteen = 4.8 consumption units). The family receives benefits amounting to forty-nine schillings in fourteen days, and thus with 73g per day plus consumption unit, that is, 44g for one child, is still not within the minimal families group. 51/3 1¼ 12 20 28 3 50 30

kg kg l kg g dk

1½ 1 6 2 8 2½ 1 1

kg kg kg kg kg l

½ ¼

kg kg

45 50 kg

Flour Rice Bread Bread rolls Milk Lard Oil Beef with bones makeweight Beef bones Granulated sugar Box of saccharine Eggs Vegetables (sauerkraut, lettuce, spinach) Potatoes Pulses (beans, lentils) Salt Vinegar Pepper Malt coffee Fig coffee Cocoa Cigarettes Soda and soap Coal

3.58 0.80 8.00 1.40 10.64 7.20 0.18 0.95 0.30 1.78 0.30 0.72 1.56 1.44 1.74 0.70 0.30 0.10 0.48 0.48 0.20 0.45 1.70 4.00 49.00

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The heavy consumption of flour is striking: 5.5kg is a relatively large amount for a period of fourteen days. The vegetable consumption, by contrast, is extremely small, which is clearly related to the high prices at this time of year—the two weeks from May 14 to 27. The little piece of beef with bones was bought for the first Sunday of this period; the beef bones for the soup were bought for the second Sunday, by which time there was clearly no longer enough money for meat. Another notable point is the regular and relatively expensive consumption of milk: 2 liters per day, primarily going to the children. This care that the parents show for their children while forgoing even the most basic of their own needs was also striking during the home visits for this family. The following excerpts from the turnover figures of the consumer association complete our findings about the shifts within individual budgets. For example, flour consumption shows the following change:     Flour consumption     (price turnover) 1928 1930

100 112

This increase is clearly based on the fact that many foodstuffs are replaced by dishes that contain flour. Within flour consumption, a change from expensive wheat flour to cheaper rye flour can be seen. For purchases of butter and margarine there is the following shift: 1928 1929 1930

Butter 100 69 38

Margarine 100 160 192

Turnover of coffee and cocoa shows an analogous countermovement: 1928 1929 1930

Coffee 100 75 63

Cocoa 100 118 141

Chocolate consumption fell by 57 percent. The confectioner of [the] GrammatNeusiedel [municipality] reported a similar phenomenon:10 Consumption has fallen by a quarter since the unemployment began. Sunday consumption has fallen from 30 to 40 schillings to 16 to 18 schillings. Previously he prepared 16 to 17 cakes for Saturday and Sunday; today, two are enough. Expensive chocolates are not bought at all anymore; almost without exception, people only buy bars weighing 10g each. Moreover, at the same time as all other chocolates and confectionary fall, the consumption of broken chocolate rises from 5kg to 15kg per month. Shortly after the payout of unemployment support, consumption increases rapidly. He believes that many young men buy chocolate and banana lollipops instead of alcohol.

10 Grammat-Neusiedel

(Gramatneusiedl) is the municipality of which Marienthal is part.

“Books on the bonfire.” On the occasion of the Nazi book burnings, Edgar Zilsel, member of the Vienna Circle, gave a lecture on Galileo Galilei. (Courtesy of Wienbibliothek im Rathaus.)

CHAPTER FIVE

LOGICAL EMPIRICISM Gernot Waldner

T

“logical empiricism” refers to one of the most prominent philosophical movements of the twentieth century, which became dominant within the AngloSaxon world. Its origins can be decisively traced back to the philosophy of the Vienna Circle, whose members had various ties to Red Vienna culture and its protagonists. The Vienna Circle was a group of philosophically interested male and female academics, many of Jewish origin, from diverse disciplines. Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, Herbert Feigl, Olga Hahn-Neurath, Olga Taussky-Todd, Edgar Zilsel, Viktor Kraft, Karl Menger, Richard von Mises, Gustav Bergmann, Philipp Frank, Kurt Gödel, and several others made up the group’s inner circle; the most prominent temporary members were Alfred J. Ayer, Karl Bühler, Josef Frank, Hans Kelsen, Charles W. Morris, Karl Raimund Popper, Alfred Tarski, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Willard Van Orman Quine. The history of the Vienna Circle has been divided into an early phase (1918–1929), during which above all the philosophy of Wittgenstein was central, and a high-profile, late phase (1929–1938), which is characterized by the founding of the Ernst Mach Society, increased conferences, congresses, and publications, and was punctuated by the political caesura of the year 1934. In that year, officials not only destroyed and dismantled Red Vienna but also dissolved the Ernst Mach Society; Otto Neurath escaped political persecution by the Austrofascists by emigrating to Holland, then later fleeing to Great Britain to escape the invading German military. Other members of the Vienna Circle also escaped, many fleeing to England and America. Although some members of the Vienna Circle were active in Prague and Berlin, there were three conditions that favored Vienna as the birthplace of logical empiricism. First, the school reform of the late nineteenth century institutionally solidified the natural sciences into the curricula of the Austrian school system and contributed to the fact that the generation of the Vienna Circle immersed themselves in mathematics and physics from an early age. Additionally, the university extension movement (Volksbildungsbewegung), which originated in Oxford and Cambridge, also gained ground in Vienna and, in working with the Social Democratic city government, made the natural sciences a focus of its curriculum. Second, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the mechanistic worldview of the natural sciences was put into question by figures such as Einstein, Schrödinger, Curie, Boltzmann, Rutherford, and others. As such, many found an alternative to this mechanistic worldview in empiriocriticism, a form of innovative empiricism advocated by Ernst Mach in Vienna. Indeed, Mach’s professorship in the philosophy of science at the University of Vienna, a chair which was he term

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later occupied by Schlick, turned Vienna into an international center for scientific-theoretical discussions. Third, through the publication of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus and his contact with the Vienna Circle, Vienna became a hub for debates on logic, mathematics, and the philosophy of language. Correspondingly, three central themes of the Vienna Circle emerge: a varied critique of metaphysical propositions, the transformation of (academic) philosophy into logical empiricism, and the establishment of a theory and practice of unified science. The Vienna Circle, however, was not monolithic, and can be seen as consisting of multiple overlapping circles, in which numerous intellectuals exchanged ideas both in private and in cafés. For example, Neurath discussed the economic theory behind the emerging liberal school of national economics; Carnap gave talks at the Bauhaus in Weimar; Kelsen sought to apply scientific insights to legal reasoning; Josef Frank adapted facets of the scientific conception of the world from the Vienna Circle for his architectural pursuits; the artist Gerd Arntz developed a statistical visual-language for Neurath’s Social and Economic Museum; and Zilsel authored works of social and cultural criticism centering on the concept of “genius.” Neurath also wrote a work on empirical sociology and began to compile an all-encompassing scientific encyclopedia, a project inspired by the French Enlightenment. For this reason, biologists, pedagogues, astronomers, psychoanalysts, and other researchers all presented work within the larger framework of the Vienna Circle as well. The Vienna Circle’s international contacts were numerous. Willard Van Orman Quine, an American philosopher and logician, visited Vienna; many congresses were organized and took place in Czechoslovakia, England, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The Vienna Circle also left its mark on literature: Hermann Broch studied with Vienna Circle members, Rudolf Brunngraber (Neurath’s assistant) authored an “empirical-sociological” novel (Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert, see chapter 25), and Robert Musil was influenced by and wrote his dissertation on the philosophy of Ernst Mach. Within academic philosophy there were contacts with the Frankfurt School, and numerous debates with figures within hermeneutics and existential philosophy (such as Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger), and fierce controversies with scientists who shared the National Socialist and Italian Fascist ideas of biologism. In response to Lenin’s critique of Mach’s conception of empiriocriticism, several articles were published defending the Vienna Circle as holding the more up-to-date theory of materialism since they were in the position to successfully integrate the theory of relativity into their views. Politically, the connections between the Vienna Circle and Red Vienna are multifarious. Neurath, Philipp Frank, Josef Frank, and others were members of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP) and were active in educational politics for Red Vienna. Some members of the group offered popular lectures or seminars at Vienna’s popular education centers. In the founding document of the Vienna Circle, education is explicitly named as the central medium by which its philosophy could be spread; other members were also involved in the school reform movement. The Vienna Circle was not politically homogeneous, however: Schlick saw himself as an upper-class liberal, and in his debates with Neurath, their political differences were more than clear. What many members had in common was their participation in the public sphere: they regularly contributed articles to daily newspapers (e.g., Arbeiter-Zeitung), monthly periodicals (e.g., Der Kampf), and scientific journals (e.g., Erkenntnis). As such, the Vienna Circle represents a diverse group of academics engaged in the public life of Red Vienna.

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Further reading Friedman 1999 Kraft 1950 Stadler 1997

1. Anonymous Magic and Technology First published as “Magie und Technik,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, January 3, 1931, 5. Translated by Daniel Binswanger Friedman. Between 1929 and 1932 more than thirty lectures organized by the Vienna Circle took place. In addition to the group’s core members, biologists (Ludwig Bertalanffy, Wilhelm Marinelli), national economists (Karl Polanyi, Richard Strigl), sociologists (Hans Zeisel) and psychologists (Egon Brunswik, Wilhelm Reich) presented their specialized knowledge to the public. The goal of these events was to reach a wider audience, to cooperate with other institutions (for instance, the Werkbund, an association of craftsmen and artists) and to locate the individual sciences within the larger framework of a unified science that the Vienna Circle was seeking. The following article from the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the SDAP’s daily, summarizes a lecture given by Otto Neurath in which he addresses the pivotal theme of the Enlightenment: the displacement of magic and religion by science and technology. A lecture series organized by the Austrian Werkbund recently held its inaugural session with a magnificent talk by Otto Neurath on “Magic and Technology.” The process of upheaval stemming from developments in capitalism, science, and technology in Europe and America has already taken its course, yet in Asia and Africa it has just begun. The revolution of modes of life and modes of production has also shifted humankind’s worldview. Capitalism and technology are spreading across and pushing beyond the borders of the Western and Occidental cultural spheres; older cultures such as Japan, China, India, and the barbaric peoples of central Asia and Africa are being pulled into the current of capitalistic commodity production. Here, the engineer or the scientist encounters the priest, magician, or shaman; the technological and scientific forms of thought from Europe come face to face with thousand-year-old religious views. But there the conflict will not be as difficult or long-term as in Europe; and not simply because here modern thought, already in its highest developmental form, has infiltrated the ancient conceptual realm and technology has been pounded into our brains with calculated force. The cultures of the world—which the twentieth century is breaking in upon at this moment—are not built on religious worldviews like the Occident, but rather on magical ones. And, as Otto Neurath has shown, technology and magic are not in fact fundamentally different from one another; rather they are deeply related at their core: technology is the continuation of magic on a different cultural plane. The man of magic thoroughly resembles the man of technology in his mental and spiritual orientation.

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The man of magic.

What is magic? If a Melanesian native hangs the bow with which he wounded his enemy over an open fire in order to make that wound become hot and fester—we call this magic. If a Javanese farmer couple heads out into their fields at night just before the rice-bloom season begins in order to stimulate the rice crop’s fertility by their own example—we call this magic. Magic is when, during a massive drought, the Japanese Ainos move through their fields with screens through which they gently sift water in order to lure rain to the fields by way of imitation. “Magic,” states Neurath, “is the meager method of survival and tool use of primitive peoples.” Even though it may appear as such on first glance, there is nothing crazy or unreasonable within the magical actions of these primitive peoples. The mode of thought in this epoch is “animism”—the notion that our own emotions and drives can also be found again within the external world; the notion that nature itself is at its core both living and animated with a soul. The man of animism could not react to such a conception of life full of spiritual force in the same way as we would, since we have a different understanding of how things work. He was simply not able to use technology in his interactions with nature. He had no choice but to define his relation to the world through magic! Magical ceremonies, images, and spells held the same practical meaning for the man of magic as functional and goal-oriented actions; they were inextricably connected with one another. If a tree that was to be cut down were said to be the home of a demon capable of exercising revenge, then it is clear that the tree must not be felled until sufficient protective measures had been taken against the spirit. “Magic,” says Siegmund [sic] Freud, “is the technology of animism.” Magic is the guiding principle within cultures of animism, just as technology is the guiding principle within our own. The social aim of the religious era.

Animism itself was not yet a religion; but its world of demons and spirits already contained the conditions of possibility for a religion to come into being. In that historical moment, the magical system became a constraint on development, since it was complete in character and had regimented and placed rules on all human relationships and activities. Each localized form of magic is starkly distinct from that of its neighbors, and thus no tribe is in any position to adopt a methodological innovation or shift in perspective from any other; nor can an autonomous innovation be undertaken internally since, in that case, the previously inviolable taboos would thereby become vulnerable. The magical apparatus prohibits any development. This is the moment in which religious ideas begin to unfold. Religion unchained the economic and technological forces by transforming the real spirits of animism into unreal apparitions, relocating them to heaven and hell, or at the very least somewhere outside the earthly realm. In this way religion made magic superfluous; the methodological substratum of magic thus became free to develop. For religion, individual customs and rules are unimportant and superfluous; instead it concentrates its energy on the behavior of human beings with one another and on the relationship between human beings and God. Only personality and disposition are of central importance. Thus, the monasteries of the Middle Ages could spread the most modern methods of agriculture and architecture in all directions, free from the restraints of any magical taboos. Only by building upon the foundation of Christian culture did international commerce, international art, and scientific development become possible in Europe. For the religion of the Middle Ages belonged to the “modes of production of material life.” The peoples who did not have the capacity to develop religious

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conceptions remained stagnant, as primitives, within their current stage of cultural development. In the Orient the magical worldviews proved stronger in the long term than their religious ones, slowly and consistently eroding them from the inside out. Only the Occident brought religion to its peak and therefore, from this point, can it begin its process of overcoming religion. Modern man—technology as magic.

The era of magic wasted its energy on ceremonies and events that served earthly goals, yet whose attainment was fundamentally superfluous. The era of religion wastes its energy on extraterrestrial goals that themselves become superfluous. “God is a hypothesis I no longer require for my postulations,” noted [Pierre-Simon] Laplace at the beginning of the last century; this was the annunciation of a new era. The development of technology rendered religion useless as a factor in production. The modern man is once again oriented toward earth because technology ensures the achievement of his goals. Socialism, which frees technology from the fetters of capitalist modes of production—eliminating its aimless squandering of energy—should become the fulfillment of the “earthly” kingdom. The hopes of such men of magic were childishly overexaggerated (due to their very real helplessness), and those of the religious-theological era were displaced into the realm of the beyond. Technology and science give rise to hopes that can be realized through collective work. These hopes, however, easily exceed those of the man of magic, yet for him the path to the era of technology stands open; technology—and with this quite optimistic prognosis Otto Neurath brought his talk to an end—is the fulfillment of magic!

2. Philipp Frank On the Intuitive Nature of Physical Theories First published as “Über die ‘Anschaulichkeit’ physikalischer Theorien,” Die Naturwissen­ schaften 16, no. 8 (1928): 121–28.1 Translated by Daniel Binswanger Friedman. In 1908 V. I. Lenin published his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy.2 This text was Lenin’s response to the Russian translation of the writings of Ernst Mach, which were very well received among Mensheviks and Bolsheviks of the time (including Alexander Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Basarov, and Maxim Gorky). In this book, Lenin attacks Mach’s philosophy as idealistic and over the span of four hundred pages argues that (put rather simply) the external world is mirrored in internal consciousness. Lenin does not enter into a discussion of quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity. In the following article, Philipp Frank discusses what “intuitiveness” may consist of within contemporary physics. Frank’s mathematically based response defends Mach, criticizes Lenin, and attempts to present logical empiricism as the more up-to-date theory of materialism. 1 The German word “Anschaulichkeit,” intentionally placed in quotation marks, centers on the notion of external, optical vision which is lost in the most commonly used translation of the term within the field of physics. 2 V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, trans. A. Fineberg (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1950).

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Many physicists currently working in laboratories often complain that modern physical theories have become unintuitive [unanschaulich]. These complaints especially apply to the two most brilliant and influential theories of our time: The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. [. . .] With respect to Bohr’s atomic model, most would concede that the electrons orbiting around the atomic nucleus in such a model do count as “intuitive.” But why? We can, of course, recall the planets that orbit around the sun. Yet in reality any actual optical perception of a physical body really only amounts to the observation and experience of the reactions of these physical bodies on incoming light waves. If, however, the orbital amplitude is small enough in comparison with the light wavelengths, this reaction can never exist (or be represented) as a geometrically similar image of an elliptical path. Instead, the reaction consists of characteristics of the light emitted from the system, the discontinuous spectrum and scattered radiation, just as it is described by quantum mechanics. It is simply an illusion to wish to see something similarly intuitive in the scaled-down planetary orbits. If elliptical orbital paths on the magnitude of the smallest wavelengths (or even smaller) can be said to have a point, then it is only as geometrical equivalencies of algebraic formulas or as much-loved recollections from Newtonian physics. Therefore, why we conceive of the orbiting and jumping electrons as especially intuitive is quite strange. One could not assign any other visible experience to the jump of an electron than that of an experience of radiation, which is also assigned its foundational laws by way of the new quantum mechanics. Thus, it seems as though, with this demand of intuitiveness, what one actually seeks is that this same theory (excluding the radiation) should also give an account of a completely different experience (in our case of planetary orbits), which through experience—or more precisely through the historical development of physics—is more familiar to us. [. . .] One finds affirmation in the view that the preferential mode of representation of physical processes through the movement of points in space and time has absolutely nothing to do with “intuitiveness” or with “the boundedness of the senses,” but is in fact only a partially conscious, partially unconscious effect of metaphysical materialism; this is most obvious given how the cited statements of Ernst Mach (in which the sharpest rejection of that viewpoint are to be found) have an effect on other authors for whom materialism is essential as a worldview, but for whom “intuitiveness” or a “heuristic meaning” of physical theories play no role. Especially Mach’s remarks—in which we found a solid epistemological foundation of the most recent quantum mechanics—provoked Lenin [. . .] to mount fervid attacks in his 1908 work “Materialism and Empirio Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy.” There he states: From the standpoint of the straightforward and unmuddled Machism which Mach openly advocated in 1872, it is indisputable that if molecules, atoms, in a word, chemical elements, cannot be perceived, they are “mere thought” [das bloß Gedachte]. If so, and if space and time have no objective reality, it is obvious that it is not essential to think of atoms spatially! Let physics and chemistry “restrict themselves” to a three-dimensional space in which matter moves; for the explanation of electricity, however, we may seek its elements in a space that is not three-dimensional! [.  .  .] Mach’s argument amounts to deserting science for fideism.3 (Lenin 3 Lenin,

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 181–82.

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understands the term “fideism” as referring to a doctrine that favors belief in place of knowledge, or at the very least, one that attributes some significant meaning to belief). [. . .]

Spoken with such pointedness and intensity, these views—coming from the man who not only created the Soviet state but also granted it its ideological foundation and anchored it in a materialistic worldview—reflect the massive significance that this worldview endows upon the question of whether the representation of natural phenomena within space and time is the only acceptable view to adopt. Among those who fiercely reject the new physical theories founded upon Mach’s positivism are the conscious materialist and the idealist, who regards materialism (as it appears in inanimate nature) as a mere counterpart to vitalism (as it appears in the animate, natural world). The foundational idea of materialism stemming from the Enlightenment is the mathematical representation of all natural phenomena. I would assert, however, that precisely within these new theories (relativity as much as quantum mechanics) we possess an important indication that this foundational idea is not necessarily tied to a primitive mechanistic conception; we possess an important indication that these foundational ideas’ inability to incorporate nature as a whole is not proof of the “bankruptcy of materialism.” Rather this can be seen as evidence of the fact that a gradual permeation of science into world affairs is still developing in the same direction today, which can be partially characterized by a takeover of ideas that are methodologically foundational for the Laplacian worldview. Materialism itself is thus not overcome, but rather only its first form, the idea that all phenomena are essentially just the movement of small points in space, which is conceived of more or less materialistically.

3. Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath The Vienna Circle’s Scientific Conception of the World First published as Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung—Der Wiener Kreis: Veröffentlichung des Vereins Ernst Mach (Vienna: Artur Wolf, 1929), 9–30. Translated by Daniel Binswanger Friedman. With the publication of this text, the public phase of the Vienna Circle began. The occasion for its publication was a professorial appointment for Moritz Schlick in the German city of Bonn, after which all members pleaded for Schlick to remain in Vienna. They founded the Ernst Mach Society (Verein Ernst Mach) and, with this text, positioned themselves as both a philosophical and public movement. The term “conception” (Weltauffassung) should be seen as a scientifically oriented antonym to “ideology” (Weltanschauung). At the same time, it was also a preoccupation of the group to develop “everyday tools of thought” and to economically, pedagogically, and socially reform society. Most probably authored by Carnap and Neurath, the text itself is potentially too focused on the socialist cultural movement for Schlick’s more moderate views; and likely for that reason he distanced himself from it. Many claim that today metaphysical and theological thought is on the rise in both daily life and in the sciences. Does this refer to a more general trend or only to a shift limited to a few particular circles? Such a claim is easily verified by taking a look at the

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themes of university lectures and at the titles of philosophical publications. However, the oppositional spirit of the Enlightenment and of anti-metaphysical factual research [Tatsachenforschung] is also currently gaining strength as it becomes more aware of its own character and its own goals. In some circles, though, a mindset is thriving more than ever, with its feet planted in concrete experience and ill-disposed toward speculation, strengthened precisely by this growing resistance. In all branches of the empirical sciences this spirit of a scientific worldview is alive and well. However, this view is held and systematically thought through by only a few leading thinkers, and they are rarely in the position to assemble a circle of like-minded individuals around them. We can find anti-metaphysical efforts above all in England, where the tradition of the great empiricists still lives on; the investigations of Russell and Whitehead in the fields of logic and the analysis of reality have gained international importance. In the USA these efforts have taken on the most diverse forms; and in a certain sense here one must also mention James in the same vein.4 The new Russia is thoroughly searching for a scientific worldview, even if it is partially following models of older materialistic movements. In continental Europe a concentration of productive research in this direction can also be notably found in Berlin (Reichenbach, Petzold, Grelling, Dubislav, and others) and in Vienna. The fact that Vienna would be an especially well-suited place for this development is historically understandable. For a long time during the second half of the nineteenth century in Vienna, Liberalism was the leading political force. Its world of ideas originated in the Enlightenment, in empiricism, in utilitarianism and in the free-trade movement in England. In the Viennese liberal movement, scholars with international reputations held leading positions. Here, the anti-metaphysical spirit was cultivated; let us not forget Theodor Gomperz, who translated (from 1869 to 1880) the work of Mill, Sueß, Jodl, and others. We have this spirit of the Enlightenment to thank for the fact that Vienna has been a leading force in the field of scientifically oriented popular education [Volksbildung]. With the assistance of Victor Adler and Friedrich Jodl, the Association for Popular Education [Volksbildungsverein] was founded and continues its work. The “public university courses” [volkstümliche Universitätskurse] and the association Volkshochschule Wien Volksheim were created by Ludo Hartmann, the well-known historian whose antimetaphysical stance and materialistic conception of history found expression in all of his works. And from this same spirit, the Free School Association [Verein Freie Schule] emerged as a precursor to today’s education reform.5 We have characterized the scientific worldview through two main postulates: first, it is empirical and positivistic in nature; there is only experiential knowledge, constructed upon the unmediated given. With this, the boundary line for content of legitimate scientific research is drawn. Second, the scientific worldview is marked by the use of a particular method, namely logical analysis. The efforts of this scientific work are oriented toward the ultimate goal of achieving one unified science through the application of logical analysis on empirical materials. Since the meaning of every scientific claim must be able to be formulated in such a way that it can be traced back to a claim concerning the empirically given, the meaning of any term (regardless of which branch of science it may belong to) must be able to be determined through a step-by-step process to other terms, in the end leading all the way back to those of the most elementary level that directly refer the empirically given itself. 4 The authors refer to the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910), cofounder, with Charles Sanders Peirce, of American pragmatism and the brother of well-known author Henry James. 5 See chapter 16.

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If such an analysis were to be carried out for each and every term, they could be integrated into a “constitutive system.” Consequently, the investigations that are oriented toward such a constitutive system, “the constitutive theory,” make up the frame in which the logical analysis of the scientific worldview can be applied. The implementation of such investigations quickly shows that traditional Aristotelian-Scholastic logic is utterly insufficient for this purpose. Only now, through modern symbolic logic (“Logistik”), is it possible to achieve the necessary precision of definitions of terms and claims, as well as to formalize the intuitive processes of deduction of everyday thought—that is to say, to bring our thought under a strict form, automatically controlled by a system of signs. The investigations of constitutive theory show that the terms derived from a subject’s own psychic experiences and qualities belong to the most basic, foundational layer of the constitutive system; above them, the physical objects are organized, and this organization constitutes the physical experiences of others and finally the investigative objects of the social sciences. The integration of concepts from distinct branches of science into the constitutive system is already recognizable today; there is still much work to be done, though, with respect to its full realization. With the evidence for the potential of the system and the existence of the form for the complete system of terms, the direct connection of all claims back to the empirically given as such becomes recognizable, and with this the organizational form of unified science in general. [. . .] We are experiencing how the spirit of a scientific worldview is seeping into the forms of both personal and public life, our instruction, our upbringing, and our systems of architecture at an increasing rate, and we are able to see how it aids in structuring economic and social life through rational principles. The scientific worldview serves life and life itself absorbs it.

4. Rudolf Carnap Overcoming Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language First published as “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache,” in Erkenntnis 2 (1931), 219–41. Translated by Daniel Binswanger Friedman. At the time of its development, logical empiricism repeatedly attempted to position itself with respect to contemporary philosophy and to the history of philosophy that preceded it. Of course, within the Vienna Circle there were different historiographic dispositions, yet the movement’s constant concern was to present logical empiricism as the form of philosophy that was most appropriate for the scientific age. In his essay, Rudolf Carnap develops criteria founded upon logical reasoning and empirical investigations in order to distinguish meaningful statements from pseudo-statements. Following this line, metaphysics is characterized by the fact that it is constructed from and consists of pseudo-statements. Without naming too many names, let it suffice that the examples cited here by Carnap could be ascribed to contemporary texts of Othmar Spann, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Klages, Oswald Spengler, and others within the metaphysical tradition. From the Greek skeptics to the empiricists of the nineteenth century, there have been many opponents to metaphysics throughout history. The forms taken by these proposed objections were, however, quite varied. Some declared the tenets of metaphysics to be

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false because they contradict experiential knowledge. Others held such metaphysical views to be simply doubtful, since the way they formulated problems exceeded the bounds of human knowledge. Many anti-metaphysicians described the pursuit of metaphysical questions as unproductive; whether or not one could answer such questions was irrelevant, and in any case, it was seen as unnecessary to spend time with them; one should instead dedicate oneself wholly to the task that each day sets before the actively engaged human being! Through the development of modern logic, it became possible to provide a new, more exact answer to the question of the validity and justification of metaphysics. The investigations of “applied logic” or “epistemology,” whose task it is to clarify the cognitive content of scientific statements and thereby clear up the meaning of words (“terms”) that appear in such statements, lead to both a positive and a negative result. The positive result is achieved in the field of empirical science; the individual terms of the various branches of science become clarified; their formal-logical and epistemological connections are revealed. In the field of metaphysics (including value theory and normative and social sciences) logical analysis leads to the negative result that the alleged statements of this field are completely devoid of meaning. Through this, a radical overcoming of metaphysics is achieved that was not previously possible with earlier anti-metaphysical positions. Of course, we can find related thought already present in some earlier considerations, for example, in those of nominalist character; yet the decisive step is only now possible, since logic has become a sufficiently precise tool as a result of its development over the past decades. If we say that the so-called statements of metaphysics are meaningless, we mean this word in the strictest sense possible. Imprecisely, one might describe a statement or a question as meaningless if its assertion is seen to be completely unproductive (for example: “What is the average body weight of all people who live in Vienna and whose telephone numbers end in a 3?”); or one might use this term as a description for a statement that is blatantly false (for example: “In 1910 Vienna had six inhabitants.”); or to describe a statement that is not only empirically but also logically false, and thus contradictory (for example: “Both person A and B are one year older than the other.”). Even if they are rather unproductive or even false, statements of this type are still meaningful, since only meaningful statements can be divided up into the categories of theoretically productive and unproductive, true or false. In the strictest sense, the term “meaningless” in fact refers to a sequence of words, which—inside of a particular existing language—does not constitute a statement at all. It can happen that at first glance such a sequence of words may look like it is in fact a statement: we will call such a case a pseudo-statement. Our thesis claims that through a logical analysis of language, the alleged statements of metaphysics will be revealed as pseudo-statements. [. . .] With respect to many metaphysical terms, it can now be shown that they do not meet the given requirements and thus that they are devoid of meaning. As an example, let us take the metaphysical term “principle” (in the sense of principle of being, not as principle of knowledge or axioms). Various metaphysicians can answer the question of what constitutes the highest principle of the world (or “of things,” “of existence,” “of being”); for instance: water, number, form, movement, life, spirit, ideas, the unconscious, the act, the “Good,” and many others in this vein. In order to find the meaning that the word “principle” holds within these metaphysical questions we need to ask the metaphysician under which conditions a sentence of the form “X is the principle of Y” is true, and under which conditions can it be said to be false. In other words, we are asking for the mark of distinction, or the definition of the word “principle.” Normally, the metaphysician answers roughly as such: “X is the principle of Y” should mean “Y arises

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from X,” “the existence of Y rests upon the existence of X,” “Y exists by means of X,” or with other similar expressions. These words, though, are multifarious and imprecise. Often, they do have a clear meaning; for example, we can say of a thing or a process Y that it arises from X if we observe that from things or processes of the form X, things or processes of the form Y often or always follow (a causal relationship in the sense of a rulebased succession). Yet the metaphysician tells us that he does not mean this kind of empirically determinable relationship; for otherwise his metaphysical thesis would just amount to simple experiential statements similar in form to those of physics. Here, the phrase “arises from” should not be taken to have the meaning of a relationship of temporal succession or of conditional possibility, as would normally be attributed to it. Yet no other criterion of meaning is provided. Consequently, an alleged “metaphysical” meaning, defined here as being distinct with respect to the other empirical ones, is nowhere to be found. Let us recall the original meaning of the word “principium” (and its respective counterpart in Greek). Note that the same developments can be found here as well. The word has been explicitly divested of its original meaning of “origin” or “beginning”: it is no longer first in a temporal sense but is instead taken to mean the first in another, specifically metaphysical sense. However, the criteria for such a “metaphysical sense” are not specified. [. . .] Meaningful sentences can then be categorized in the following ways: to begin, there are sentences that are true simply based on their formal structure (“tautologies,” following Wittgenstein; they correspond more or less to Kant’s “analytic judgments”); they make no claim concerning reality itself. The formulas of logic and mathematics belong to this type; they are not themselves claims about reality, yet they aid in the transformation of such claims. Second, there are the negations of such statements (contradictions); they are self-contradictory and thus formally false. For all other remaining statements, the decision of whether they are true or false lies in the protocol statements [Protokollsätze]; consequently, they are (whether true or false) experiential statements and belong to the field of empirical science. If one wishes to construct a statement that does not belong to one of these types, it will automatically be meaningless. Since metaphysics does not wish to employ analytic statements, nor does it wish to be drawn into the realm of empirical science, it is thereby required to either use words for which no criteria can be specified, and are therefore devoid of meaning, or to compile meaningful words in such a way that yields neither an analytic (i.e., contradictory) nor an empirical statement. In both cases, this necessarily results in pseudo-statements. [. . .] If we say that the statements of metaphysics are utterly meaningless or that they signify nothing, a certain feeling of reticence may still plague those who reasonably do agree with our results: can it really be the case that so many figures from the most varying epochs and cultures (even the most prominent and distinguished minds) expended so much energy and fervor on metaphysical questions if metaphysics itself consists of nothing more than empty, senseless words placed one next to the other? And would it be understandable that even today these works still exert such a strong impact on readers and listeners if they cannot even be said to simply contain errors, but that they in fact contain absolutely nothing at all? Such considerations are correct in the sense that metaphysics does in fact contain something, yet it is not theoretical content. The pseudo-sentences of metaphysics do not serve to aid in the representation of facts; neither in the form of already existing facts (for they would be true statements) nor in the form of not-yet-existing facts (for they would be at least able to be classified as false statements); rather they serve as a medium for the expression of our emotional existence.

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5. Edgar Zilsel The Intellectual State of our Time? First published as “Die geistige Situation der Zeit?,” Der Kampf 25, no. 4 (1932): 168– 76. Translated by Daniel Binswanger Friedman. Within the Vienna Circle Edgar Zilsel was a solitary figure, continually striving to maintain critical distance to all other theoretical positions held in the group. He completed a PhD in philosophical mathematics, although in practice his work more resembled that of a sociologist or historian. He taught numerous courses at popular education centers ranging from Chinese philosophy, electrical theory, and cultural history all the way to Kant. In short, he combined a knowledge of the natural sciences and the humanities in a singular fashion. In his review of Karl Jaspers’s The Intellectual State of our Time,6 two unique, learned scholars confront one another, two thinkers who differ widely in their methods, demands, and capabilities for sociological self-reflection. One reads scientific texts in order to become acquainted with the new research findings shared within them. If, however, no new facts or even previously unknown connections between facts are presented in the book, then this normal approach to reading becomes untenable. Still, such books can also prove to be interesting. Each printed page is a social phenomenon and as such can be an object of investigation in its own right. If the text is characteristic for the social class in which it is rooted, and the author enjoys a certain reputation and is seen to occupy an important social position, the text can be very informative, even if it contains no new insights. These preconditions have been filled by two small publications in the social sciences within the last few months. The first bears the title The Intellectual State of our Era and appeared as the one-thousandth anniversary volume in the well-known Göschen Series (Berlin-Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1931).7 Its author is Karl Jaspers, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg and the author of a voluminous, metaphysically leaning work, “The Psychology of Ideologies” (1919), which has received considerable attention and is already in its third printing. [. . .] What, exactly, can our philosophical observer say about our current situation? All human activity has become rationalized and mechanized; technology provided the human race with all of life’s necessities, “yet in a form that diminishes any potential delight we might take from such necessities.” The internal attitude and external social norms, the thought and eroticism of human beings are rendered banal and standardized, “a love for things and other people disappears and only machinery remains.” Only mass events, spectacles, lotteries, and crossword puzzles excite interest: “the world appears to have fallen into the hands of mediocrity.”8 Democracy and the bureaucratic apparatus dominate our existence, “but even the organized masses are spirit-less and inhuman.” The sci6 For this translation, we decided not to use the title of the English translation of Jaspers’s Die Geistige Situation der Zeit, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul as Man in the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1933). Jaspers himself expressed dissatisfaction with the translation of the work in some of his letters. All excerpts from Jaspers’s book were translated by Daniel Binswanger Friedman. 7 The other book reviewed by Zilsel was Hans Freyer, Revolution von rechts (Jena: Diederichs, 1931). This section was omitted from our excerpt. 8 See chapters 25 and 29, in particular the selections by Stefan Zweig.

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ences become “subservient to the public interest,” language loses itself in a violent pathos and when it comes to dealmaking and thinking, the compromise prevails, a cowardly way to avoid making any decision. In healthy times, family represents the solid foundation of a well-rooted and stable life. That same family finds itself today in a state of complete dissolution. “The terror of divorce and polygamous eroticism, dread in the face of abortion, homosexuality, or suicide” is disappearing, while tormenting existential fear in the face of poverty and sickness is on the rise like never before. Every possible work-related joy has found its endpoint through the division of labor. Only sports fill the free time of the masses, yet what they seek there are mere bodily sensations and the reckless achievements of the individual: “in antiquity sports functioned as a wonderful mode of communication by exceptional human beings, revealing their godly origins; today’s situation could not be further from this reality.”9 The state of “spirit” is particularly disastrous. “Art is becoming a game, mere enjoyment; science is only concerned with technological uses, philosophy has become the equivalent of a classroom lesson or a hysterical type of pseudo-wisdom.” These are intense phenomena of decline, since true art should have its roots in the transcendental, true science should originate out of the pure theoretical thirst for knowledge, and true philosophy is the “essence of human beings in their intense questioning and danger through radical thinking.” Thus, according to this characterization, philosophy plays a similar role for nonbelievers as religion should for the ardently devout. As such, the chapter on art, science, and philosophy is an epic lamentation. We need not reproduce all of the chapter’s development, listing to all of the author’s grievances concerning the bleak, mechanistic grind of science and philosophy, the “mass-life at the universities,” the lack of a specific artistic style, the brutality of film, or the theatrical performances of Piscator. Whoever has experienced this tone can easily manufacture further variations on the same theme themselves. [. . .] We have attempted to reproduce the content of the book as clearly as possible. However, it is still necessary to discuss the author’s mode of expression since it can be treated as a fitting example for a method that has been almost universally employed within philosophy for some time now. As is common knowledge, battling against the opinions of the masses is particularly difficult; anonymous opponents elude every attempt to grab hold of them. This experience—which Ibsen artistically represented through the vivid image of Peter Gynt’s struggle against great evil—is expressed in Jaspers’s book in the following manner (159): The anonymous is (the) authentic being, it alone accomplishes the certitude to be open to the fact that nothing does not exist. The anonymous, though, is also the being of non-being, whose power is incomparable and incapable of truly being grasped, although it threatens to destroy everything. It is that which grants me the impetus to soar in becoming one with it, and it is that, against which I must struggle, if I seek out being. But this struggle is again solitary. The being of non-being is the pure uncanny, which brings unrest since one is uncertain what is to be fought for and what to be struggled against. In the face of this, it appears that nothing else remains except the brutal struggle for being in its respective egocentricity.

The methodology of presentation and research applied here—and let it be emphasized that it is quite common within philosophy, and in Germany, even within some 9 See

chapter 18.

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branches of the humanities—may be roughly characterized by the fact that manifold emotionally charged fantastical representations are conjured up through words placed next to one another, forming statement-like structures. When longer sections of the text are gathered together, an idea may surface that is only incidentally implied. It is one of the most intriguing sociological phenomena of our time, that this method can also be found in lecture halls, where—just a few rooms away—differential equations are being integrated, and physics experiments and microscopic investigations are being carried out. It counts as one of the most interesting sociological phenomena of our time that the same state laws regulate student assessments regardless whether they major in this kind of philosophy or in turbine construction or exchange law. One would need to conduct very carefully constructed, thorough investigations of science and technology, of the history and social function of higher education, of the technical and mental preconditions concerning the proliferation of the capitalist social order in order to sufficiently explain these curiosities, which to my mind have not yet been the subject of enough bewilderment.10 In line with the peculiarity of the employed method, a content-based analysis of Jaspers’s small volume is simply not possible. We live in a fully technologized and rationalized society: this fact is not up for debate. Where, then, should one even begin with the more far-reaching claims of the book? Is there anything left of the philosophy of culture if all types of empirical and causal investigation are missing? Undertaking an investigation of political corruption would be, for example, very informative; yet without a rough comparison of the parliamentary-democratic establishment with (for example) the absolutism of the seventeenth-century nobles, with the czarist civil servants who lived off betting and bribery, or even with the oriental Cadi and Mandarin structures, nothing can come of it. This question is certainly interesting: under which conditions in national foreign policy do mere strategies of power prove to be stronger than shared or disputed ideals? Yet, this question only takes on importance if we not only look at the contemporary English-Japanese and Fascist-Soviet-Russian relationships, but also at the subsidized agreements of arch-catholic France alongside, say, protestant Sweden and the Turkish sultan of the seventeenth century. Practicaltechnical needs and a purely theoretical will for knowledge are intertwined with one another in the development of the sciences; even an attempt at disentangling some of these threads would be commendable. But whoever decides to tackle such questions must know that in our current era there is not just engineering but also the completely impractical theory of relativity and astrophysics, and that in Galileo’s time, shipyards, artillery arsenals, and the construction of dams and canals were the birthplaces of the developing discipline of mechanics. Such types of historical and sociological comparisons are nowhere to be found in the book. As such, Jaspers’s complaints about today’s corruption, foreign policy, and science (65, 88f., 122f.) are not presented in a way that allows for any kind of content-based discussion whatsoever. On the other hand, it is precisely this that makes the text so fascinating: the fact that such vague complaints can fill up the whole book. Moreover, these complaints are oddly conflicting. The book occasionally comments on the theological tradition with quiet contempt: it speaks of the “irretrievable past” of religion—yet it is melancholic about religion’s degeneration. On the whole, the sciences and intellectualism appear unsatisfactory for Jaspers—yet the anti-scientific, theosophical occult trends are equally rejected as superstitious. Next 10

Original note: See some remarks in my “Soziologische Bemerkungen zur Philosophie der Gegenwart,” Der Kampf 23, no. 10 (1930): 410ff.

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to intellectualism, the spirit of the masses counts as the principle of evil. In this sense, the book’s orientation is thoroughly antidemocratic, although (and this is perhaps its most obvious characteristic) the concrete antidemocratic movements of our time (fascism and, of course, communism) are also rejected in the same vein. Democracy relies upon the very same half-knowledge and catchphrases as fascism and communism. The dictator who preaches in his own name is just a cheap replacement for authentic personality and as such breeds the kind of man who is at home in the masses (78, 97). Still though, this phenomenon is best understood framed within the context of the social class that gave rise to Jaspers’s value judgments. It is the highly educated, middle-class bourgeoise that speaks to us here. Who has not already heard very similar views coming from the mouths of university professors, high-ranking government officials, judges, and doctors? This class of educated citizens feels extremely uncomfortable in the present. Caught between big business and the masses, this social group has fallen into decline, having become economically and politically dwarfed. Rationalization and bureaucratization have robbed them of the joys of their work. In the world of purchasing and sales, amid the exhaust from the factories, their individual emotional needs are withering away. Everywhere the bourgeoisie looks, the uneducated masses seem to be crawling out of the woodwork. Intellect has failed us, for science only exacerbates this brave new machine-driven world. Of course, religion would be something else completely. In fact, religion would be wonderful, since it still contains irrational emotions that can be used to keep a tight rein on the masses. But one is of course too sophisticated to still believe in the church; and occultism makes too many concessions to the “half-educated” as well. The state of current politics is utterly bleak. Regardless of whether democracy or dictatorship comes out on top, the truly cultivated class (which one naturally belongs to) will never succeed in gaining power. Therefore, it suffices to observe the surface forms of political systems from a distance: how unrefined all this brutality is, these catchphrases, this half-knowledge! Of course, one cannot directly engage in the social struggle. Those moneymakers one socially spends time with are obviously enemies of the working class. Yet, individually, of course one has no problems at all with the proletariat, one still has a sense of decency. One would never have anything against working people. Quite the contrary! One even reads Marx (“at one time or another each of us is fascinated by the Communist Manifesto,” says Jaspers, 142) but can’t quite truly believe it and does not apply it to him or herself. One simply does not want to believe that precisely those people who stumble over foreign words could be rebuilding society; and one does not wish to look for social principles, one does not wish to follow current economic events. No one is required to carry out research that eats away the ground beneath their own feet. And so there is nothing left but word salad and frail emotions. In a similar situation, at one time the petty bourgeoise were of the opinion that they just needed another Bismarck (today this man’s name is Hitler). However, the highly intellectual crowd yearns for both humanity’s new nobility, which is of course indescribable, and the transcendental, which cannot be grasped. Nothing remains except for a philosophy with no foundation, the verbose metaphysics of a yawning, emotionally overwrought nothingness; reality is unpleasant to the point of disgust.—The globe wants to give birth, it is writhing with labor pains, it contracts with convulsions and the ground wavers; at this very moment, though, someone passes by carrying a piece of decaying matter under his arm, and not realizing it, turns his nose left and right, finally complaining that the world smells rotten.

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6. Otto Neurath Ideology and Marxism First published as “Weltanschauung und Marxismus,” Der Kampf 24, no. 10 (1931): 447–51. Translated by Daniel Binswanger Friedman. Otto Neurath’s understanding of Marxism fulfilled two functions within the contemporary discourse at that time: first, it provided a basis for discussion, facilitating exchange with the key thinkers of Austro-Marxism and the SDAP as well as with other Marxist-influenced parties in Europe and the Soviet Union. Second, his interpretation of Marxism as empirical sociology opened up the potential to address scientists who would not have otherwise seen themselves as Marxist. A central characteristic of this dual function is the adherence to Marxist terminology despite a break with the tradition of Marxist exegesis. Is Marxism itself an ideology (does it rest upon a distinct philosophical foundation) or is it compatible with the tenets of various other philosophical systems? This question tacitly assumes that other meaningful claims may exist aside from the scientific claims that could be linked to these “philosophical” or “ideological” ones. This supposition is false. Outside of science there are no meaningful statements constituting philosophical systems. As a science, Marxism is neither constrained by a specific philosophical foundation nor does it make any sense to ask whether it is compatible with other ideologies. Above all, the “Vienna Circle” around Schlick and Carnap is to thank for proving that, besides rigorous scientific statements, it is only possible to formulate pseudo-statements. Rather than going step-by-step through the proof, this essay instead lays out Marxism’s fundamental claims. Here, the term “science” should be understood as a system of formulations that provides us with the possibility to make predictions about particular processes. [. . .] Scientific language is constructed in such a way that observational statements can be replaced by statements about a unified system. In all scientific statements, it is specified when and where something takes place. A blind person who is also deaf comes to make the same sort of statements as a deaf person who is also blind. Say, for example, a blind person could be made to experience light through the use of a telephone and a selenium cell. A similar formulation in which the periodic shifting experienced here is expressed could then be seen in the word order of the following two statements describing the same event: “periodically appearing light and darkness” and “periodically appearing sound and quiet.” This is analogous to how one might speak of a “cube” regardless of whether the person who does so possesses the faculty of sight (and can see it) or the sense of touch (and can feel it). This common language—which is impartial to all senses and all human beings—is the unified language of science; it is “intersubjective” and “inter-sensuous.” [. . .] The efforts to build up a unified science by means of an empirical unified language clearly contradict the view that there could be two different, methodologically distinct types of science: “the natural sciences” and the “humanities.” Those who advocate for such a dualism (which goes back to the theological separation of the earthly world from the heavenly world) wish to distinguish between two types of “being,” and for this reason, between two “essences” of science. Whereby it should be noted that the discussions concerning “being”—those that concern the “essence” of things in themselves—are only

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possible by engaging pseudostatements, since predictions can only be made with the help of claims about correlations. If all correlations that are required within the spatiotemporal order to be able to make accurate predictions are exposed, then our scientific task is, as such, completed. The analyses of unified science show that anything that is important for “religious” or “spiritual” individuals must also be formulated in physical terms if we wish to make verifiable predictions. If you were to say: “From a particular set of circumstances it can be inferred that Hans will be angry tomorrow,” then, on the following day, you would have to collect information regarding Hans’s behavior, his looks, gestures, heart rate, and words. His description of his own anger would be similarly vague, as if someone claimed there was a thunderstorm outside without being able to describe it in any sort of detail. It might be possible to get Hans to talk about “feelings inspired by a muse,” or about feelings of pressure, or other physical, bodily changes. These experiential statements from Hans are as much prepared formulations as statements about bright colors or deep tones. Ultimately, everything finds itself within a system of physical formulations which themselves need not be any more complicated than our use of conventional formulations. Such a positivistic language most nearly corresponds to the language that children produce before they become too influenced by the adults around them. [. . .] In this sense, Marxism is empirical sociology. Whoever, as a Marxist, searches for correlations between individual sociological processes does not need any philosophical foundation. One makes predictions about the occurrence of crises, revolutions, and wars and even about relationships between the social position of individual classes. The Marxist attitude can then be understood by examining which correlations are accepted. Particular processes are called out as pertaining to the “superstructure” in order to identify how their occurrence relates to particular processes of the organization of production, “the base.” The Marxist will be especially careful to see all scientific formulations (that is, his own formulations) as superstructural, completely dependent on the base. Put another way, the Marxist will expect that particular theories only then appear if processes of social upheaval are underway. From this, the Marxist will hope for shifts in theoretical claims stemming from this transformation of societal organization. On the other hand, the physical manifestation of any theory cannot only be seen as a symptom of certain changes of societal organization but must itself be seen as a factor in this process of reorganization. That way, an organization can be changed through spreading specific views and, as such, can create new fertile ground for the development of theory. Within Marxism, theory and practice—together as spatiotemporal representations—are intimately connected to one another. And with this, the bourgeois view from “neutral” scholars who study the chain of events “from the outside” falls away and disappears. It is noteworthy that Marx and Engels, who were also in this respect well ahead of their time, employed the metaphysically colored language of their surroundings in order to find a modern vocabulary, leading in many cases almost to the point of behaviorism (German Ideology): “Empty talk about consciousness ceases. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. From the start, the ‘spirit’ is afflicted with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that it really exists for me personally as well.” Whoever upholds the tradition of empiricism and recalls that the materialists paved the way for the views presented here will define the previously quoted view as

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“materialism.” The church ostracized materialism, the bourgeoisie despises it; the older materialists, still clinging to their “mechanisms” (not without occasional metaphysical excursions), advocated a position that placed restraints on the playful historical conception of Marxism. And anyone who is convinced by these ideas and is therefore reluctant to uphold the empiricist tradition may prefer the more neutral term “physicalism.” As a science, Marxism makes meaningful predictions while abstaining from all pseudo-statements; in this way it has nothing to do with such pseudo-statements, whether positively or negatively, regardless of how they may be commonly formulated. In order to be at the forefront of philosophical investigations, it is important to engage with philosophical opinions. But if this turns into a study of ideology, it is more important to focus on “theology” because of the massive influence that it continues to have, and because idealistic philosophy is merely a weakened form of theology anyway. This complete separation of Marxism and ideology does not specify how active Marxists should position themselves vis-à-vis concrete ideologies outside of the workers’ movement. The workers’ movement unifies people with similar positions concerning the class struggle. It takes particular actions that are aimed at confronting class-struggle seriously and is itself rather tolerant towards individual, ideological leanings. It is actually an element of bourgeois tactics to emphasize the ideological differences within the working class in order to break up the unified class front. To be sure, the situation is different if the religious community is simultaneously a political, anti-proletarian community. But even then the Marxist-schooled freethinkers are not of the un-Marxist opinion that much could be achieved through enlightenment; rather they are much more contented to gather up all the nonbelievers and to prevent that children, from an early age, are exposed to an often anti-proletarian, religiously charged upbringing. The idealist philosophers also frequently appear (even if unconsciously) as tools of anti-proletariat forces, and in doing so, can even provoke others to fight in the interest of the further development of the proletariat. Within workers’ pedagogy, tolerance of idealistic philosophy can sometimes lead to a situation where, in the end, the youth are brought closer to bourgeois ideology as would have otherwise normally taken place in the same time frame. Yet these are isolated problems, the answers to which are contingent upon the current state of the class struggle, not upon the theoretical insight that, as a science, Marxism has nothing to do with ideology, whether positively or negatively.

7. Otto Neurath Protocol Statements First published as “Protokollsätze,” Erkenntnis 3 (1932/1933): 204–14. Translated by Daniel Binswanger Friedman. Since its inception, the Vienna Circle pursued the goal of synthesizing distinct fields of both social and natural science under the paradigm of logical empiricism. However, the form this synthesis was supposed to take shifted over the course of time. At first, the goal of a unified science was pursued; later the project became one of compiling an encyclopedia of science, modeled after the French Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie. A major reason for this shifting form of synthesis was bound up with the controversial debate as to what the common basis of such a unified science might be. Stemming from Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language,

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protocol statements were suggested as a foundational unit. It was thought that they could satisfy empirical criteria and embody the hopes of overcoming an isolated discipline-specific language, which was conceived of in line with Wittgenstein’s “private language.” In the interest of current research, a growing number of formulations within the unified language of unified science are becoming more precisely defined. However, no scientific terminology is ever free from imprecision, since each term leads back to yet another term, which, in turn, is fundamental for protocol statements, whose imprecision immediately catches one’s attention. The fiction of an ideal language constructed from pure atomic statements is just as metaphysical as the fiction of a Laplacian spirit.11 Although the language of science is continually furnished with systematic symbolic notation, one cannot view it as an approximation of some sought-after ideal language. The statement: “Otto observes an angry person” is more imprecise than the statement “Otto observes a thermometer reading of 24 °C,” insofar as “angry person” is less possible to precisely define than “thermometer reading of 24°C.” Yet, “Otto” itself is in many ways an even less precise term. The statement “Otto observes” can be replaced by the statement “the human being, whose carefully captured photograph can be found in the card catalog in plaza 16, observes”; however, the phrase “photograph in the card catalog in plaza 16” is not yet replaced by a system of mathematical formulations, which is itself uniquely assigned to another system of mathematical formulas corresponding to the terms “Otto,” “angry Otto,” “friendly Otto,” etc. Above all, our historical, trivial language is overcrowded with imprecise terms that have not yet been analyzed (“masses”). We will begin by ridding this trivial language of its metaphysical components and, as such, will achieve a physicalist trivial language. A list of banned words will be quite useful to us in practice. In parallel, we can construct from the outset a physicalist, highly scientific language free of any metaphysical elements. We have it at our disposal, though only for certain sciences, or even only for parts of certain sciences. If we wish to bring the unified science of our time together, we need to link the terminology of the trivial language with those of the highly scientific language since the terms of both languages overlap in practice. There are certain terms that are only employed in the trivial language, others that appear only in the highly scientific language, and lastly, terms that appear in both. In a scientific essay touching on the entirety of the unified science, one is only able to use a type of “slang,” covering terms from both languages. We are awaiting the time when one will be able to replace each word of the physicalist trivial language with terms from the highly scientific language—in a similar way to how one can formulate the terms of the highly scientific language by means of terms from the trivial language. This last idea is very unfamiliar to us and is often anything but simple; Einstein can somehow express himself through the use of the Bantu language, but not Heidegger—in fact, it seems to be the case that intentionally adjusted misuses are inevitably introduced into the German. Fundamentally, a physicist must be able to fulfill the demands of a brilliant thinker: “one must be able to express the fundamentals of every rigorous scientific concept to a mere cab-driver in a language he will understand.” 11

The Laplacian spirit is, put simply, the conception of an ultimate intelligence that can bring the entirety of what has been conceived as the mechanistic worldview under the elegance of one single formula.

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[. . .] From the beginning, we will teach our children this universal idiom, having already been freed from its unnecessary metaphysical elements, as the language of the prevailing unified science. Each child can be “trained” in such a way that they begin with a simplified universal idiom, over time slowly advancing to the universal idiom of adulthood. For our purposes there is no reason to strictly define this childish language as a type of “special language”; otherwise, one would have to differentiate between many different universal idioms. The child will not learn one “original” universal idiom that can be derived from the adult universal idiom; instead, the child will learn a “more primitive” universal idiom, whose vocabulary is then gradually filled out over time. The term “ball of iron” is also based on the language of adults; and if it is defined by a statement in which words such as “radius” and “pi” appear, then in the children’s definition words like “nine-pin bowling” and “present from Uncle Rudi” will appear. Yet, even in strict scientific language “Uncle Rudi” is not missing if the physical ball is defined through protocol statements in which “Uncle Rudi” appears as “observing person” who “perceives a ball.” In opposition to this view, Carnap speaks of an original protocol language.12 His remarks on the “original” protocol language and on protocol statements that “require no verification” lie on the outer edges of his important anti-metaphysical project, whose foundational idea is not touched by the considerations in this essay. Carnap speaks of a “first language” that one could call an “experiential language” or “phenomenal language.” In doing so, he emphasizes that “the current state of research at this point does not yet allow the question of an exact characterization of this language to be answered.” These remarks may prompt some younger thinkers to search for this potential language—which can easily lead to false, metaphysical detours. Even though metaphysics cannot be suppressed with arguments, it is important, if only for the sake of those still undecided, to champion physicalism and represent it in its most radical form.

12 Original note: Rudolf Carnap, “Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft” [The physicalist language as the universal-language of science], Erkenntnis 2 (1931): 437–38, 453–54.

Otto Bauer, SDAP leader and Austro-Marxist thinker, giving a speech. Photo by Albert Hilscher 1932. (Courtesy of Austrian National Library, ÖNB/Hilscher.)

CHAPTER SIX

AUSTRO-MARXISM Vrääth Öhner

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hat is Austro-Marxism? On November 3, 1927, none other than Otto Bauer, the acting chairman and leading theoretical strategist of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP), took the opportunity to opine on that question. In an anonymous headline article in the Arbeiter-Zeitung, Bauer distinguishes between three competing definitions of the term: On the one hand, Austro-Marxism had become, “for quite some time, a favorite catchphrase in the parlance of the bourgeoisie” and carried the connotation of “an especially pernicious variety of socialism.” On the other hand, this bourgeois usage of the term contradicts its true history, which was coined before World War I by the American socialist Louis B. Boudin. He used the term to refer to a group of young Austrian Social Democrats (including Max Adler, Karl Renner, Rudolf Hilferding, and Otto Bauer) who were attempting “to adapt the Marxist historical approach to complicated phenomena in a way that mocked all superficial, schematic approaches to Marxism.” Following the dissolution of the Austro-Marxist school after World War I, however, the term meant “nothing more than the ideology of the unity of the workers’ movement.” As opposed to the “workers’ parties of most other countries,” the Austrian Social Democrats had succeeded in “maintaining their unity in spite of the pressures of the postwar era,” meaning that they were able to withstand the influence of communist agitation. All of this was possible because of a political strategy that “unified prosaic realpolitik and revolutionary enthusiasm in one movement.” In Bauer’s time, Austro-Marxism was both a product of the unity of the Austrian workers’ movement as well as “the spiritual force that preserves that unity.”1 It is hard to define this vibrant concept more concisely than Bauer does it here, especially since his definition identifies the major points of contention that underlie the contemporary understanding of the term. One point of contention is the relationship to political opponents who, despite all evidence to the contrary, misunderstood AustroMarxism to be the harbinger of an antidemocratic coup d’état, a dictatorship of the proletariat. Another point of contention is the Austro-Marxist approach to Marxism as a scientific method, used by the leading protagonists of the movement for the purpose of systematically expanding empirical social sciences as well as adapting them to political, social, or economic phenomena which had, up to that point, been poorly understood or completely ignored. A third point of contention can be found in the relationship between 1 Otto

Bauer, “Austromarxismus,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, November 3, 1927, 1–2.

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Austro-Marxism as a political theory and the realities of Austrian politics, which Bauer situates dialectically as the power that creates unity as well as the product of that unity. The manifest expression of this dialectic can be found in the Linz Program, ratified at the SDAP’s 1926 convention in the city of Linz. This document essentially approved and sanctioned the political strategy followed since the founding of the republic on November 12, 1918. This strategy called for a democratic takeover of state power, followed by a step-by-step expansion of democratic safeguards that would allow the creation of a socialist civil order. Sometimes seen as a “third way” between parliamentary, reform-oriented Social Democratic politics and Bolshevik revolution, the political strategy of Austro-Marxism was repeatedly criticized by the communist left as a revisionist distortion of Marxism, an unholy union of bourgeois politics and the rhetoric of class struggle. But this strategy was not only consistent with the historical experiences of the Austrian Social Democratic movement, reaching back to the 1889 party unity convention (Einigungsparteitag) in Hainfeld.2 It was also consistent with the research completed since the turn of the century by Austro-Marxism’s leading theoreticians in the areas of political economics (Hilferding), justice (Renner), social philosophy (Max Adler), and national identity (Bauer). In spite of all of the differences that existed between these individual research approaches—differences that were hotly debated on the pages of Der Kampf, the movement’s central theoretical organ published in Austria from 1907 to 1934—leading Austro-Marxists shared the conviction that the bourgeois constitutional state could play a positive role in the process of class struggle. Power won through legal means, they reasoned, is much easier to maintain over time than power captured in a violent upheaval. Thus, Austro-Marxist theoretical discourse is centered around the relationship between the working class and the state with all of its institutions. The Austro-Marxist strategy of supporting a democratic constitutional system seemed to pay off in the first years of the republic, as evidenced by the party’s successful economic and social legislation during the Provisional National Assembly and during the time of the coalition government.3 These successes coincided with the rise of Red Vienna as an “alternative model” and an “alternative power” to the antisocialist and antidemocratic forces that dominated Austrian politics on a national level. Over time, however, the Austro-Marxist democratic strategy sank into an inescapable historical dilemma, exacerbated by the worldwide economic depression, the rise of the Austrian right-wing militia known as Heimwehr, and the National Socialist takeover in Germany. The recession not only led to the economic dissolution of the proletariat (see the Leichter excerpt in this chapter), but it also brought about an upheaval in the industrial sector (see Bauer) and caused citizens to lose trust in the civil institutions of the state (see Renner). Otto Bauer’s oft-invoked “balance of class forces” shifted to the advantage of political adversaries:4 Although Austro-Marxism continued in its unwavering defense of the safeguards of the democratically governed republic— faced with a latent civil war, an economic depression, and a simultaneous “spiritual world 2

The convention (December 30, 1888, to January 1, 1889) was a gathering of Social Democratic organizations—some revolutionary, some reformist—from the crown lands. This convention led to a common party platform and is considered as the founding moment of the SDAP of Austria. 3 The Provisional National Assembly, called by the Austrian House of Deputies on October 21, 1918, was the sole legislative power until the general election on February 16, 1919. The coalition government made up of the Social Democrats and the Christian Socials was formed after the February election and remained in office until July 7, 1920. 4 See Otto Bauer, “Das Gleichgewicht der Klassenkräfte,” Der Kampf 17, no. 2 (1924): 57–68.



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crisis”5—Austria’s clerical-backed fascists on March 15, 1933, seized the opportunity to overthrow the country’s legal constitution following a procedural crisis in Parliament. Further reading Blum and Smaldone 2016, 2017 Bottomore and Goodie 1978 Gruber 1991 Löw, Mattl, Pfabigan 1986 Rabinbach 1983

1. Max Adler Bourgeois or Social Democracy First published as “Bürgerliche oder soziale Demokratie?,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, February 15, 1919, 2. Translated by Rob McFarland. The distinction between “bourgeois” and “social” democracy is one of the foundational concepts in the formation of Austro-Marxist theory in the interwar years. As a part of their theory of class struggle, Social Democrats positioned themselves against the claim of the bourgeois parties that their version of democracy was no different than the kind of democracy imagined by the SDAP. On the other side, Social Democrats positioned themselves against the wishes of the more revolutionary-minded segment of the working class who fell sway to the allure of a Bolshevik-style overthrow of the government. To counteract the allure of a revolution, Max Adler (1873–1937) offered the long-range prospect of a Socialist Republic. Adler’s article, which was published in the Arbeiter-Zeitung on the day before the election of the Constituent National Assembly,6 roughly corresponds to one of his longer treatises from the same year (1919) that outlined his concepts of “democracy” and the “soviet system.”7 Of all the bourgeois campaign slogans used by the different parties heading into elections, the appeal to democracy has proven to have the greatest effect upon the intelligentsia. For, after all, the members of this caste believe that the bourgeois notion of democracy contains all of the political ideals of freedom, equality, and progress that otherwise make the Social Democrats so sympathetic, but without all of the talk of class struggle and overcoming bourgeois society. Why vote for the Social Democrats when you can get the same result by voting bourgeois-democratic or just plain old democratic? There is a grave fallacy in this way of thinking, a fallacy of world-historical proportions. And in the one hundred years since the meteoric rise of bourgeois democracy, since the French Revolution, this fallacy would have become perfectly clear if it had not been obscured again and again by the prejudices of the bourgeois mindset. [. . .] Three of the most penetrating observers of contemporary history came across the explanation to this conundrum at roughly the same time. It is no coincidence that 5 See

Otto Bauer, “Geistige Weltkrise,” Der Kampf 23, no. 11 (1930): 449–54. Constituent National Assembly, elected on February 16, 1919, was the first Parliament of the First Republic convened upon the basis of free and equal elections. 7 See Max Adler, Demokratie und Rätesystem (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung Ignaz Brand, 1919). 6 The

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Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen, those vanguards of modern socialism, all came to the fore at this time, using a new social ideal to counter conventional wisdom. They proved that just because the world thought it had pulled off a successful revolution did not mean that the world had founded a new golden era. These three great social critics emerged from the harrowing experience of a democratic revolution knowing full well that a mere political upheaval did not automatically change and improve the quality of life for the broad masses of the people. They knew that political equality and freedom would remain meaningless words without a corresponding economic equality. What good does it do a worker if he is free from political repression, but still dependent upon a “bread-giver” who controls not only his working conditions but also, often enough, his living conditions? What does it mean to have equality before the law, when financial inequality means that the have-nots must sell themselves to those who have it all? And is it possible to have fraternity between employers and workers, the haves and the have-nots, those who exploit and those who are exploited, between people who are destined to fight each other because their interests are at odds with each other? Thus, Saint-Simon wrote down this insight: “Riches are the true and only foundation of every political influence and value.” He wisely concluded that constitutional laws are not as important for the happiness of the masses as are the regulation of the rights of ownership. Indeed, under the bourgeois laws of ownership, all ideals of democracy are revealed to be delusions. Under the capitalist form of economy—one that creates and perpetuates the vital distinction between rich and poor, employer and worker, master and servant—democracy becomes a tragic self-deception, striving to do good, but always ending up doing evil instead. In a best-case scenario, equality before the law becomes domination and exploitation through capital. For those who resist the system, freedom becomes the freedom to starve to death, and fraternity becomes hypocrisy and a disgraceful one-upmanship of charity. These ideas only have real social substance when they are built upon a system of economic equality, when all financial subservience and dependence have been radically swept away. This is only possible by overcoming the order that breeds such economic inequality, the order of capitalism. Hence the true attainment of democracy demands a consequential stride beyond the world of the bourgeoisie, beyond the world of capitalism. A stride into the socialist order where the private control of production no longer separates people into a small caste of masters and an overwhelming mass of societal pariahs. An order where profit is no longer the engine and organizing principle of cultural life, an order where all goods and services of a society are available to everyone. An order that finally celebrates the advent of freedom, equality, and fraternity among all peoples. Those who would earnestly seek out democracy, those who understand history and see why democracy has so seldom succeeded, these seekers cannot stand half-way down the democratic path as the bourgeoisie has done, these seekers must confidently continue down the path all the way to social democracy. The idea of democracy is not fulfilled by bourgeois equality, but by social equality. And it is not the bourgeois republic that guarantees the democratic liberation of the people, but the socialist republic.



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2. Karl Renner What Is Class Struggle? First published as Was ist Klassenkampf? (Berlin: Singer, 1919), 21–24. Translated by Rob McFarland. In this work, also published in 1919, Karl Renner (1870–1950) departs markedly from his party comrade Max Adler in his conception of bourgeois versus social democracy. Whereas Adler places the overcoming of the capitalist order as a precondition for democratic liberation, Renner demonstrates a step-by-step inductive description of economic and political class struggle. The working class—as organized by the Social Democratic movement—is immediately ready to use the state as leverage to bring about socialism. The working class can accomplish this through the creation of institutions such as unions, consumer cooperatives or renters’ organizations, entities which combat industrial capital, business capital, and private ownership of property. It can also use its own growing influence on the legislative process and the administration of the state. In a political sense, Renner’s pragmatic interpretation of class struggle, dependent as it is upon institutions and legality, represents the right wing of the Austrian Social Democratic movement. II. The political class struggle. Economism is more pervasive than we had thought.8 The basic fallacy of this movement is its dependence upon abstract ideas of law and the state, causing it to overlook the tremendous economic potential of public authorities. Economism finds its intellectual opposite in the reversed one-sidedness that I would like to call politicism: anything and everything should be affected by the political party movement and by the conquest of public authorities. In politicism, the economic class struggle only serves as a distraction from the one true political purpose, and it threatens to bog down progress. Except, of course, when it plays the role of a negative example, an unsuccessful economism that drives more and more people to political action. These one-sided approaches are mostly espoused by those circles in the movement that stand outside of the industrial proletariat with no comprehension of the workers’ economic needs. This politicist line of thought sees class struggle almost exclusively as a political struggle, further restricted by their distaste for members of the working class who organize themselves politically and put their political weight in the service of their day-to-day, all-pervasive economic class struggles. Thus, the party, in their way of thinking, is reduced to a mere English-style Labour Party, a mere workers’ party, only representing the current interests of the working class. This is a fallacy, laid bare by the fact that all purely economic weapons, as has been demonstrated, naturally lead to economic democracy and to social order. And by the fact that the one essential premise for social democracy lies at the heart of a capitalist society. [. . .]

8

For Renner, “economism” is the fundamental part of the class struggle that has to do with the relationship of capital to labor, already institutionalized by the working class through the creation of unions or cooperatives. According to Renner, the economic class struggle is not enough to fully push through the interests of the working class, it requires a political class struggle as its counterpart.

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1. The economic-political struggle.

The political representatives of the working class stand in a constant reciprocity with the real and immediate class struggle, and all of the different manifestations of the class struggle can be seen in institutional examples. First, the preliminary political struggle for the unions. The unions fight for shorter working hours, the political movement constantly secures the things that they have fought for through laws that restrict the length of the workday. The Ten Hours Act [Zehnstundenbill] with its historical creation of a ten-hour workday is a success of the class struggle. As a political act, it is also the legal expression of the economic power of the working class: this Factory Act of 1847 could not have succeeded without this power. The struggle of the unions to regulate the process of labor has created a legal counterpart to the industrial inspection authorities. In circles where the labor union movement cannot reach, the law makes up for it. This is the way it works in the regulation of cottage industries, and also much of the regulation of women’s and children’s labor. Programs that have been taken on and reworked by the unions have been passed on to lawmakers who take them over publicly and automatically: think of the case of workers’ insurance. The cooperation of the economic and political struggle is appreciable in these cases, but it is also notable that the political struggle in some areas (such as with cottage industry) has gone farther than the economic struggle, just as conversely the economic struggle is often the trailblazer for the political (as with the shortening of work hours). In general, it can be said: A country’s worker protection laws are the legal manifestation of the economic power of a class. Second: The economic consumer protection movement [Konsumentenbewegung] is supported politically by the labor union movement, by the public food inspection police, and by consumer protection bureaus. The Cooperative Economic Committee [Konsumgenossenschaftlicher Wirtschaftsausschuß] is the first attempt at a consumer protection authority in Austria. Third: The problem that currently needs the biggest political boost is the limited range of economic means to combat the ownership of private property. Public administration and lawmakers take care of rent control and housing inspection, comprising a state-run housing welfare authority. In Ireland, for example, tenants are protected by English law and enjoy an emancipated status. The only way to loosen the grip of property ownership is primarily through the public authorities. Only they are in the position to limit the private ownership of property, or even to abolish it (as in Russia). Here it becomes clear that in some cases state law is the only available way to bring about the emancipation of the proletariat. Fourth: On the whole, the economic-political struggle secures the sporadic achievements of the working class and makes it possible that the institutions and bodies that the workers have created have some sort of permanence. Without this permanence, every achievement would have a precarious existence, only through the power of legal protection can every achievement become an institution! The institutions created by a class are the guarantee of its advancement, and without them a class will always fall back into the original position of an unregulated, disorganized struggle, meaning always having to start over from the beginning. These working-class legal establishments create a new reality that is underestimated by all sides. Once beholden only to the ruling classes, the state and its lawmakers and administrators now serve a continuously growing segment of the working classes, and the more mature the class is, the more the so-called social administration will outweigh the purely bourgeois (police and legal) administration. Hence the state



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becomes a lever for the emancipation of the working classes, in spite of the power of its formerly ruling classes. Thus, in the heart of the present state, the future state is already growing, just as socialism is growing in the heart of the capitalist economy. If this were not the case, the preconditions for new systems would not rise up in the middle of the old systems. The content and scope of social law and administration in a country is an accurate measurement of the maturity and power of the working classes who live there. Just as economic democracy is the foundation of all lasting emancipation, and therefore more important for the working class than purely political democracy, the social maturity of the legal institutions is more important than the maturity of the state constitution or the bourgeois version of democracy. States with lagging democratic institutions but with advanced sociopolitical institutions are, in terms of socialism, more developed than fullfledged democracies without social legal institutions. The priority of the economy, taught to us by material historians, brings every Marxist to this conclusion, even if predominantly democratic and less socialist-oriented Social Democrats would like to deny it.

3. Otto Bauer The Austrian Revolution First published as Die österreichische Revolution (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1923), 182–89. Translated by Rob McFarland. Three years after the end of the coalition government made up of Social Democrats and Christian Socials, Otto Bauer’s (1881–1938) comprehensive representation of the constitutive phase of the First Austrian Republic appeared in print. In the following excerpt from the chapter “The State and the Working Class,” Bauer alludes to the constraints that hemmed in the Austrian revolution through economic adversity and dependence on foreign capitalist powers.9 He also calls out both the “self-limitation of the proletariat” in the processes that formed the new state and the weakened position of the “revolutionary government” which, because of its lack of authority, was forced to govern “according to the consent of the governed.” This consent, which Bauer accordingly sees as an indicator of a truly functional democracy as opposed to a mere political democracy, contributes to the unique nature of the Austrian revolution and its importance as a step on the way to socialism. §12. The state and the working class. [. . .] The revolution shattered the military control apparatus that had kept down the working class. The working class was free. No armed force held the proletariat back. But the revolution also dissolved the old Austro-Hungarian economic alliance, plunging German Austria into terrible misery and oppressive dependence upon foreign powers. That was the twofold inner contradiction of the German-Austrian revolution: The contradiction between the strong political power of the working class and their horrible 9 Bauer uses the term “Austrian Revolution” to refer not only to the toppling of the monarchy brought about by the founding of the republic but also to a phase of intense social unrest that accompanied the reorganization of state authority, a phase that lasted until the signing of the Peace Treaty of Saint-Germain on September 10, 1919.

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economic misery; the contradiction between the inward freedom of the working class and its crushing dependence upon foreign capitalist entities. This contradiction could only be resolved through self-imposed restrictions by the proletariat. The proletariat had to restrain itself, of its own volition and realization, in regard to using its own freedom and power. The members of the proletariat did this in order to avoid an escalation with foreign powers, a conflict that would have brought about famine, invasion, and the destruction of all of their new freedoms. [. . .] That was the actual, most difficult problem of the revolution: Not to control the masses—who were hungry, despairing, and agitated by all of the passions aroused by the war and the revolution—by force, but to guide them in a way that they realize on their own not to overstep the boundaries brought upon them by the economic plight and the economic and military impotence of their new revolutionary country. That was the peculiarity of the governing style of the new government: unlike the regimes that came before and after them, who could depend upon the obedience of their subjects, they could not govern by force. This new government could only use intellectual methods to govern, a government reliant upon the common sense of the masses. This government relied upon appeals to the masses, to their patience and understanding for the situation of their country, appeals to their sense of responsibility. [. . .] It is important to closely identify the substance and meaning of this successful method of governing. A parliamentary democracy seeks to reach a consensus between the governing and the governed at the ballot box. Democracy believes that this consensus will be assured only when the people go to the polls every three or four years to vote for a parliament, determining the makeup and operations of the government. The working class found out everywhere they looked that this belief was an illusion, that the power of the bourgeoisie over the press, the courts, and the election system allowed them to influence the outcome of the votes. The resulting government that emerged from a general election became a regime of a single class, the government of a minority of the people. That is the reason that the entire revolutionary movement, set into motion by the Great War, is dominated by the struggle of the working class against mere parliamentary democracy. This struggle gave rise to the Russian idea of the Soviet state, as well as to the British idea of the guild state.10 Even though these two ideas are so fundamentally different, both of them offer the proletariat a better way to secure a consensus between the government and the governed, better than under a mere parliamentary democracy. In modern capitalist society, we have not only the development of a political democracy—which is embodied in the democratic organization on the state and local levels— but also of an industrial democracy, embodied by the large democratically organized trade unions and consumer associations, the professional associations of employees and public servants, and the cooperatives of farmers. Political democracy only sees the citizens as such, regardless of their economic situation, profession, or societal function. It invites all citizens to the ballot box indiscriminately, divided only by their territorially circumscribed voting districts. An industrial democracy, on the other hand, divides people according to their professions, their places of work, and their role within the economy 10 The guild state is a decentralized model of socialism, in which—in the place of the state—large, self-governed administration committees from the individual industries take over the governance of the economy after taking over the means of production.



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into business, professional, or industrial organizations. Everywhere in its fight against mere parliamentary democracy, the working class has countered political democracy with the (often disparate) conceptions of a functional democracy. Whereas political democracy—unconcerned with shaping the will of the state—creates a state around a generic citizen, a functional democracy has a government that is controlled by a citizen that is organized and integrated into a career or a workplace, and thus into a societal or economic function. Whereas political democracy requires that a government rules in accordance with a parliament elected every few years by the general populace, functional democracy demands that every single branch of the government governs in accordance with [the needs and demands of] its respective organized body of constituents, defined by their profession or workplace, by their societal or economic standing. A combination of political and functional democracy: This was the nature of the governmental praxis that was forced upon the government of the republic by the power dynamics of the revolution.11 [. . .] But that changed the entire relationship of the masses to the state. The masses saw that their organizations dominated the state government. The masses saw that the government had to work through the proletarian organizations in order to keep in constant, close compliance with the masses themselves. The masses saw that they themselves could steer the course of the government through their elected officials. The masses saw that the government could not repress the working class by means of violence, but they could only lead the state in accordance with the will of the working class. The republic, for the masses, was not just a system that was no longer headed by an emperor; it was a system that places the government under the effective influence of proletarian organizations. Democracy, for the masses, was not only a government of representatives elected by the general population; it was the method of governing where every single act of the government had to be executed with the approbation and participation of the masses whose fate stood in the balance. At first the republic brought the masses only hunger, unemployment, adversity, and misery; it had to disappoint many exuberant hopes [for change] of its supporters. But it brought freedom to the masses—not the freedom of licentiousness, but the freedom for the proletariat to act without fear of being met by possible violence. The only obstacle that the proletariat had to face now was defined by its own reasoning powers, its own sense of responsibility, its own will, led by its own power of rational thought. This rational thought had been hard-won with the help of impassioned leaders and meetings at home and in the workplace. This was the experience that filled the working class with republican patriotism, that empowered them to bridle their own passions, to bear scarcity and sacrifice without violence, for the sake of the preservation and security of the republic.

11

With this combination of political and functional democracy, Bauer is addressing the soldiers’ and workers’ councils that had existed from the fall of the monarchy in 1918 up until the founding of the SDAP’s paramilitary Republican Protection League (Republikanischer Schutzbund) in 1923.

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4. Hans Kelsen Otto Bauer’s Political Theories First published as “Otto Bauers politische Theorien,” Der Kampf 17, no. 2 (1924): 50–56. Translated by Rob McFarland. The following excerpt from Hans Kelsen’s (1881–1973) analysis of Otto Bauer’s “The Austrian Revolution,” establishes Bauer’s turn from Marx to Lassalle in terms of the political ideology of the socialist movement.12 This article participates in a broader continuing debate between Kelsen and the Austro-Marxists about the Marxist conception of state power. In “Die Staatsauffassung des Marxismus,”13Max Adler, for instance, speaks exhaustively about the difference between Marxist theory and a purely formal theory of law. Adler responded to the thesis that Kelsen developed in “Socialism and the State” that socialism can only be realized through the state, and not without the state.14 In the following issue of Der Kampf, Otto Bauer refuted Kelsen’s objection to a purely quantitative comparison between the pre- and postrevolutionary state, arguing that such a position “wants to shatter the belief in the capacity of a future state to change its character.”15 Otto Bauer imparts praise upon the German-Austrian People’s Republic founded after the collapse of the empire. He justifies that praise by citing the state’s specific method of governance. A government must rely upon intellect, and not violence, to keep the masses within the bounds of order. This is an order that—economically speaking—was the same order that existed in the old Austrian system, a capitalistic legal order that guaranteed private ownership of the means of production. Otto Bauer believes that it is important to note that the republic’s coalition government had no army to hold back the proletariat, and that the only thing that kept the workers from setting up a dictatorship was their own judicious self-control and discernment about the international situation. He believes that the government could only influence the workers’ discernment and self-control by intellectual means. It had nothing to do with the fact, say, that German Austria would have had no access to an army. The very first and most energetically orchestrated task of the Social Democrats was, actually, the organization of an armed force. But this army, made up exclusively of supporters of the Social Democrats and Communists, was not available to the Social Democratic chancellor for use against the proletariat. But the Social Democratic war minister must have had some reasoning behind the creation of this army, and you will not be too far off the mark if you consider the nonproletariat population which, it must be added, still makes up the majority of the population of German Austria. Thus, the nature of this people’s republic—in contrast to a class-run state—may lie just as close to violence as it does to intellect. [. . .] Nonetheless, Otto Bauer saw things accurately, for the most part. Certainly, the proletariat, with the help of the army that stood at 12 Next

to Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864) was one of the leading minds of the German workers’ movement. In contrast to Marx, he advocates the position that socialism could enjoy a peaceful, organic integration into the foundations of the existing state structure. 13 Max Adler, Die Staatsauffassung des Marxismus: Ein Beitrag zur Unterscheidung von soziologischer und juristischer Methode (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1922). 14 Hans Kelsen, Sozialismus und Staat: Eine Untersuchung der politischen Theorie des Marxismus (Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1920). 15 Bauer, “Das Gleichgewicht der Klassenkräfte,” 66.



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its beck and call, could have had its way with the bourgeoisie that seemed from the outside to be relatively powerless. But the proletariat kept itself in check, conscious as it was of the international opposition to violence. But is it not a similar situation when—seen from the Marxist point of view—the capitalist class does not maximize its political and economic exploitation of the masses, even though it has an army at its disposal? Think of the Social Democratic legal paradigm, including the notion of the political equality of the working class: was it not brought about largely in a time when all opposing forces had plenty of guns to use against it? Again, we see that the dichotomy of intellect and violence is not necessarily applicable for the representation of social conditions. In the end, even “violence” has an effect upon the intellect, and intellect is a kind of violence, for it works in and through violent means. [. . .] Whoever thinks that the German-Austrian republic from 1918 to 1923 cannot be considered as a class-based state certainly cannot use the term “class-based society” to describe the modern state that developed over the last half of the nineteenth century. But he has also overcome the Marxist method, which maintains qualitative, fundamental oppositions where only quantitative differences exist. And he cannot continue to ignore the fact that just as the previous class-based state was separated by a difference of degree from the people’s republic with its coalition government, so this new republic will only be separated by a difference of degree from a future social entity that more completely resembles the socialist ideal, a gap that can only be closed by purposeful reform, not just skipped over by a revolution. Because in Otto Bauer’s seemingly content depiction of a people’s republic all of the conditions are in place to assure a step-by-step progression toward the realization of a socialist ideal, it is completely incomprehensible that anyone could see our present situation as leading to a new revolution, or to a dictatorship of the proletariat. Not that we should completely eliminate that as a possibility. It is just that the present people’s republic does not set out the necessary conditions for a revolution; rather it works in quite the opposite direction. Seemingly, Otto Bauer may still believe that he cannot do without this revolutionary perspective, when he argues that the balance of power is only temporary, that each class still seeks to control the other, and that the class struggle continues and will eventually lead to a proletarian revolution. If, in his prognoses, Bauer once again returns to the Marxist formula for the future, after abandoning it for the present time, then it will only show that he has abandoned a political theory that has fulfilled its intended purpose as a means to an end to adjust to a new set of circumstances. The political theory of Marxism is the theory of a still small opposition group, whose fight against the state—on whose leadership it has no influence—is an ideological fight against the state as such, rendering that theory by definition a theory of anarchy. Similarly, the political ideology of bourgeois liberalism, with its hostility toward the state, came about in a time when the politically disenfranchised middle class was still a powerless oppositional movement fighting against a state apparatus controlled by the nobility. This liberalism never completely negated the state and never resorted to anarchy because the bourgeoisie was only politically disenfranchised, not economically. The state still was able to protect some of their rights to private ownership of property. Just like the bourgeoisie learned to abandon its hostile anti-state theory in favor of a statist theory when it became part of the governing body of the state, the proletariat will have to revisit its political ideology once it is no longer represented by a powerless opposition party, once that party, forced at a moment’s notice by the conditions on the ground, has to take over the government, going it alone or sharing power with the bourgeoisie. At this moment, Marxist political theory becomes too constricting to the

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socialist movement. Once a useful weapon in the battle for power, it later becomes a hindrance to the responsible use of this power. Thus, in the ideology of the proletariat, the state evolves from a mere tool of capitalism to an instrument of socialism. That is the moment when the proletariat recognizes that this state can be “its” state, is “its” state. This is the way that the political ideology of the socialist movement will evolve from Marx to Lassalle.16 The work of Otto Bauer appears to be a very meaningful symptom of that evolution.

5. The Struggle for State Power (from Program of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of German Austria, Enacted at the Party Convention at Linz on November 3, 1926) First published as “Der Kampf um die Staatsmacht,” in Programm der Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschösterreichs, beschlossen vom Parteitag zu Linz am 3. November 1926. Translated by Rob McFarland. The so-called Linz Program of the SDAP is considered to be the classical document of AustroMarxism, mostly because it allowed the vastly different political theories of the AustroMarxists to be formulated as common strategic goals. Even though the program was recorded in the unmistakable handwriting of Otto Bauer, the document reveals a compromise between the pragmatic and the revolutionary factions of the party. This compromise is especially visible in the third chapter, which is reproduced here almost in its entirety. The chapter seamlessly builds upon Bauer’s idea of an “Austrian revolution,” while setting out provisions in case of the event that the bourgeois parties would use the Social Democratic expansion of power as a pretext for an antidemocratic coup d’état. Politicians of the era hardly seemed bothered by the jarring contradiction—often mentioned in scholarly research—between the document’s avowal of democracy on the one hand and the threat of civil war and proletarian dictatorship on the other hand. Far more often discussed, especially in Christian Social newspapers such as the Reichspost, was the Social Democratic discourse surrounding birth control, which included the legal abortion of a pregnancy. 1. [. . .] The history of the democratic republic is the history of class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class for control of the republic. In the democratic republic, the political power of the bourgeoisie no longer rests upon political privileges, but rather upon the fact that the bourgeoisie seeks to keep the majority of the people under their intellectual and spiritual control through the use of their economic power, the power of their traditions, and the power of their press, their schools, and their church. If the Social Democratic Workers’ Party can succeed in counteracting this influence by uniting the manual and intellectual workers in the city and in the country and by connecting the working class to compatible classes such as small-scale farmers, the petit bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia, the 16 Original

194ff.

note: See my monograph Sozialismus und Staat, 2nd ed. ([Leipzig: Hirschfeld,] 1923),



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Social Democratic Workers’ Party will win over the majority of the population. Through the arbitration of general electoral law, the party will take over the power of the state. Thus, in the democratic republic, the class struggles between the bourgeoisie and the working class will be decided as the two sides wrestle for the soul of the majority of the people. In the course of these class struggles, the course of events can lead to the situation where the bourgeoisie loses its strength, and the working class is not strong enough to lead the republic on its own. But the cooperation that brought the otherwise hostile parties into this situation will soon break under the weight of the insurmountable class differences that exist within a capitalist society. After each such episode, the working class will fall back under the control of the bourgeoisie if it cannot find the strength to seize control of the republic. Such cooperation between the classes can only ever be a temporary phase of development in the class struggle for state power. Cooperation cannot be the goal of the struggle. If the Social Democratic Workers’ Party succeeds in controlling the democratic Republic in the first phase of its struggle, it then has the responsibility to utilize all of the democratic weapons at its disposal to bring the majority of the people under the leadership of the working class and thus to topple the class hegemony of the bourgeoisie and to seize the leadership of the democratic republic for the working classes. The Social Democratic Workers’ Party is striving to take over the leadership of the democratic republic, not for the purposes of overthrowing democracy but for the purpose of putting democracy into the service of the working class. The party is striving to adapt the state apparatus to the needs of the working class and to use this apparatus as a weapon to wrest ownership of the means of production and exchange from the hands of big capital and major property owners. The party is striving to return these means of production and exchange to the common ownership of the entire population. 2. The bourgeoisie will not voluntarily vacate its position of power. Even if they accept the democratic republic forced upon them by the working class, as long as they are in control of the republic, the bourgeoisie will attempt to overthrow the democratic republic, to set up a monarchical or fascist dictatorship as soon as the rights of the general electorate threaten to turn over state power to the working class. Only when the working class is able to defend the democratic republic against every monarchical or fascist counterrevolution, only when the national army and the other armed militias of the state shall rise to the protection of the republic when the republic’s leadership falls into the hands of the working class through universal suffrage, only then will the bourgeoisie no longer dare to rise up against the republic, only then will the working class therefore be able to overtake and wield the power of the state by democratic means. The Social Democratic Workers’ Party must therefore keep the working class in constant, organized intellectual and physical readiness to defend the republic. The party must foster the closest intellectual relationship between the working class and the soldiers of the national army, and also inspire the army and the other armed state militias to maintain a state of absolute loyalty to the republic. Only then will the working class maintain the possibility of breaking the domination of the bourgeoisie using democratic means. If, in spite of all of these efforts of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, a bourgeois counterrevolution should succeed in breaking our democracy, then the working class could only take back state power by means of a civil war.

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3. The Social Democratic Workers’ Party will wield the power of the state using the forms of democracy, with all of the safeguards of democracy. The democratic safeguards provide a guarantee that the Social Democratic government will act under the constant control of the majority of the people, led by the working class, and will remain responsible to this majority. The democratic safeguards will make it possible to undertake the formation of a socialist order of society in the most favorable circumstances, with the unrestrained, active participation of the masses of the people. But if the bourgeoisie shall resist this radical change of society brought about by the mandate of the working class, if they systematically undermine the economy, or conspire with foreign counterrevolutionary forces to bring about a violent uprising, then the working class would be forced to break the power of the bourgeoisie by means of a dictatorship. 4. The working class will seize power in the democratic republic not to set up a new class hegemony, but in order to abolish class hegemony. If the state power of the working class can expropriate capitalists and major property owners and redistribute their means of production and exchange to the people, then there will be no more separation of the people into the exploiters and the exploited, then hegemony and class struggle will be overcome, then democracy will finally transform from the last manifestation of class hegemony into the self-government of a people no longer split into classes. Then, at last, the state will transform from a tool of class hegemony into a united commonwealth of the people.

6. Leon Trotsky The Austrian Crisis and Communism First published in English as “The Austrian Crisis and Communism,” Militant 3, no. 1 (1930): 1, 6–7. At the height of the power of the Heimwehr, a collection of far-right militias, right at a point in time when the Schober government had just submitted a draft of constitutional reforms to the National Council that meant to gravely weaken parliamentary power,17to broaden the authority of the federal president, and to revoke Vienna’s status as a state, Leon Trotsky (1879–1949) evaluated Austria’s political situation as “one partial aspect of the greater crisis of democracy.” Trotsky’s critique is especially pointed toward the political strategy—formulated in the Linz Program—that calls for a transition to socialism by democratic means. With this strategy, the Social Democrats would reach exactly the opposite: by adhering to the safeguards of democracy, they would aid and abet the rise of fascism. Austria is a small body with a big head. The capital city is in the hands of the Social Democracy, which, however, has less than half the seats in the national Parliament (43 percent). This unstable equilibrium, which is maintained thanks only to the conservative-conciliatory policy of the Social Democracy, greatly facilitates the position of Austro-Marxism. What it does in the Vienna City Council is enough to 17 From

September 26, 1929, to September 30, 1930, the former police president Johann Schober led a government made up of nonaffiliated ministers and representatives of the Christian Social and Pan-German People’s parties as well as members of the Rural League (Landbund).



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distinguish it from the bourgeois parties in the eyes of the workers. And for what it does not do—that is, the most important things—it can always put to the responsibility of the bourgeois parties. While Austro-Marxism exposes the bourgeoisie in articles and speeches, it very skillfully utilizes [. . .] the international dependence of Austria in order to prevent the workers from rising against their class enemy. “In Vienna we are strong, but in the country we are still weak. Besides, we have a master over us. We must retain our positions within the democracy and—wait.” That is the central idea of Austro-Marxist politics. All this has made it possible so far for Austro-Marxism to play the role of the “left” wing in the Second International and to retain all its positions against the Communist Party, which continues to heap mistake upon mistake. [. . .] No matter how tightly the Austrian Social Democracy has enmeshed the working class in its net of political, union, municipal, cultural, and sport institutions, it is nevertheless plain—and the July 1927 days showed this especially clearly18—that these reformist-pacifist methods alone do not give the bourgeoisie the necessary guarantees. What has been said explains the social functions of Austrian fascism. It is the bourgeoisie’s second steward, quite distinct from the first and opposed to it. The lower ranks of the Social Democracy are impelled forward by a proletarian instinct, even if an adulterated one. The lower ranks of fascism feed upon the hopelessness of the petty bourgeoisie and declassed elements that Austria is so rich in. The leaders of the Social Democracy keep the class instinct of the proletariat in check through the slogans and institutions of democracy. The leaders of fascism give vent to the despair of the petty bourgeoisie in its state of decay, offering the perspective of salvation through a coup d’état, after which the “Marxists” will no longer be able to hinder the good headway of agriculture, commerce, and the professions. [. . .] Fascism is the legitimate son of formal democracy in the epoch of decline. In Austria the principles of democracy have been carried to the point of absurdity in an especially graphic way. The Social Democracy is a few percentage points short of having a majority. It could be said, however—and it would not be paradoxical, but simply the naked truth— that the political immobility of Austrian Social Democracy is based not on the 43 percent of the vote which it has but on the 7 percent that it lacks for a majority. The foundations of capitalism would remain inviolable even if the Austrian Social Democrats won the majority. But such a victory is in no way guaranteed. It is idiocy to think that all questions can be settled through propaganda. [. . .] It is hard to imagine more concentrated nonsense than Otto Bauer’s arguments on the impermissibility of violence except for the defense of the existing democracy. Translated into the language of classes, this argument means: violence is permissible to guarantee the interests of the bourgeoisie, organized as the state, but it is impermissible for the establishment of a proletarian state.

18 With this reference to the events of July 1927, Trotsky is addressing the spontaneous mass protests of Vienna’s working population in response to the verdict of a grand jury on July 15, 1927. During the protests, the Palace of Justice was set on fire, and eighty-four protesters were shot by the police. See also chapters 1 and 36. The government exploited the July demonstrations as a pretext for their veering toward the fascist path espoused by the Heimwehr.

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A juridical formula is appended to this theory. Bauer chews over again the old formulations of Lassalle on law and revolution. But Lassalle was speaking while on trial. There his arguments were pertinent. But the attempt to turn a juridical duel with the prosecutor into a philosophy of historical development is nothing but a subterfuge of cowardice. As Bauer would have it, the use of violence is permissible only in response to an already accomplished coup d’état, when “law” no longer has any foundation, but it is impermissible twenty-four hours before the coup, in order to prevent it. Along this line, Bauer draws the demarcation between Austro-Marxism and Bolshevism as if it were a question of two schools of criminal law. In reality the difference lies in the fact that Bolshevism seeks to overthrow bourgeois rule while Social Democracy seeks to eternalize it. There can be no doubt that if a coup were made, Bauer would declare: “We did not call upon the workers to take arms against the fascists when we had powerful organizations, a legal press, 43 percent of the deputies, and the Vienna municipality; when the fascists were anticonstitutional bands attacking law and order. How could we do so now, when the fascists control the state apparatus and base themselves on the new laws they have created; when we have been deprived of everything, have been outlawed, and have no legal communication with the masses (who are, moreover, obviously disillusioned and discouraged, and have gone over to fascism in large numbers)? A call for armed uprising now could only be the work of criminal adventurists or Bolsheviks.” In making such a 180-degree turn in their philosophy, the Austro-Marxists would simply remain one hundred percent true to themselves. [. . .] Either way, Austrian “democracy” is doomed. After its present apoplectic stroke, it can of course recover and live on for a while, dragging one foot and barely able to use its tongue. It is possible that a second stroke would have to come before it falls. But its future is foreordained.

7. Käthe Leichter The Best Defense First published as “Die beste Abwehr,” Der Kampf 26, no. 11 (1933): 446–52. Translated by Rob McFarland. The best defense—is an attack: In this article, Käthe Leichter (1885–1942) criticizes the lukewarm “wait and see” and “lesser of two evils” strategies followed by party leadership in response to the dissolution of Parliament in March 1933. Her critique sums up the argument of the left opposition during the SDAP convention in October 1933, at which a split in the party was only narrowly avoided. Leichter’s thesis—that reformism has run into a dead end because of “the dynamic of political contingencies”—calls the very foundations of Austro-Marxist political strategy into question. Her allusion to the “economic fragmentation of the proletariat,” however, may ultimately be the best argument against a pointless, violent coup d’état. The German catastrophe has demanded the task of a tactical reevaluation by the workers of the world.19 In doing so, it is important to do more than to decide if this or that 19 The

author refers to the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor on January 30, 1933, and to the rapid transformation of Germany’s parliamentary democracy into the centralized dictatorship



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moment is being missed, if this or that situation is being utilized properly, if this or that decision was wrong, or if here or there the leaders and the masses were lacking initiative or gumption. This all-too-common method of critical reflection focuses only on visible manifestations of the fascist blindsiding of the worker’s movement, ignoring the deeper causes behind it. Can we muster the necessary strength to rise to the task and evolve? Only if we conscientiously examine the possibility that some of the reasons for our failure might lie deeper than the surface. Only if we ask ourselves if the strategy that led the workers movement through the years of bourgeois democracy might still be relevant for empowering us in our fight against fascism. We can evolve, but only if we take the appropriate steps. [. . .] Above all else, it is necessary that we lose our faith in the automatic, inevitable nature of economic and historical processes. This faith has too often been our guiding principle in these last decades. The first big step forward was our shift from utopianism to science, the recognition that the socialist movement depended upon an evolutionary process. Today, now that we recognize that we need to move from recognition to implementation, it becomes clear that we—in our fascination with this dependence upon an evolutionary process—have lost our faith in the creative power of the workers movement itself. We have lost our confidence in our own power to create and to take action. [. . .] When we show so little passion for the thought of winning back our democratic system with all of its freedoms and rights and its parliamentary procedures, are we actually revealing a deep-seated scorn for democracy? Surely thousands of people are only realizing today how much they value their democratic institutions. It is becoming clear that conditions in a democracy are a hundred times more desirable than life under a fascist dictatorship. What has disappointed us all, however, is the dynamic of democratic development. All of us with our Marxist convictions seemed so sure that a bourgeois democracy would serve us well because of the ever-growing number of salaried workers and the increasing size of the proletariat. On the wide field of democracy, all of these things seemed to tip the odds to our advantage. But even given our advantages, change did not come as automatically, as mechanically as we thought it would. The Proletarianization was enormous, but not in the form of an increase in the number of salaried workers. Quite the opposite: more and more people were thrown out of the process of production, and the middle class devolved not into salaried workers but into paupers. The postwar period, the process of rationalization and the worldwide depression did not lead to a unification, but to an economic fragmentation of the proletariat. This created a class of people who did not automatically swell our own ranks. Instead, it gave the fascists the opportunity to use their pseudo-socialist phraseology to infiltrate the outer edges of the working class. Obviously, this could not have been accomplished so easily without failings on our side. At a point when we were already deep into the crisis, we were still, for the most part, advocating for the politics of the employed worker, fighting for wages and workplace rights. In this one area, nobody can accuse the Austrian movement of not sensing a growing problem. In those final years, we were spending our resources and energy on winning over the middle class and fighting for unemployment insurance. But we misjudged the psychology of both of these issues. We were so convinced that the middle class was inexorably connected to the capitalist order that we essentially assured them that the capitalist economy would survive. With all of our conviction, we completely overlooked their passionate anti-capitalism, especially among the more economically precarious administered according to the “Führer” principle that was in force by July of 1933.

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subset of the middle class. Right from the start, we assumed that the unemployed would be so hungry for a revolution that we were afraid of unleashing their revolutionary zeal. We blithely assumed that our parliamentary struggle would automatically bind them to us, but this parliamentary struggle became less and less fruitful, and we played down the worsening situation until we were made responsible for it. [. . .] And let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that our rivals hate us because of our rhetorical radicalism! We are “Austro-Bolsheviks” in the eyes of the Austrian bourgeoisie not because of the Linz Program or because of some potentially strong words in our speeches and headlines. They hate us because of our rental controls, our Breitner taxes, our works councils, and our social encumbrances. Our revolutionary words hardly disturbed them. They got nervous because of our reforms that cut into their profits and endangered the power of their business leaders. Even the most carefully worded political platform or journalistic writing could not have protected the German Social Democrats from the hatred of their rivals that was stoked both by the reformatory day-to-day politics concerned with creating new labor laws and in the administration of Prussia. If we had wanted to pay attention to agitation from the other side, then we should not have played down our socialist goals but our day-to-day policies instead. And indeed, we see that the first attack from the fascist side is aimed at our social accomplishments. That is how our reformism ended up in this dead-end situation. This reformism might lead us, as it has in so many countries, to keep quiet and not to stake our bets on the big prize, in order to save our social institutions and our deepest values, to save all of the things that the workforce could lose in a battle with its enemies. If we follow this careful course, experience tells us that this course is the surest way to lose everything that we have fought for. Because right now, antirevolutionary forces are slowly but surely dismantling our social politics and our social insurance, our right to participate in the leadership of our industries and unions, our social housing programs and our autonomy as a working-class community. The institutions and values that hinder the workers today in their struggle— because they are afraid to lose them—these same institutions and values will be the first thing to be lost as soon as our enemies no longer fear our counterattack. [. . .] We cannot fend off the attacks from our enemies by loyally cooperating with them, we can only fend off attacks on our social positions when our enemies are afraid of us.

Dr. Karl Siebert: “Is your Child Intelligent?” Child Psychologist Charlotte Bühler performing experiments using children who spent time in Vienna’s Intake Center for Children. Das interessante Blatt, March 17, 1932. (Courtesy of ANNO/Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.)

CHAPTER SEVEN

FREUDO-MARXISM AND INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY Rob McFarland, Nicole G. Burgoyne, and Georg Vasold

S

igmund Freud was more than just a researcher and scientist in Vienna. By the 1920s Freud had become a landmark in the Viennese cultural landscape, a celebrity who attracted visitors from beyond Austria’s borders. Not only the bourgeois press claimed Freud as an icon. The Social Democratic Arbeiter-Zeitung published Eduard Hitschmann’s congratulatory overview of the work of Freud on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.1 After detailing the trajectory of Freud’s life work, Hitschmann categorizes Vienna’s famous doctor as a “revolutionary” dedicated to a cultural ideal of life guided by science. Sadly, Hitschmann explains, many of Freud’s most important treatments are unavailable to broad swaths of the common people. But he then includes a quote by Freud that portrays the famous psychologist as a defender of the poor and as a proponent of psychological care for the masses:

Someday the social conscience will awaken and demand that the poor have every right to psychological care as they now have to surgical care, and that neurotics are just as dangerous to the health of the people [Volksgesundheit] as those suffering from tuberculosis. Just like tuberculosis, we cannot turn over treatment to the insufficient care of random individuals from the unwashed masses. Institutes and clinics will be organized, places where psychologically trained doctors are employed to treat our oft-drunken men, our incapacitated women, and our wild or neurotic children and make them resistant to illness and ready to work. These treatments will be provided at no cost.

As the director of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Outpatient Clinic (Wiener Psychoanalytisches Ambulatorium), Hitschmann had a vested interest in using Freud’s birthday to leverage more public support for his own institution. But his choice of this particular Freud quote goes beyond his own self-interest: Hitschmann is casting Freud as a proponent of Red Vienna, referring to the city’s extensive efforts to eradicate tuberculosis and calling for wide-ranging access to psychoanalytical help as a part of the massive Social Democratic program to cure the health of the Viennese people.

1

Eduard Hitschmann, “Siegmund [sic] Freud: Zum siebzigsten Geburtstag am 6. Mai 1926,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, May 6, 1926, 6.

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In spite of Hitschmann’s choice of quote, Freud was famously ambiguous when it came to endorsing any specific political movement, including the ideas published by the denizens of Red Vienna in the Arbeiter-Zeitung and other publications.2 In contrast to Freud’s often apolitical stance, many of his erstwhile disciples were not afraid of appropriating the science of psychoanalysis for various—and often contradictory—political purposes. Freud was the subject of political attacks and popular ridicule both from the Left and the Right, and he served as the éminence grise against whom other Viennese psychologists defined and delineated their own work. Other institutions soon developed and served as gathering places for charismatic leaders and their followers who coalesced into competing schools of psychological thought. Out of the many fascinating psychoanalytical impulses and developments that started during the Red Vienna period, this chapter focuses on a series of writings that theorize the relationship between the individual and the larger community, whether this community was defined as urban masses, as society in general, or as a political ideal. While Hitschmann praises the originality of Freud’s group psychology (Massenpsychologie) in his laudatory article in the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the work that Hitschmann references, Freud’s 1921 work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse), does not politicize psychology for the masses. Instead, the text explores the way that an individual’s libido and the tendency toward narcissism affect the individual’s interaction with masses and crowds. The political potential of Freud’s ideas had to be developed and set into motion by his former allies who moved beyond his sphere of influence. Wilhelm Reich, a student of Freud and later a prominent part of Vienna’s psychological institutions, became convinced that mass neuroses demanded a mass cure that went beyond individual psychoanalysis. He broke with Freud as he investigated a synthesis between psychoanalysis and Marxist dialectic materialism, bringing about a movement that came to be known as Freudo-Marxism, which included psychologists and theorists such as Siegfried Bernfeld, Helene Deutsch, Paul Federn, Otto Fenichel, and Josef Karl Friedjung.3 As Reich and Bernfeld argue in their two texts in this chapter, psychoanalysis contains potential for a radical critique of societal structures. While Freud enjoyed international acclaim, the adulation of Vienna’s psychological community—and the attention of many of Red Vienna’s Social Democratic leaders— belonged to Alfred Adler, a former proponent of Freudian psychoanalysis who broke with the movement in 1911. Adler believed that an individual could only be truly healed when placed in the context of the broader society in which he or she functioned. Adler and his followers developed this model into the movement known as individual psychology, a name that belies the movement’s focus on the importance of communal ties in an individual’s development. Adler founded the Austrian Association of Individual Psychology (Österreichischer Verein für Individualpsychologie) in 1912 and its international journal in 1914. Among Adler’s many devotees was Manès Sperber, who published a short monograph that described Adler’s superiority to Freud in 1926. Other members of Adler’s movement, the therapist and activist Alice Rühle-Gerstel and the writer and educational theorist Sofie Lazarsfeld, specifically politicized individual psychology and tied the movement to the educational projects of Red Vienna in contemporary publications. Alfred Adler taught at the Pedagogical Institute of the City of Vienna, where the experimental psychologist Karl Bühler led the psychological-pedagogical laboratory with 2

One important exception is, of course, Freud’s participation in the Rallying Cry of Vienna’s Intellectuals (Eine Kundgebung des geistigen Wien), translated in chapter 34. 3 For a further example of Freudo-Marxist thought, see the article by “Dr. Otto” in chapter 33.

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close ties to the University of Vienna. Bühler and his wife Charlotte Bühler (pictured in the chapter illustration in the Intake Center for Children) worked together with the Social Democratic government of Vienna to reorganize the city’s educational institutions using scientific principles of child development. Their theories were firmly based in empirical research, including the artistic “will to form” that they found in the games played by Vienna’s working-class children. The differing psychological movements in Vienna were not only an outgrowth of Freud’s influence. The institutional and intellectual projects of Red Vienna provided the basis of many of the movements that made up what Sheldon Gardner and Gwendolyn Stevens have called the “psychological diaspora” that emanated from Vienna after the fall of Austro-Marxism and the rise of the Austrofascists. Further reading Benetka 1995 Danto 2005 Fallend 1988 Gardner and Stevens 1992 Gay 1998 Hoffman 1994

1. Sigmund Freud Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego First published as Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (Vienna, Leipzig, Zurich: Internationaler Psycho­ analytischer Verlag, 1921), 57–65. Authorized translation by James Strachey (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 52–59. Even though Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is typically associated with fin-de-siècle Vienna, he produced some of the most important and influential texts of his career during the Red Vienna period—including Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips) in 1920, The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion) in 1927, and Civilization and its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur) in 1930. Freud’s 1921 work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse) returns to two central issues of his 1913 monograph Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu): herd instinct and group mind. In his treatment of mass psychology, Freud carefully analyses contemporary issues such as church communities, the army, and the rise of leaders (Führer) in such communities. Even though he addresses large movements, Freud avoids political analysis and explains mass phenomena using his tried and true theories of narcissism and libidinal ties. We should have to start from the ascertained fact that a mere collection of people is not a group, so long as these ties have not been established in it; but we should have to admit that in any collection of people the tendency to form a psychological group may very easily become prominent. We should have to give our attention to the different kinds of groups, more or less stable, that arise spontaneously, and to study the conditions of their origin and of their dissolution. We should above all be concerned with the distinction between groups which have a leader and leaderless groups. We should

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consider whether groups with leaders may not be the more primitive and complete, whether in the others an idea, an abstraction, may not be substituted for the leader (a state of things to which religious groups, with their invisible head, form a transition stage), and whether a common tendency, a wish in which a number of people can have a share, may not in the same way serve as a substitute. This abstraction, again, might be more or less completely embodied in the figure of what we might call a secondary leader, and interesting varieties would arise from the relation between the idea and the leader. The leader or the leading idea might also, so to speak, be negative; hatred against a particular person or institution might operate in just the same unifying way, and might call up the same kind of emotional ties as positive attachment. [. . .] Let us keep before our eyes the nature of the emotional relations which hold between men in general. According to Schopenhauer’s famous simile of the freezing porcupines no one can tolerate a too intimate approach to his neighbor. [. . .] The evidence of psycho-analysis shows that almost every intimate emotional relation between two people which lasts for some time—marriage, friendship, the relations between parents and children—[. . .] leaves a sediment of feelings of aversion and hostility, which have first to be eliminated by repression. This is less disguised in the common wrangles between business partners or in the grumbles of a subordinate at his superior. The same thing happens when men come together in larger units. Every time two families become connected by marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighboring towns each is the other’s most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt. Closely related races keep one another at arm’s length; the South German cannot endure the North German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon the Scotchman, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese. We are no longer astonished that greater differences should lead to an almost insuperable repugnance, such as the Gallic people feel for the German, the Aryan for the Semite and the white races for the coloured. When this hostility is directed against people who are otherwise loved we describe it as ambivalence of feeling, and we explain the fact, in what is probably far too rational a manner, by means of the numerous occasions for conflicts of interest which arise precisely in such intimate relations. In the undisguised antipathies and aversions which people feel toward strangers with whom they have to do we may recognize the expression of self-love—of narcissism. This self-love works for the self-assertion of the individual, and behaves as though the occurrence of any divergence from his own particular lines of development involved a criticism of them and a demand for their alteration. We do not know why such sensitiveness should have been directed to just these details of differentiation, but it is unmistakable that in this whole connection men give evidence of a readiness for hatred, an aggressiveness, the source of which is unknown, and to which one is tempted to ascribe an elementary character. [. . .] But the whole of this intolerance vanishes, temporarily or permanently, as the result of the formation of a group, and in a group. So long as a group formation persists or so far as it extends, individuals behave as though they were uniform, tolerate other people’s peculiarities, put themselves on an equal level with them, and have no feeling of aversion towards them. Such a limitation of narcissism can, according to our theoretical views, only be produced by one factor, a libidinal tie with other people. Love for oneself knows only one barrier—love for others, love for objects. [. . .] The same thing occurs in men’s

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social relations as has become familiar to psychoanalytic research in the course of the development of the individual libido. The libido props itself upon the satisfaction of the great vital needs, and chooses as its first objects the people who have a share in that process. And in the development of mankind as a whole, just as individuals, love alone acts as the civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to altruism. And this is true both of the sexual love for women, with all the obligations which it involves of sparing what women are fond of, and also of the desexualized, sublimated homosexual love for other men, which springs from work in common. If therefore in groups narcissistic self-love is subject to limitations which do not operate outside them, that is cogent evidence that the essence of a group formation consists in a new kind of libidinal ties among the members of the group. But our interest now leads us on to the pressing question as to what may be the nature of these ties which exist in groups. In the psychoanalytic study of neuroses we have hitherto been occupied almost exclusively with ties that unite with their objects those love instincts which still directly pursue sexual aims. In groups there can evidently be no question of sexual aims of that kind. We are concerned here with love instincts which have been diverted from their original aims, though they do not operate with less energy on that account. Now we have already observed within the range of the usual sexual object-cathexis [Objektbesetzung] phenomena which represent a diversion of the instinct from its sexual aim. [. . .] As a matter of fact, we learn from psychoanalysis that there do exist other mechanisms for emotional ties, the so-called identifications, insufficiently-known processes and hard to describe, the investigations of which will for some time keep us away from the subject of Group Psychology.

2. Wilhelm Reich Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis First published as “Dialektischer Materialismus und Psychoanalyse,” Unter dem Banner des Marxismus 3, no. 5 (October 1929): 736–71. Translated by Nicole G. Burgoyne. Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was one of the best-known representatives of a younger generation of Viennese psychoanalysts who combined therapeutic practice with leftist engagement after 1918. Beginning in 1922, he worked at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Outpatient Clinic, and in 1928, Reich cofounded, with Marie Frischauf-Pappenheim, the Socialist Society for Sex Counseling and Research which managed Sex Counseling Centers for Workers and Employees in Vienna. Reich was a member of the SDAP, but increasingly fell into conflict with the party after the Palace of Justice fire in 1927, also known as the July revolt. Reich thought the SDAP was being too passive, and in 1930, because of his public support for the Communist Party, the party ejected him from its membership. He moved to Berlin in the same year. In this essay, which was published in the international communist journal Under the Banner of Marxism, Reich argues for the connection between Marxism and Psychoanalysis. For him, “psychoanalysis only [has] a future in socialism.” Reich’s writings enjoyed a resurgence during the student movements of the late 1960s. At the end of the nineteenth century, as a reaction against the morally repressed scholarship and emblematic of the second, scholarly phase of the downfall of the bourgeois morality within the bourgeois class itself, a researcher stepped forward who claimed that

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the modern nervousness was a consequence of the cultural morality of sex [. . .], and that neuroses are generally sexual disorders of particular types and largely based on sexual repression. This researcher, Freud, was professionally scorned, ostracized, and branded a charlatan. Quite alone, he staked his claim and remained unheard for decades. In this time, psychoanalysis was born, a horror and abomination for the whole of the bourgeois world, especially for scholarship, because psychoanalysis is based on the roots of sexual repression, a cornerstone of much conservative ideology (religion, morality, etc.). Psychoanalysis appeared in the societal milieu at the same time that other signs of a revolutionary movement within the bourgeois camp itself began to show themselves, but against its own ideology. The bourgeois youth protested against their bourgeois parents and created a “youth movement.” Its secret purpose is to strive toward sexual freedom. However, since this youth movement has passed up the chance to connect with the proletarian movement, after partially reaching its goals, it has become meaningless and is in decline. Liberal bourgeois voices of the press are ever more critical of the dictates of the church. Bourgeois literature has begun to take an ever more liberal position on moral questions. But all of these occurrences—which partly accompany the appearance of psychoanalysis and partly preceded its appearance—all of these things fade away right when they should be taken seriously. None dare to think the question through to its end, to take on the consequences. Economic interests supersede all others, and even bring about an alliance between bourgeois liberalism and the church. Just as Marxism was, sociologically speaking, an expression of a growing consciousness of the laws of the economy, an expression of the exploitation of the majority by a minority, so psychoanalysis is the expression of the growing consciousness of the social repression of sex. This is the main social meaning of Freudian psychoanalysis. Still, one essential difference remains. Whereas one class exploits and the other is exploited, sexual repression occurs in both classes. Speaking in terms of human history, sexual repression is older than the exploitation of one class by another. Sexual repression is not, however, quantitatively the same in both classes. Judging by the reports by Marx in Capital and Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England, there was just about no constraint or repression of sexuality among the proletariat at the time of the first differentiation of the proletariat, in the beginnings of capitalism. The sexual form of the proletariat was only marked and influenced by its desolate social condition, the same condition in which we find today’s Lumpenproletariat. In the course of the development of capitalism, the ruling class has grasped at social political measures and begun to institute “welfare” [Fürsorge], but only insofar as was required for its own existence and profit interests. As a result, today’s proletariat is, ideologically speaking, becoming ever more bourgeois. Thereby the effects of sexual repression have been shunted into the proletariat. Among the proletariat, sexual repression has not reached the same dimension as among the petit bourgeoisie, which is more chaste than the pope and follows the upper class moral ideal more strictly than the upper class itself. Although it is the moral role model of the petit bourgeoise, the upper class has long since internally liquidated its morality. [. . .] Concerned as it is with a practical use of a quite revolutionary theory of humanity in capitalist society, the therapy of neuroses shows the greatest inclination to compromise and capitulate to the bourgeois sexual morality. The social being of the psychoanalyst forbids, indeed makes it impossible for him to address in public the impossibility of uniting the radical psychoanalytic therapy of neuroses with today’s sexual morality, marriage, the bourgeois family and bourgeois education. Although it is acknowledged that the familiar relations provide no comfort, that the environment of the afflicted patients is usually the

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greatest hindrance to their recuperation, the consequence of this realization is—understandably—seldom acknowledged. Thus it is that the reality principle and conforming to reality are not understood as competently coping with reality, but rather as completely submitting to the same social demands that caused the neuroses. It is clear that all of this is detrimental to the practical use of psychoanalysis for the healing of neuroses. Thus, psychoanalysis’s temporarily capitalist form of being stifles it from within and without. Freud is correct: his science is in decline. But we must add: in decline in the bourgeois society. If psychoanalysis does not conform to bourgeois society, certainly it will decline, but if psychoanalysis does conform to bourgeois society it will suffer the same death that Marxism suffered at the hands of reformist socialists, namely death by flattening, above all by neglect of libido theory. Now as ever, official scholarship has no wish to know of it, because it cannot accept it due to its class ties. Those psychoanalysts who are optimistic regarding the propagation of psychoanalysis are gravely mistaken. Precisely this propagation is a sign of the beginning of its demise. When it is used in its undiluted form, psychoanalysis undermines bourgeois ideologies. Furthermore, because the socialist economy forms the foundations of the free development of the intellect and sexuality, psychoanalysis only has a future in socialism. [. . .] We have seen: psychoanalysis cannot develop a Weltanschauung, a view of the world from itself, and therefore cannot replace any Weltanschauung. However, it can bring with it a reevaluation of values. In practice it destroys religion, the bourgeois sexual ideologies among individuals, and frees sexuality. Precisely these are also the ideological functions of Marxism. Marxism topples the old values with economic revolution and a materialist worldview; psychoanalysis does the same or could do the same, psychologically. However, because psychoanalysis remains ineffectual in bourgeois society, it can only reach this result after a complete social revolution. Some psychoanalysts believe that psychoanalysis can reshape the world along the path of evolution and replace the social revolution. This is utopian thinking that is based on complete ignorance of economic and political existence.

3. Siegfried Bernfeld Socialism and Psychoanalysis: Basic Ideas from a Presentation Held at the Society of Socialist Doctors First published as “Sozialismus und Psychoanalyse: Grundgedanken eines Vortrages, gehalten im Verein Sozialistischer Ärzte,” Vierteljahrszeitschrift des Vereins Sozialistischer Ärzte 2, nos. 2–3 (November 1926): 15–22. Translated by Rob McFarland. Siegfried Bernfeld (1892–1953) was a psychological researcher and educational reformer who believed in the importance of qualitative research inspired by psychoanalysis. After graduating from the University of Vienna, he was influenced by the Zionist socialist movements. In 1919 he founded the Baumgarten Children’s Home, where he sought to rehabilitate orphaned Jewish refugees according to principles of child development.4 After the financial failure of the school, Bernfeld became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung) and worked in its pedagogical institute. Along 4

Siegfried Bernfeld, Kinderheim Baumgarten: Bericht über einen ernsthaften Versuch mit neuer Erziehung (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1921).

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with Hermine Hug-Hellmuth (1871–1924) and August Aichhorn (1878–1949), Bernfeld is considered one of the pioneering members of the Viennese school of child psychology. After 1925 Bernfeld developed the cause of Freudo-Marxism through his work at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin. In this excerpt from his article “Socialism and Psychoanalysis,” which was based on a presentation to the Society of Socialist Doctors founded by Georg Simmel (1858– 1918) and Ewald Fabian (1885–1944), Bernfeld connects the work of Freud with some of the basic tenets of Marxist theory. He later collaborated on the screenplay of the 1932 Social Democratic propaganda film “Die vom 17er Haus” (The people from house no. 17). It cannot be denied that the materialist—and even less the dialectical—character of the Freudian method of psychoanalysis has not been consciously acknowledged. Therefore, as far as dialectics are concerned, his method has not yet been fully and consequentially realized. Freudian psychology is by no means dialectical psychology. This is a task for the future. Freud is an enemy of any premature systematic approach; he is well aware of the fragmentary nature of his science and of all sciences. There are many sets of facts—especially in the earlier phases of his research—that were left without a systematic examination. Some of his findings were even analyzed with the methods of nonpsychoanalytic psychology. But every one of the revisions so frequently undertaken by Freud represented one further step toward what would become a thoroughly dialectical process. Thus, today’s psychoanalysis is a very meaningful—and certainly the first—attempt at a dialectical psychology. It is also the case that Freud himself did not engage in much self-reflection about his own method of thinking and the methods of psychoanalysis that would have contributed to his characterizing psychoanalysis as being particularly materialist or dialectical in nature. [. . .] The method of psychoanalysis, its epistemic goal, and its course of inquiry all correspond to Marxism in the way that they approach their object of study: Psychoanalysis studies the history of the inner life, Marxism studies the history of society. The inner connection between both of these doctrines is not accidental but self-explanatory. For both the inner life and the life of society are dialectical processes, and the best insights are provided by a conscious exploration of their nature. Which, of course, does not exclude the possibility that individual ideas of psychoanalysis will not have to be corrected by future research. After this observation, a short explanation is necessary for the exposition of both of these negative criteria: (A) Freud has, up to now, never engaged in the subject of Marxist research. His treatises Totem and Taboo and Group Psychology as well as his scattered remarks about the facts of cultural history only address the ideologies or the psychic processes of individual beings within a group. His line of questioning relates exclusively to problems that were never addressed by Marx, preexisting problems that had already been arranged in defined positions. His questions about the processes of the individual—and how this individual might react to a given societal condition—are asked from a position that totally rejects any notion of a “collective soul.” Wherever he touches on questions of the ur-history and the emergence of societal phenomena—the final reduction to material needs, to the economic circumstances or means of production—he considers these to be open questions or simply beyond the realm of psychoanalysis. (Ur-sublimations are, for Freud, the individual mechanisms which make available new productive forces. These new forces are useful in the difficult relations of production that arise out of economic hardship. Thus, the sex drive has suffered limitations.) On the other hand, Marx never addressed those same problems that Freud just started to flesh out: how are psychic mechanisms organized in the heads of living and working people, those same mechanisms which allow people to

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observe the dominant means of production and to come up with a corresponding ideology? The race between social scientists and psychologists to answer exactly those questions has not yet been won, because neither discipline has sufficiently developed its doctrines on this front. At least not by the major authors on the side of the psychoanalysts. (B) Every scientific discipline is potentially at the command of any given value, any given class interest. It is only necessary to undermine the discipline’s scientific integrity in whatever point happens to be on the table. It is not necessarily so that a specific political or even metaphysical worldview arises from psychoanalysis. By consistently holding fast to the structure of its historical/materialistic/dialectic methodology, it is possible for a truly historical/materialistic/dialectic social science to avoid conclusions that would be incongruous to its purpose. Every imaginable degree of Marxist “deviation” to the right or to the left has its complimentary right- or left-leaning psychoanalytic deviation. Freud never identified himself in any way as a socialist, but neither did he identify himself as an opponent of socialism. Given his unique capacity for keeping himself aloof from any kind of political position, it would be very difficult to pin down any of his most off-the-cuff statements as being reactionary, if the statement were understood correctly. The fact that his values are bourgeois at their core can be seen in his practical use of the term “sickness,” and can probably be found elsewhere. The fact that Freud is never explicitly bourgeois except perhaps in obscure passages of his research: this is a very important detail that cannot be said of any other bourgeois researcher, certainly not any other psychologist.

4. Alfred Adler The Significance of the Social Feeling for the Development of Character First published as “Die Bedeutung des Gemeinschaftsgefühls für die Charakterentwicklung,” in Menschenkenntnis (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1927), 132–36. Translated by Walter Béran Wolfe in Understanding Human Nature (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1927), 166–71. Freud’s erstwhile colleague Alfred Adler (1870–1937) famously broke away from Freudian psychoanalysis in 1911 because he objected to the centrality of sexuality (as opposed to social life more broadly) to psychoanalysis.5 According to Manès Sperber (1905–1984), twelve members of Freud’s famous Wednesday Psychological Society followed Adler to form the Austrian Association of Individual Psychology in 1912. In the same year Adler published On the Nervous Character (Über den nervösen Charakter), his best-known work apart from The Study of the Inferiority of the Organs (Studie über die Minderwertigkeit von Organen, 1907). In addition to his editorial work for volumes related to his association, Adler organized in the mid-teens and 1920s a series of lectures and courses at the Volksheim Ottakring, a large popular education center located in a working-class outer district of Vienna. A dutiful student used her stenography skills to write down a series of Adler’s lectures, and in 1927 he published these lectures under the title Understanding Human Nature (Menschenkenntnis) simultaneously in German and English. In this excerpt, Adler explains 5

See Adler, “Zur Kritik der Freudischen Sexualtheorie der Nervosität,” in Heilen und Bilden: Ärztlich-pädagogische Arbeiten des Vereins für Individualpsychologie, ed. Alfred Adler and Carl Furtmüller (Munich: Verlag Ernst Reinhardt, 1914), 94–113.

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one of the foundational ideas of individual psychology: The importance of the individual’s connection to her or his larger social context. The social feeling, next to the striving for power, plays the most important role in the development of character. It is expressed, just as is the striving for significance, in the first psychic tendencies of the child, especially in his desire for contact and tenderness. We have already learned about the conditions for the development of the social feeling in a previous paragraph, and we wish merely to recall them briefly. The social feeling is influenced both by the feeling of inferiority and its compensatory striving for power. Human beings are very sensitive media for the development of inferiority complexes of all kinds. The process of psychic life, the disquiet that seeks for compensations, that demands security and totality, begins as soon as the feeling of inferiority appears, for the purpose of securing peace and happiness in life. The rules of conduct which we must maintain toward a child grow out of our recognition of his feeling of inferiority. These rules may be summed up with the admonition that we must not make life too bitter for a child, and that we must prevent him from learning the dark side of existence too quickly; and that we must also give him the possibility of experiencing the joy of living. A second group of conditions, which are of an economic nature, comes into play here. Unfortunately, children often grow up in circumstances which are unnecessarily bitter; misunderstanding, poverty, and want are phenomena which may be prevented. Bodily defects play an important role because they can cause a normal style of life to be impossible and teach a child that he needs special privileges and particular laws in order to maintain his existence. Even if we had all these things in our power, we could not prevent the fact that such children would experience life as an unpleasant difficulty and this in turn gives rise to the great danger that their social feeling will become distorted. We cannot judge a human being except by using the concept of the social feeling as a standard and measuring his thought and action according to it. We must maintain this standpoint, because every individual within the body of human society must affirm the connectedness of that society. The necessity causes us to recognize more or less clearly, what we owe our fellow-men. We are in the very midst of life and are dominated by the logic of communal existence. This determines the fact that we need certain known criteria for the evaluation of our fellows. The degree to which the social feeling has developed in any individual is the sole criterion of human values, universally valid. We cannot deny our psychic dependency upon the social feeling. There is no human being who is capable of actually breaking off his social feeling in its entirety. There are no words with which we could entirely escape our duties to our fellow-man. The social feeling constantly reminds us with its warning voice. This does not mean that we constantly have the social feeling in our conscious thought, but we do maintain that a certain mobilization of power is required to distort it, to set it aside; and further, its universal necessity permits no one to begin an action without first being justified by this social feeling. The need for justifying each act and thought originates in the unconscious sense of social unity. At the very least it determines the fact that we frequently must seek extenuating circumstances for our actions. Herein originates the special technique of life, of thinking and acting, which causes us to wish to remain constantly in rapport with the social feeling, or at the very least, to delude ourselves with the semblance of social connectedness. In short, these explanations show that there is something like a mirage of the social feeling, which acts as a veil cloaking certain tendencies. The discovery of these tendencies alone would give us a correct evaluation of an action or an individual. That such deception may occur,

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increases the difficulty in evaluating the social feeling; it is this very difficulty which raises the understanding of human nature to the plane of a science. [. . .] The degree of the social feeling shows itself in an individual’s every activity. It may be very obvious in his external expressions, as, for instance, the way he looks at another person, his manner of shaking hands, or of speaking. His whole personality may give an indelible impression, one way or another, which we sense almost intuitively. Occasionally we draw such far-reaching conclusions unconsciously from the behavior of a man, that our own attitude is quite dependent upon them. In these discussions we are doing little else than bringing this intuitive knowledge into the sphere of consciousness, and thus enabling ourselves to test and evaluate it, to the end that we may avoid making great mistakes. The value of this transference into consciousness lies in that we lay ourselves less open to false prejudices (which are active when we allow our judgments to be formed in the unconscious where we cannot control our activities and have no opportunity to make revisions). Let us reaffirm that an evaluation of a man’s character must be made solely when his context, his environment is known. If we wrench single phenomena from his life and judge them singly, as one might if one considered his physical status alone, or solely his environment, or education, we are inevitably forced into erroneous conclusions. This thesis is valuable because it immediately removes a great load from the shoulders of mankind. A better knowledge of ourselves must, with our technique of living, result in a behavior pattern more appropriate to our needs. It becomes possible by applying our method, to influence others, especially children, for the better, and prevent the inexorable consequences of the blind fate which might otherwise overtake them, Thus it will no longer be necessary for an individual to be condemned to an unhappy fate simply because he originated in an unfortunate family, or hereditary, situation. Let us accomplish this alone, and our civilization will have taken a decided step in advance! A new generation will grow up courageously conscious that it is master of its own fate!

5. Alice Rühle-Gerstel Marxism and Individual Psychology: The Revolutionary Science First published as “Marxismus und Individualpsychologie: Die revolutionäre Wissenschaft,” in Der Weg zum Wir. Versuch einer Verbindung von Marxismus und Individualpsychologie (Dresden: Verlag Am Andern Ufer, 1927), 143–49. Translated by Nicole G. Burgoyne. Alice Rühle-Gerstel (1894–1943) was a student of Alfred Adler and a proponent of individual psychology and socialism. In Manès Sperber’s 1977 introduction to the reprint of this text, Sperber noted that Rühle-Gerstel’s book The Way to Us (Der Weg zum Wir) was foundational for Marxist followers of Adlerian psychology of the 1920s. He recalls the 1927 International Conference of Individual Psychologists in Vienna as a watershed moment when the Marxists used the present text as a basis for agreement on methods of therapeutic practice as well as engagement with workers’ parties and other social organizations. At over 220 pages, the first half of the book summarizes Marxism and individual psychology separately as deployed for Rühle-Gerstel’s purposes. This excerpt previews Rühle-Gerstel’s argument for the compatibility and importance of the two schools of thought. Comparable to the argument set forth by Wilhelm Reich above, RühleGerstel concludes her book with a statement of the mutual dependence of the two movements.

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Now we must examine the ways in which Marxism and individual psychology may be understood as a sociology and psychology, respectively different from their antecedents and contemporary rivals. In addition, there is the question of how Marxism and individual psychology are sciences that may be understood as superior to all previous sciences, and the question as to the extent to which they earn the designation “revolutionary science.” Above all, Marx differs in his historical, dialectical method from previous approaches to sociology (and also from those which, in his opinion, did not change because of class interests). With Marx, the question is no longer asked: what is society, how did it come to be, how are its parts constituted, what is to be made of it all? Rather with Marx, the question is phrased as follows: How does a certain society function under certain conditions (to be examined) and under historically contingent objectives or interests? Adler differs from previous approaches to psychology in the same way. Adler’s question is no longer: How is the psyche constituted? Or: How should it be constituted? Rather, the question that must be asked in regard to Adler would be: How does a certain (individual or mass) psyche function under these or those circumstances, while striving toward goals of this or that type? These two teachings elevate themselves above the general scholarship of the era in every decisive aspect. First, in the object of their research: it is neither nature nor mind but rather humankind. For Marx, the object of research is the socialized human in his or her historical transformation. For Adler, it is humans as they are tied to their community, the transformation of their function as conditioned by striving for their goals. Humans are at once “nature” and “mind.” They are regarded by means of the terminology of productive forces and ideologies, of organ inferiority and life plans. The particular subject, humans, are brought closer to comprehension in the totality of their manner of existence. Still, they are regarded completely differently than by anthropology, which, as a branch of biology, artificially abstracts [and considers] only the natural, static side of the human. Humankind is considered in their whole context [Zusammenhang], as an indivisible unity, which cannot be categorized or divided into races, species, individualities, or into hosts of partial drives [Triebe]. They are understood as specific forms of appearance [Erscheinungsformen] and functional bearers [Träger] of the universal cosmic as well as earthly life in the totality of their original conditionality. They are understood by means of nature, their environment, their past, their social ties, economy, situation, etc. They are also understood by their purposeful impulses toward the creation or expansion of the basis of production, their configuration or reconfiguration of the social forms of communal living, and their achieving security or acquiring new security through prestige and power. New methods of research become visible on this basis. It is not the intention simply to yoke humanity with the causal chains of all of human history. Neither may a kind of freedom of action be ascribed to humankind, a freedom that has no causality. They are represented as final or causal, as originally conditioned and purposefully directed living beings, whose naturalness holds them tightly in the causal chain of events. The human character of these goals allows them to insert new links into the causal chain. The materialist dialectic and compensation theory illuminate the reciprocal relatedness of their being simultaneously bounded and free. From this choice of material, means, and methods, Marxism as well as individual psychology grasp new possibilities of exiting the confines of contemporary scholarship. Marxism and individual psychology do not merely collect material to be catalogued on behalf of those ideologies that are crazed with amassing possessions. They also offer no blithe speculation for the solace of festering consciences. For Marxism and individual psychology, the illumination of facts is only a means by which they may show the ways forward, and as the discoverers of law-like regularities, they are merely the stewards of emancipation.

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6. Sofie Lazarsfeld Raised by a Family or Educated by a Community? First published as Sophie Lazarsfeld, “Familien- oder Gemeinschaftserziehung,” in Handbuch der Individualpsychologie, vol. 1, ed. Erwin Wexberg (Munich: J. F. Bergmann, 1926), 323–35. Translated by Rob McFarland. In this article, Sofie Lazarsfeld (1881–1976) lays out an argument supporting one of the most controversial and misconstrued ideas associated with Red Vienna: the claim that scientists and the state should ultimately replace the traditional family in order to produce healthy, well-socialized members of society. Lazarsfeld, an individual psychologist and educational reformer in Alfred Adler’s circle, describes the pathological tendencies that can play out in the course of traditional family dynamics. She imagines an educational system that could avoid the pitfalls of family life by socializing children in a way that fosters self-reliance, confidence, and interconnectedness to the people and institutions around them. Lazarsfeld specifically mentions Red Vienna’s famous municipal housing complexes and the didactic potential of the schools and nurseries associated with these projects. In their criticism of the foundational ideas of Austro-Marxism, Red Vienna’s enemies frequently exaggerated such efforts to replace the traditional family with a new communal ideal. I. Individual psychology and social pedagogy. [. . .] “What is more important in the business of education, the individual or the community?” If you ask this question not in a vacuum but in a real context, then individual psychology has a clear answer. Because education, generally speaking, means: helping an individual to function in the framework of predetermined biological conditions and external circumstances. “To function,” though, means being able to act and to react in meaningful ways that fulfill a purpose.6 Individual psychology—coming from the standpoint of dealing with the sick psyche—considers controlling your human functions and using them in a meaningful way to be nothing less than “normal,” meaning free from neuroses. This is—purely descriptively, without invoking a norm—contingent upon the individual’s standing in the community, and how it has been formed from earliest childhood, eventually determining the individual’s character. [. . .] Thus, individual psychology answers the first question: the process of education—no matter what its stated goal—must be community oriented, if it is going to unfold according to a plan and not be left up to chance. It is this principle that inherently separates us from so-called social pedagogy: our central consideration of the community does not arise from an a priori point of view (like that of philosophy, anthropology, and biology [. . .])7 but out of an analysis of the process of education itself. [. . .] 6 Original

note: An explanation of the concept of functions as it is used in this article can be found in Külpe, Psychologie, 128ff. 7 Reference in the original: Alfred Adler, H. Albrecht, G. Bichlmair, “Diskussionsbemerkungen zum Vortrag des Prof. Max Adler im Verein f. Individualpsychol. in Wien” [Discussion of a presentation of Prof. Max Adler in the Verein für Individualpsychologie in Vienna], Zeitschrift für Individualpsychologie 3, no. 5, 221. 1925.

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As long as our main task consists of the regulation of communal life—under the threat of general demise—we will stick with the guiding principle that Carl Furtmüller has formulated so concisely: know the rules of the game of life.8 And thus we have clearly summarized the topic of our article: Is the family really a suitable place to foster the development of these rules or are they better taught in an institution developed by the community? Our answer, as might be anticipated: We support community education and we reject the kind of socialization found in the family. We must now justify our reasoning. II. The place of the child in the family. From the standpoint of individual psychology, there are essentially four circumstances in the family that complicate the process of growing into a part of the community. Not all of these circumstances can be mitigated through increased oversight.9 First, it is a basic tenet of individual psychology that growing up around a bunch of older and larger people will persistently exacerbate a child’s feelings of inferiority. [.  .  .] The youngest child who seeks revenge for the oppression suffered at the hands of its older siblings by becoming a political or artistic revolutionary, the oldest child who, as a conservative adult, tries to maintain its position of privilege above its unwelcome younger siblings; [. . .] the only boy in a family of sisters,10 the only girl in a family of brothers—all of these situations are all too common. Through no fault of its own, the organization of the family threatens the development of the individual’s sense of community. Second, the family lacks the crucial means of providing a sense of security for a frustrated little person, for it cannot give the child a meaningful function within the community. In the family, there is generally no place for children’s accomplishments, their usefulness to the community11 remains invisible. [. . .] Third, there is the widely accepted but sociologically clearly false assessment of a child’s capacities on the part of the grown-ups, causing the little one all kinds of psychic distress. [. . .] Last, but certainly not least among the psychological difficulties that arise out of the family for a child: the importance that the preservation of the family structure holds for the parents. [. . .] Again and again we see cases where children are forced to choose a trade that turns out to be a way for the father to make up for a mistake that he has made in his life. This is always couched in educational terms: The boy should have it better, should not have it better than I did. Yes, parents even imagine their children as their own 8

Carl Furtmüller (1880–1951) was an Austrian pedagogical theorist and psychologist who used the ideas of individual psychology in his proposals for educational reform as an associate of Otto Glöckel. 9 Original note: See, for example: Zeitschr. 3, no. 4 Schulkinderpsychologie. 10 Original note: A typical, almost clichéd example is Heinrich von Kleist’s youth and development, see Sofie Lazarsfeld, Kleist im Lichte der Individualpsychologie [Kleist in the light of individual psychology] (Frankfurt a. O.: Publikation der Kleist-Gesellschaft, 1926). 11 Original note: In order to remain true to our methodological program, we will not back away from our conviction of the absolute value of the community. The differences between the normative and the descriptive concepts of community were very important for the systematic part of our study, but taking these differences into account would only complicate the findings of the practicalpsychological part of our study, even though it would not change the results.

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private property, commonly using expressions such as “he won’t study hard for me” or “he won’t be my good little boy.” [. . .] III. The possibility of community-based education. [. . .] Practically speaking, one of the main beliefs of individual psychology is that in every stage of individual development it should be possible to increase a person’s capacity to dwell harmoniously with other people and thus to greatly influence the person’s character. [. . .] Those who know how central the question “What am I good for?” is to the adolescent, those who were able to observe the desperate attempt to repress this question or the way that forcing an answer to this question can lead down the road to neurosis, over and over again, they will recognize the value of a community-based education, begun at an early stage, which hardly ever allows this question to emerge in such an individualistically biased form. The leadership of the school community, the opportunities for service, the organization of daily life—all of these provide thousands of possibilities to function in many diverse ways. Every little citizen can find a place to fit in, everyone can experience those early feelings of security that arise from the well-balanced expectations and encouragement that are so necessary at this stage of development. [. . .] Seen from a purely material point of view, there is no practical way at this time that an entire school system could be reorganized according to the principles of community education. The next step will probably be the organization of all-day schools on the periphery of the city. It is also certainly possible to organize specific family associations that can organize learning opportunities for school-age children. In addition, an increasing number of social institutions have managed to develop communal educational facilities, as can be seen in the City of Vienna’s grand municipal building projects. In these facilities, working adults and often hundreds of children enjoy access to the services of educational experts. If educational theorists are to keep up with the necessary scope of these developments, it will be best if they consider how to actually provide the appropriate means for the work of education and not merely discuss their justification.

7. Karl Bühler The Will to Form and the Desire for Function in Children’s Games First published as “Formwille und Funktionslust im Spiele des Kindes,” in Die Krise der Psychologie (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1927), 200–212. Translated by Rob McFarland. The spouses and experimental psychologists Karl Bühler (1879–1963) and Charlotte Bühler (1893–1974) were brought to the University of Vienna in 1922 and asked to establish a research institute for child psychology. In their institute and in the courses they taught at the Pedagogical Institute of the City of Vienna, the pair provided the empirical basis for many of Red Vienna’s educational initiatives. In his 1927 treatise Die Krise der Psychologie (The Crisis of Psychology), Bühler calls for a “big tent” psychology that can accommodate many

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different directions, although he distances himself from the ideas of Freud. In this excerpt, Bühler thoughtfully analyzes data collected by his former student Hildegard Hetzer, a child psychologist and Charlotte’s assistant.12 In the children’s games observed by Hetzer in a working-class Vienna neighborhood, Bühler sees a creative power (Gestaltungskraft) that he connects to the human capacity for art, design, and music. His ideas resonate with the work of the art educator Franz Čižek, the leader of the so-called Čižek School where the artistic movement known as Viennese Kineticism was developed. The City of Vienna’s Intake Center for Children has undertaken psychological observations of children and their first toys. H. Hetzer’s recent study titled “Symbolic Representation in Early Childhood” provides many new insights into role-playing games of three- to six-year-old children.13 [. . .] This is the new experiential foundation that I would like to build upon as I assert a basic claim. Nobody who is familiar with children can possibly be surprised by this idea. My claim: that principles of form [Formprinzipien] dominate children’s games, and these games reveal a will to form [Formwille]. This realization has long been recognized either intuitively, based on children’s play in general, or with reference to concrete examples. Since Schiller, artists and art historians have repeatedly formulated questions about the psychological origin of art in relation to children’s play and written about it in more or less one-sided deliberations. We would like to argue in the opposite direction: in order to truly understand the children’s games, it is useful to consider the activities of an artist. Both have one thing in common: they are both motivated by a will to form. If you think about the theoretical implications of the data outlined in these new studies, you become aware of the astounding relevance of all of the stages of development, from babbling right up through theatrical performances. Every oversimplified, content-driven theoretical study will find its natural limits when confronted by the will to form that is displayed by the child at play. Even the most exacting content-centered premise can only vaguely explain the attention to form shown by any contemporary piece of art, and if you attempt to comprehend the role of form in a child’s game by merely focusing on the observed or imagined stirrings of the child’s libido, you will arrive at equally vague conclusions. [. . .] Parents are one major force that make sure that the tradition of childhood games is passed down to the next generation. Mothers remember the games that they themselves played, and thus pass the form of their games down to their own children. Another pure transmission occurs in densely populated neighborhoods with a high concentration of children, as older children pass the tradition of childhood games down to the younger children before they grow out of the games themselves. When considering the stability and ubiquity of this transmission of childhood games, psychologists are interested in two specific moments. First, the child is unbelievably receptive—even voracious—about obtaining the form and the formulaic elements of these traditional games. She or he treats the rules as inviolable, as if happiness itself depends upon these rules. Second, in spite of this obsession with form, the child takes every opportunity to 12

Hildegard Hetzer was later involved with several infamous National Socialist children’s institutions and has been accused of perpetrating or enabling crimes against humanity. 13 Original note: Hildegard Hetzer, “Die symbolische Darstellung in der frühen Kindheit: Erster Beitrag zur psychologischen Bestimmung der Schulreife,” in Wiener Arbeiten zur pädagogischen Psychologie, ed. Ch. Bühler and V. Fadrus, Heft 3 (Vienna: Deutscher Verlag für Jugend und Volk, 1926).

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arrange, rearrange, and insert creative elements from her or his own unbounded imagination. The in part age-old traditional legacy of games is thus newly awakened in every crowd of children, newly bestowed a breath of life, and updated according to the latest fashion. I have often seen it for myself: the same group plays a newly discovered game every day, and within a week there are genuine and ossified characteristics, you may want to call them variations or flourishes and compare them to the highly localized variations of old hymns or folk songs. The comparison is not completely random. The psychological problem is about the same in both cases: How can you explain such loyalty to tradition in the midst of such carefree, creative reformulation? It would not be hard to search for an answer to this question in the study of the preservation and transformation of organic forms, writ large. The forms that are able to maintain themselves in the face of all kinds of change and throughout the flow of events must (to be brief) either have some innate power of conservation guaranteed to them or some external force working upon them (like a river bed, to use a metaphor). [. . .] This would be the logical place to focus our investigation first and foremost on the role of symbolism in the life of a child. In her study “Symbolic Representation in Early Childhood”, H. Hetzer offers a series of experimentally determined findings that can help us in our investigation. We observe, for example, how strikingly early a child is capable of understanding and performing the symbolic actions of other people with whom he or she is in psychological contact, acting as if he or she were somebody else. When we see a child playing roles in a societal game and performing these roles correctly, and when we recognize that it is the realm of language in which symbolism first asserts itself, both of these facts point to the same thing: Symbolism appears in the service of community life [Gemeinschaftsleben]. [. . .] Let us return to our thesis about the will to form in the games of a child. This was not meant as a half-baked idea, in fact, I am prepared to go so far as to call it a “form drive” [Formtrieb] and thus to bestow upon it some of the dignity that Freud claims for his “repetition drive” [Wiederholungstrieb]. But why the haste to label it with a final, irreducible mark? The disposition, the tendency, the need to create a form is something that can be measured empirically, and I mean nothing else when I call it the “will to form.” That means much more than if we were just to use the popular term “form” or “gestalt” without the accompanying word “will” in our thesis. In a child’s game, there is such an unmistakable force of seeking and trying out, of perfecting imperfections. Games engender a process of overcoming, an attack against the resistant power of something not yet mastered. The child’s game points us unmistakably toward the future, not like the repetition compulsion which leads us back to the past. And if this tendency—and with it a transition to designing well [Wohlgestalten]—is coupled with a joy of function [Funktionslust], then we have found the necessary principle of the here and now, the principle that guides us into the future.

Part III Identities

“The Operation. Professor Clemenceau: ‘There we have it; it didn’t hurt too badly, now, did it, lad?’” The popular daily illustrated Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung (June 5, 1919) depicts the final stages of imperial dismantling that the Treaty of Saint-Germain would codify. (Courtesy of ANNO/ÖNB.)

CHAPTER EIGHT

POST-EMPIRE Kristin Kopp

A

key set of challenges faced by the leaders of Red Vienna involved addressing the legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: What was to be done with the palaces, castles, and villas left behind by the Habsburgs? How should the new state, German Austria, position itself vis-à-vis the recent imperial past? What did it mean for Austrians to no longer see themselves, or their Viennese capital, stationed at the helm of a multinational empire? A March 1919 article in the Arbeiter-Zeitung engages these questions and envisions Vienna as a city threatened by the presence of its post-imperial past. Published just as German Austria’s democratically elected Constituent National Assembly was set to convene for the first time, the article questioned what role the Hofburg—the imperial palace of the Habsburgs that had served as the governing center of the now deposed monarchy—would play in this new, post-imperial order. Ominously titled “The Lurking Monster,” the essay warns that although the Hofburg may appear empty and lifeless, it is actually only feigning sleep. In reality, it is a vengeful giant lying in wait—its arms outstretched to capture its enemies in its planned return to power.1 Both materially and ideologically, the Hofburg stood for the larger question of whether an imperial metropolitan infrastructure built to meet the needs of a vast, multiethnic empire could now be repurposed to serve the democratic project of the new German-Austrian state. The Hofburg, which today remains the largest secular building complex in Europe, had been built over the course of centuries: Vienna had been the center of a growing dynastic realm, and new wings were added to the Hofburg as the Austro-Hungarian Empire grew to include over fifty million inhabitants and territories spanning from Bohemia and Galicia in the north to Transylvania and Bukovina in the east and Dalmatia and Bosnia in the south. Once the second-largest empire in Europe (after the Russian Empire), Austria-Hungary now lay in ruins. A milestone on its path to collapse had been presented by US President Wilson’s landmark Fourteen Points speech of January 1918, in which he outlined his program of peace in Europe. Guided by the “principle of self-determination,” Wilson promised autonomous development to national groups enclosed in empires. The German population of Austria-Hungary anticipated this principle would also apply to them, and they therefore joined other national groups in organizing themselves politically. But where Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia looked forward to their introduction 1 Michael

Schacherl, “Das lauernde Ungeheuer,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, March 9, 1919, 2.

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as independent countries on the postwar map of Central Europe, the German population in the empire, and the Social Democrats in particular, did not desire such independence. Instead, they sought to unite themselves with Germans in the north, as they clearly articulated in their provisional constitution. Whereas Article 1 declared the birth of the democratic Republic of German Austria (Deutschösterreich), Article 2 annulled the independence of this republic by identifying it as an “intrinsic part of the German Republic.” The 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain would prohibit this intended unification with Germany and further diminish the size of Austria (a change in name also mandated by the treaty) by assigning additional territories to Czechoslovakia and Italy. After all of the other successor nations had been established, Austria—in a phrase attributed to the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau—would only consist of what was “left over.” But that was a country reduced to a population of six million, one-third of which lived in Vienna. As the administrative center of the empire, Vienna had previously been home to the enormous army of bureaucrats needed to run all aspects of the Austro-Hungarian government, military, and judiciary. Now, most of this oversized administration had been rendered professionally redundant and was becoming the object of growing resentment. Given the prevailing food, housing, and fuel shortages, the rural population found itself called upon to provide for the residents of Vienna, but from their point of view, Vienna was a Wasserkopf, an oversized encephalitic head teetering on the body of a truncated state unable to support it. Could the fledgling democracy be economically viable under these circumstances? Cut off from its previous markets and primary regions of wealth, industry, and production, Austria was now forced to import essential goods at great financial cost. From across the political spectrum, Austrians argued that their new state would not be viable (lebensfähig). This threat of nonviability became a central argument leveraged against the terms of the peace treaty, and “colonization” became the central metaphor in this context. Forced to rely on external subsidies, loans, and aid throughout the interwar period, many Austrians feared they would become subject to economic exploitation from more powerful external forces, perhaps even forced into enslavement, on par with Europe’s overseas colonies. On the political Left, this fear of losing sovereignty reinforced the desire for Anschluss with Germany. On the right, it led to the desire to bring back the Habsburg Empire, if only in the form of a Danube confederacy with Austria at the helm. This monarchist interest in the return of the Habsburgs fueled anxieties in Red Vienna, but few monarchists were politically active, and this threat never materialized. Yet over the course of the interwar period, nostalgia for the Habsburgs and the lost empire was explored in the works of such authors as Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Joseph Roth, and Stefan Zweig. For the Social Democrats, the monarchy ultimately came to serve as a negative foil for their progressive agenda. Placing the blame for the death and destruction of the war clearly at the feet of the Habsburgs, the Arbeiter-Zeitung argues that “The riddle of the Habsburg Sphinx must be solved, so that it will throw itself into the abyss in which it has collected so many piles of mortal remains.”2

2 Schacherl,

“Das lauernde Ungeheuer.”



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Further reading Judson 2016 Kożuchowski 2013 Müller and Wagener 2009

1. Anonymous Inside and Outside our Borders First published as “Inland und Ausland,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, October 25, 1918, 6. Translated by Kristin Kopp. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had not come unexpectedly. Polish, Czech, and Southern Slavic separatist movements had already been in full swing when US President Wilson gave his Fourteen Points speech in January 1918, promising autonomous self-determination to these national groups. Each created a provisional national assembly that fall, and Austro-Hungarians began organizing themselves along national lines (or “self-determining” as this author calls it). While new cartographic borders would only be established in the 1919 peace treaties, this article shows the extent to which economic lines of demarcation were already being drawn before the war’s end. The Social Democratic Arbeiter-Zeitung seems to greet this development with a certain ironic distance: The collapse of the empire is presented here as an issue most strongly affecting the ruling classes—given the prevailing food shortages, the working class would have only dreamed of the luxury goods listed. State border posts are giving way in the storm of the World War and lurching back and forth in its floodwaters. The piece of Poland already seems to have washed away from Austria, because there is hardly any doubt that Krakow has left our borders; and the day before yesterday it was Agram,3 and Preßburg too has become foreign,4 and Cis and Trans, with respect to the Leitha River, have suffered an even greater divide and now truly separate foreign and domestic lands.5 Krakow sausage, big fat Bakonyer, and Prague ham have become foreign goods and are now harder for us to get than apples and wine from South Tyrol—goods that are also already emigrating abroad.6 Indeed, ever more goods are floating across the border—not just because of smuggling, but because foreign borders are encroaching ever more upon our space. Many of our fellow Viennese, true natives of the city their whole lives, have suddenly become foreigners and lost their citizenship; wherever you look, you now see nothing but “foreign” faces. High officials and top ministers of state have become foreign subjects, and now even the army counts mostly foreigners in its ranks. A veritable race across the border has commenced: it’s not so much the notable personages and others who, overly hasty in their fear, are seeking refuge in Switzerland, for example. Instead, it is also those who have been deemed “self-determiners” that are upping the number of foreigners in Austria. This number is reaching such huge proportions that Austrians will soon wonder whether they are foreigners in their own country. 3 Now

Zagreb, Croatia. Bratislava, Slovakia. 5 The reference here is to Cisleithania and Transleithania, unofficial references to the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the former empire, as roughly divided by the Leitha River. 6 Bakonyer is a Hungarian pig. South Tyrol became part of Italy after World War I. 4 Now

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2. Directive of the Ministry of Education and the Interior and of the Ministry of Justice in Consultation with the Involved State Ministries on April 18, 1919 Regarding the Implementation of the Law Abolishing Nobility and Certain Titles and Honors First published as Vollzugsanweisung des Staatsamtes für Inneres und Unterricht und des Staatsamtes für Justiz, im Einvernehmen mit den beteiligten Staatsämtern vom 18. April 1919, über die Aufhebung des Adels und gewisser Titel und Würden. Staatsgesetzblatt für den Staat Deutschösterreich (April 20, 1919), 573–75. Translated by Kristin Kopp. When the Constituent National Assembly was democratically elected in February 1919, the new government, led by the Social Democrats, quickly moved to dismantle the aristocratic and monarchical order that had structured political and social power in the empire. On April 3 they passed the Habsburg Law, which stripped the Habsburg family of its imperial property and transferred it into the hands of the state. On the same day, they also passed a law abolishing the aristocracy, the secular orders of knighthood and orders of chivalry for women, and certain titles and honors; the terms of this law are codified in the following directive. Penned by Social Democratic chancellor Karl Renner, the law, which remains in effect to this day, forbids the use of aristocratic titles while retaining professional titles acquired through education and accomplishment. Pursuant to the law of April 3, 1919, St. G. Bl. No. 211, the following is decreed: § 1. The abolition of nobility, of its external privileges, and further of all titles and honors conferred only for such distinction and not in conjunction with any state appointment, profession, or other academic or artistic qualification, and of all privileges attached to such titles and offices. This abolition applies to all German-Austrian citizens regardless of whether the privileges in question were acquired domestically or abroad. § 2. Pursuant to § 1 of the law of April 3, 1919, St. G. Bl. No. 211, the following are abolished: 1 the right to bear the noble distinction “von”; 2 the right to bear predicates, which, in addition to granted titles, also includes those predicates of nobility serving to distinguish families, along with the title of “noble” and the predicates “grace,” “highness,” and “eminence”; 3 the right to bear customary coats of arms and to bear appellative surnames;7 the right to bear the titles of noble rank, such as knight, baron, count, and prince, or the honorific title of duke, as well as other corresponding foreign and domestic indications of noble rank;

7 Such

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4 the right to bear family coats of arms, including in particular the coats of arms falsely called “bourgeois,”8 as well as the right to bear certain foreign titles not exclusively ­connected to noble privilege, such as conte, conta palatino, marchese, marchio ro­­ manus, comes romanus, baro romanus etc., even when acquired by non-noble families. § 3. Pursuant to § 4 of the law of April 3, 1919, St. G. Bl. No. 211, the following titles and honors are declared abolished: the honor of “privy councillor,” the title and the privileges of “privy council-woman,” the office of “chamberlain” and of “steward,” the office of “lady of the court,” the form of address “excellence,” the title of “imperial councillor,” further all previous titles associated with courtly or landed estates, in particular the titles of hereditary or ordained offices of the landed estates, other sundry feudal honorific titles, and those titles created with the prefixes “court-,” “chamber-,” or “court- and chamber-” but not standing in connection with a ministerial position.

§4. The abolished titles do not include titles of government office as conferred upon public officials, particularly the titles of higher rank conferred upon state officials, the titles of ranks V and VI (court councillor, government councillor), the titles of high school and university professors, and the titles of commerce and trade officials and the like.

3. Julius Deutsch The Property of the Habsburgs First published as “Das Vermögen der Habsburger,” in Schwarzgelbe Verschwörer (Vienna: Verlag der Organisation Wien der Sozialdemokratischen Partei, 1925), 2–7. Translated by Kristin Kopp. The title of the political pamphlet from which the following excerpt is taken—“The BlackYellow Conspirators”—references the colors of the Habsburg flag and thus the monarchists who advocated for their restoration to power. The author, Julius Deutsch (1884–1968), Social Democratic member of the National Council from 1920 to 1933 and founder of the party’s paramilitary Republican Protection League (Republikanischer Schutzbund), is less distressed by any real threat posed by the monarchists than he is eager to use the Habsburgs and their supporters as a negative foil for the progressive program of the Social Democrats. With the laws of April 3 and October 30, 1919, the Republic of German Austria confiscated the property of the Habsburgs. The Parliament declared unanimously that the Republic of Austria “is the owner of all movable and immovable imperial assets that are located in German-Austrian territory, as well as of the property that is tied to the former ruling house or to one of its collateral lines.” [. . .] 8 The

reference is to coats of arms more recently acquired by newly named aristocrats.

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In 1919, even the Christian Socials did not dare vote against confiscating the Habsburg properties, because memories of the dreadful misery inflicted upon all of the peoples of the empire by the former imperial family were still very strong. From Seipel to Fink, and from Weiskirchner to Kunschak,9 they all voted for the confiscation of the property that the Habsburgs had snatched up over the course of their centuries-long rule. This vote was a sentence handed down by the people, a unanimous denunciation of the theft of state goods by sole means of which the Habsburgs had come into the possession of their wealth. They had not worked to earn it. None of the imperial family’s offspring had ever done an honest day’s work in their lives. As soon as they were born, the state had to place an endowment of several hundred thousand gold kronen in their cradles. When they grew up, the state had to guarantee them elevated and well-paid positions as generals or diplomats. Whether or not a Habsburg youth had any talent made absolutely no difference. Even the least capable of them made it at least to military commanderin-chief! Over the course of the centuries, the Habsburgs have never been anything but insatiable parasites on the body of the state. For this reason, the confiscation laws—which never even seized the entirety of the Habsburg’s wealth, but instead just a portion of it—were only a very modest and entirely just punishment for the enormous misery that this family had brought upon the land it ruled. The magnanimous Parliament of the republic dedicated that property to those who had suffered the most under the former system: the victims of the world war. The proceeds from the former Habsburg properties went to the fund for the victims of war. The palaces that used to provide the idle bon vivants with opulent luxury thus came to house poor, critically ill veterans. Several years have passed in our country since then. While the bourgeois parties only dared act with great caution during the revolution, they have now become stronger again and have even succeeded in obtaining control of the republic’s government. The reactionaries are just as spiteful as they are opposed to the general populace, and they have attempted to dismantle the accomplishments of the republic step by step. Now they think that they are strong enough to revisit the question of the Habsburg properties. [. . .] In their newspapers, one now reads moving lamentations about the ostensible distress of Frau Zita and her children.10 But much to the chagrin of the Christian Socials, just as they made this decision, Budapest’s Habsburg newspaper Pester Lloyd published a report on the Christmas holidays in Lekeitio,11 which presents a very colorful image of the “poverty” of the so pitiable former imperial family. A “distinguished personage” who had just returned from the Spanish town enthusiastically reported: 9

All four politicians were prominent members of the Christian Social Party who had each sat on the Constituent National Assembly elected on February 16, 1919: Ignaz Seipel (1876–1932) became chancellor of Austria in 1922; Jodok Fink (1853–1929) served as the first vice-chancellor from 1919 to 1920; Richard Weiskirchner was mayor of Vienna from 1913 until May of 1919; and Leopold Kunschak (1871–1953) had been speaker for the party. 10 Zita of Bourbon-Parma (1892–1989) was the wife of Karl I, the last emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. 11 In June 1923, Zita and her children moved into the medieval Uribarren Palace in the fishing village of Lekeitio, located on the northern coast of Spain.



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Incidentally, Queen Zita and her children lead a life worthy of a royal family. [. . .] The queen is in good spirits and is always active. Her daily schedule starts at 5:00 am. She attends mass three times a day in the church of Lekeitio: at 6:00 am alone, at 8:00 am with the heir to the throne Otto II., and at 10:00 am with the other children. The heir to the throne spends most of his day in the company of his Hungarian tutor. [. . .] When the weather is good, the heir to the throne and his tutor hike to the Lekeitio pier or travel by automobile or yacht to one of the picturesque localities in the area . . . [. . .]

As one can see, poor Frau Zita is really suffering. [. . .] In light of this crisis, something had to be done! The Austrian Christian Socials have pity—thank God—and are having their own committee investigate the possibility of chasing the poor disabled veterans from their nursing homes in order to give the palaces in which they are housed back to the obviously much, much poorer Habsburgs. Indeed, nothing beats the Christian charity of the pious Christian Socials! Their claims to be concerned about the legality of the current state of affairs are just as genuine as what they say about the misery in Lekeitio. In reality, the monarchists are just trying to get their hands on money for monarchist propaganda by robbing the republic of the Habsburg wealth. The monarchists have become tremendously entrepreneurial of late. Messengers travel tirelessly back and forth between Zita’s royal household in Lekeitio and the aristocrats in Hungary. From Hungary, the connections lead to Vienna, where not only former generals and diplomats but also ­leading representatives of the Christian Social Party are diligently working to prepare for the return of the Habsburgs. Intrigue after intrigue is contrived, conventicles assembled, and conspiracies instigated, the officers of the General Staff of the former Imperial and Royal [k. u. k.] Army are working busily on plans for a violent takeover in a coup.12

4. Alfred Polgar Imperial Furniture First published as “Kaiserliche Möbel,” Prager Tagblatt, November 16, 1920, 4. Translated by Kristin Kopp. Along with real estate, the Habsburg Law mandated the confiscation of certain movable assets, including those used to furnish the many palaces and residences of the Habsburgs. As a means of democratizing access to this material legacy of empire, the new republic created a museum, the Imperial Furniture Depository, which today comprises one of the world’s most important collections of furniture from past eras. The museum offered a view of the past previously unavailable to the public; the exhibits laid bare the ostentation the public’s wealth had provided. But not all visitors responded critically; for many, the displays conjured memories of the pomp and grandeur of the recent imperial past. The feuilleton author Alfred Polgar (1873–1955) registers this nostalgic sense of loss while reminding his readers of the abuses of 12 “k. u. k.” is the common abbreviation for “kaiserlich und königlich,” or “imperial and royal,” which reflects the dual role of the Habsburg monarch who was both Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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power that led to the war. Polgar included an altered version of this piece in a 1924 anthology; the following is a translation of the original publication. Vienna’s Mariahilfer Straße—which used to be traveled by golden-wheeled imperial carriages, their occupants clearly delighted to wave their thanks to onlookers—is home to the Imperial Furniture Depository. An enormous building whose purpose used to be the housing of furniture reserves and replacements for the imperial palaces. His Majesty’s storage room, so to speak (although the Viennese refer to it as “the attic”). But a storage room the size of thirty ballrooms, with workshops the size of train stations. Here, in these workshops—known as “the infirmary” by the custodians of the depository—is where damaged imperial furniture used to be brought for repair. In the rooms of the infirmary, it is warm. An iron oven puffs out heat, it smells of wood, glue, and paint, and that false idol and devourer of men called “labor” appears in the form of a friendly spirit concealing quiet satisfaction in the folds of his smock. In the rooms of the depository, stuffed to the brim with aristocratic household items, with palacehold items, so to speak, it is bitter cold. As if the frozen opulence did not ever want to thaw again. It does not smell of anything here, not even of dust, which, in its own way, is also something living. Only furniture in a cursed castle could be so unwelcoming. After the collapse of “Oh! Thou my Austria!,”13 no one paid much attention to the Imperial Furniture Depository. But the honest folks previously tasked with its care, servants and craftsmen, continued to care for it, performed their duties, dusted, set up, and put the furniture into place; the metal workers installed rivets, the upholsterers mended, and the cabinetmakers glued the furniture of the highest household, even though the pedestal from which the Habsburgs once ruled had itself become unglued. Now the people from the depository have turned their furniture warehouses into an exhibit. It did not take much. They hung signs: “Please do not touch the objects” and wrote on the doors “Entrance” and “Exit.” That was essentially all it took to transform a storeroom into an exhibit. Your visit will be rewarding and enjoyable. In one hall, the furniture has been set up into room-like arrangements, scenes of a frosty yesteryear that look like the rooms’ death masks. In the many other halls, the furniture is grouped by type. A flock of tables. A frozen sea of nightstands. An unmanageable herd of armchairs. An enormous stalactite grotto of chandeliers. Amongst them, the venerable old chandelier that once dangled from the ceiling of the old Burgtheater, and the huge chandelier from the opera that was taken away because it blocked the view of the stage from the fourth gallery. One hall displays the grandest collection of cradles: historical ones in which future emperors and kings once kicked and squirmed, and many others. Tu felix Austria nube:14 The furniture depot was armed and ready. The depository also stores sedans, luxuriously upholstered, with carrying poles for the footmen. Where have they gone, those good old days, when the coachman was his own horse! Among the furniture there are wonderful pieces. In various styles, empire and baroque, and in all the numbered Louises.15 But Biedermeier’s bourgeois charm beats 13 Composed

by Ferdinand Preis in 1852, “O du mein Österreich” was a typical military march. A famous saying, “Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube” (Let others wage war, but thou, O happy Austria, marry.), which reflected the Habsburgs’ successful use of marriage to increase their territorial holdings. 15 Polgar here refers to examples that represent the eras of the French kings, from Louis XIV to Louis XIX. 14



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them all. Nine-tenths of the furniture bears his quiet and gently curved comfort. Like carpentered music. Mozart in ash. The imperial furniture depository also has a number of proper museum pieces. Like the type case and book printing paraphernalia of Josef II. As is well known, every member of the House of Habsburg had to learn a trade so that he could advance himself in case things did not work out in the governing department. Unfortunately, by the time we recognized how much the fate of a people is connected to the advancement of its rulers, it was about ten million deaths too late. One of the most interesting items in the depot is a female figure made of alabaster, which used to embellish the entrance of the Laxenburg palace. Emperor Karl had it removed because it was stark naked, like truth. For me, the main attraction of the exhibit is a tiny room without furniture, just five wax figures: types of court servants. A footman, a doorman, a huntsman, a Hungarian guard, and a valet. The huntsman has a full, trimmed black beard. He looks as if his name should be Kaspar.16 The footman, the doorman, and the valet express something captivatingly dutiful in both facial expression and bodily posture. The Hungarian has a waxed mustache and he glistens in gold and red. Only his pants, blooming out of the top of his cuffed patent leather boots, are white like terror.17 As mannequins, they all appear quite respectable. For wax figures, the livery—and what it represents—is fitting. Living people, thus attired, are only imaginable in the vitrine of an ethnographic museum. My guide says that visitors have often wept wistfully at the sight of the five figures. Probably because the sun, in whose light this lineage of footmen, doormen, and valets blossomed, has now set. But the meaning of this setting sun is clear to even a warblinded veteran. Yes, maybe it takes a blind veteran to see things most clearly.

5. Anonymous German Austria: Bankruptcy Asset and Colony First published as “Deutschösterreich—Konkursmasse und Kolonie,” Neues Wiener Tagblatt, July 22, 1919, 2–3. Translated by Kristin Kopp. Over the summer of 1919, the conditions of peace for German Austria were negotiated, and in July, revisions to an earlier draft were released to the public. This article captures the widespread alarm raised at its provisions: Forced to carry the burden of war reparations and to cede additional industrial and trade centers to neighboring countries, Austria was also prevented from forming a political union with Germany. Some Austrians feared that their country would not be economically viable (lebensfähig) under the proposed conditions, that it would lose its fiscal sovereignty, and ultimately, its political autonomy. In the post-imperial context, it is interesting to note the extent to which images of colonization were used to express these anxieties. Stripped of imperial power, demilitarized, economically indebted, and vastly 16

In Carl Maria von Weber’s Romantic opera The Marksman, Caspar is a forester aligned with the devil. 17 The White Terror in Hungary was a two-year period (1919–1921) of repressive violence by counter-revolutionary soldiers, carried out to crush any opposition supportive of Hungary’s shortlived soviet republic.

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reduced in size and population, the future was envisioned as one in which the tables would be turned: Austrians would be the ones colonized by external powers, exploited of their natural resources, and forced to work for the economic profit of others. On Sunday our peace delegation in Saint-Germain came into possession of the complete set of provisions for peace. The powers in Paris have been working on this document for months under the influence of their Czech and Southern Slavic allies, and now it can be seen in its entirety. German Austria was inexplicably excluded from these deliberations, which leave the country suffering in subjugation. The basic requirement for our peace, according to the political intentions of the Entente, is that German Austria join the future international community as an independent state. But with the conditions for peace handed to us on Sunday, there can be no talk of independence for our small country. German Austria will not be economically independent. The country will be so financially burdened that it will not be able to fulfill the unbearable terms imposed upon it, and as a result, it will be at the mercy of the victors for the foreseeable future. The clearest sign of our financial and economic enslavement will be our subjection to the control of an international financial commission. The Turkish “Dette Publique”18—that badge of shame marking the financial dependence of the Ottoman Empire—will be resurrected in a more oppressive form in German Austria. [. . .] The powers in Paris, despite their better intentions, have remained completely under the suggestive spell of their lesser allies. In a diplomatic note carefully prepared to accord with national and international law, our peace delegation provided clear evidence that all of the successor states should be held responsible for all debts incurred by the former Austria.19 Slavic ministers pursued the policies that led to war, Slavic representatives approved them, the war bonds were issued with the cooperation of Slavic members of the Commission for the Control of State Debt, and their revenues benefitted the Czech lands to a degree that far exceeded German Austria’s share. Nevertheless, the powers in Paris divided only the prewar debt of the former Austria according to acceptable principles. They reject applying the same principles to the war debt—bonds and treasury notes—as would be fair. In this latter case, they are espousing the fiction invented by the Czechs, who claim that German Austria is the sole legal successor of the former empire. [. . .] As if that were not enough, the powers in Paris are also burdening us with war reparations. The amount has not been determined. In talks they promise benevolence. But to pay these reparations—that we alone will be forced to bear on behalf of the former empire—the treaty already stipulates the seizure of goods and assets, thus robbing us of one of our last means of achieving economic recovery. Ocean vessels, barges, our livestock, our timber, iron, and magnesite, our furniture stockpiles and machines will be claimed for the sum of damage either via uncompensated confiscation or by way of a legal option that allows these goods to be acquired at unjustifiably low prices. [. . .] It must be clear to the authors of the draft peace treaty that it will be impossible to meet their demands. Therefore, their intention can only be that of forcing German Austria under an inescapable yoke of indebtedness so that it can be treated like an economically 18

Having been unable to pay off its debts to European creditors, the Ottoman Public Debt Administration was formed under the control of a European bank consortium. It was based in Istanbul, collected taxes to make payments to creditors, and gained significant control over the Ottoman economy. 19 The term “successor states” refers to the countries that formed on the territory of the former empire: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria.



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and financially subjugated land. The world will witness the spectacle of a highly civilized people with a great cultural history from the center of Europe being reduced to a colonized population forced into drudgery for the benefit of others, just like the Negroes in the African countries. Nor is there any good news from the discussions of the territorial provisions. [. . .] Only one injustice that would have been calamitous for the future of Vienna has been alleviated: the border at the March river is not on the river’s right bank, as it had been in the first draft; instead, this right bank now falls to German Austria, such that Vienna’s position as the trading hub of the Danube is preserved. As compensation for the loss of valuable German land, the Entente offers us a portion of German West Hungary, essentially the county of Oedenburg and only smaller portions of Eisenburg and Wieselburg counties. Our delegates, in accord with the wishes of the West Hungarian Germans, demanded the right to self-determination. The Entente has paid them no heed. But the entire German-Austrian public will be of one mind on this issue: that the ancient German settlements and the quintessentially German peoples in these areas should have the full right to self-determination. They should decide in a free vote, and we will gladly welcome them if they choose to side with us. [. . .] Our delegation will have ten days’ time to answer this new set of provisions. These cannot be accepted without German Austria ceasing to exist as a country deserving of designation as such. The Entente assures us that they will take our economic and financial situation into account. If they want to live up to this promise, then they will have to make deeply incisive changes to their draft. German Austria cannot live as a bankruptcy asset nor as a Negro colony.

6. Karnute How Should Carinthia Orient Itself? First published as “Wie soll Kärnten sich orientieren?,” Grazer Tagblatt, July 16, 1919, 1–2. Translated by Kristin Kopp. When the German-Austrian republic was declared, it was the first time that an almost exclusively German-speaking nation state had emerged in former Habsburg lands. The residents of this unfamiliar entity held no allegiance to the new country and its borders. Primary political identities were regional, not national. The multilingual state of Carinthia not only endured a border dispute with the kingdom of Yugoslavia from 1918–1919, but also awaited a plebiscite stipulated by the peace treaty of St. Germain that could possibly have led to the state’s division. The German-Carinthian identity was fueled by two forces: the repression of its own Slavic history, and the rejection of multi-ethnic Red Vienna, which was perceived as having abandoned Carinthia in its struggle against the Slavic threat. This article from the pan-German-leaning newspaper Grazer Tagblatt demonstrates how the provincial resentment against the capital city combined anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic tendencies with each other. Klagenfurt, mid-July. [. . .] How should Carinthia orient itself in the near future? These days, this question arguably concerns all of our thoughtful fellow countrymen. We are an exhausted,

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war-ravaged land. Should we let ourselves be robbed of our unique character, let ourselves be experimented upon and governed into the ground by Vienna’s clumsy flirtations with communism, or should we, for the time being, unite with Salzburg and Tyrol to form a likeminded bloc, and then work toward an Anschluss with Bavaria, which, sharing a common ancestry, would be an obvious choice for these three Alpine countries? They have never understood our needs in the Viennese metropolis; under the old, failed regime, we were mostly treated like neglected stepchildren. This “new Vienna” has gained a thoroughly “Oriental” face because of its deliberately promoted immigration from Poland and Hungary and, as a result, has only been further alienated from the mountain regions. We have no faith in the current Viennese government: it is composed mainly of disguised reactionaries and elements foreign to our people, and, under “Red” leadership, it flirts suspiciously with the Communists “supported and controlled” by Ofen-Pest.20 The healthy mind of the German mountain man completely resists the corrosive Semitic spirit that seeks to completely dominate German Austria from its base in Wasserkopf-Vienna. In the name of racially foreign interests, the Viennese government works to prevent every new formation introduced organically. Schönerer’s old saying,21 that the Germans can only be helped by Germans, is truer than ever for us today. We Carinthians, as Germans, only want to live in a state that is German and truly democratic; and, as masters in our own home, we want to determine and build our own future; we therefore resolutely reject the dictatorship of today’s thoroughly Judaized Vienna, because for us it would mean jumping from the kettle into the fire, from the yoke of the Habsburg-Parma dynasty into that of Adler-Austerlitz.22 And if a soviet republic really were to be established in Vienna, cheered on by Israel and its international vassals, then there would probably be only one response from the free mountain lands, and this would be the immediate proclamation of an Alpine Republic, which would bring about a complete separation once and for all and give us full freedom of action vis-à-vis the socialist-communist metropolis-desperados. Therefore, we might seek a merger with Salzburg and Tyrol and the incorporation into Bavaria. An alternative would be the formation of an Alpine Republic, which at the appropriate time, of course, would also politically unite itself with the greater German fatherland. With such a union extending from the Baltic to the Alps, we would have a natural solution to the Anschluss-question via facti. Both paths are feasible, but the latter would undoubtedly be the better option, because it would also support the self-determination of Styria and Upper and Lower Austria, where, unlike in the Jewish Eldorado on the Danube, the same sentiment prevails as in Carinthia. The metropolis of Vienna would then—completely of its own accord—quickly come to reason and quiescence. Facing the hardship of self-inflicted isolation, the city would, in its own vital interest, free itself from the foreign rule that ravages it today like a deadly disease. With a once again German Vienna—perhaps even organically integrated with the future Germany as a free imperial city—the old cordial relations would reestablish themselves on their own in a new, better form. Built upon the basis of equality and reciprocity, these relations would certainly 20 Ofen was the German name for Buda, which unified with Óbuda and Pest in 1873 to become Budapest. 21 Georg von Schönerer (1842–1921) had been a leader of pan-German parties in the Imperial Council and noted anti-Semite. 22 The first reference is to the final Habsburg line (the marriage of Karl I to Zita of BourbonParma), the second is to two prominent leaders of the Social Democrats (Victor Adler and Friedrich Austerlitz), both of whom came from Jewish families.



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become closer and deeper than before, when the imperial capital and the provinces were firmly linked by the constitution, but still lived in two separate worlds. We Alpine Germans—insofar as we are not cut of Jerusalem-red cloth—simply cannot imagine a future under the central rule of today’s Vienna. Neither culturally nor economically. Culturally, an unbridgeable gap separates our Aryan-German weltanschauung from the Jewish one, and conniving international hands are trying to impose a Jewish world view upon us during the frightening confusion unleashed by the collapse. Economically, meanwhile, the small, impoverished Alpine provinces would simply be sucked dry by the city of Vienna—inhabited, as it is, by millions of consumers—and, in a short time, the provinces would collapse under the burden of the “Red,” ballotdriven financial system. In the Alps, where the struggle for survival has always involved the arduous labor of production undertaken in a relentless battle against the angry forces of nature, we know that only hard work and great thrift will save us from complete ruin, from catastrophic collapse, and lead us forward toward a brighter future. In Vienna, on the other hand, the leaders are only concerned with shortening working hours (right now, of all times!). At the same time, they are recklessly squandering state funds for the People’s Guard [Volkswehr] of Herr Deutsch.23 They are also setting up a number of equally useless institutions, such that the money press has had to be set in motion once again, assignat-style.24 The further devaluation of the krone will lead to inflation, which would deliver this productive people, who believed in the false prophets, ever more into the hands of hunger and misery. We will not allow ourselves to be dragged into this ruinous vortex, above which the flirtatiously communizing spirits hover, smiling happily. Our self-preservation instincts alone compel us to resolutely reject this path.

7. Friedrich Austerlitz Abandon Vienna! First published as “Los von Wien!” Der Kampf 12, no. 10 (1919): 345–49. Translated by Kristin Kopp. Friedrich Austerlitz (1862–1931) was the editor in chief of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and member of the National Council throughout the interwar period and until his death. In this article, he responds to those outside of German Austria’s capital who were distancing themselves from post-imperial Vienna. Acknowleding that many of them may have a rational reason for wishing to detach themselves from the oversized metropolis, Austerlitz reveals the true object of his ire—those Christian Socials residing in Vienna while simultaneously inciting regional opposition to the city in the other parts of German Austria. They are opposed to the kind of socialism espoused by the Social Democrats and are seeking to undermine it by rallying their party members. Austerlitz argues that the German-Austrian states should actually welcome the socialization of Vienna because it will raise the level of productivity of the city’s workers. This article was published first in the monthly theoretical organ of the Social Democrats, Der Kampf, and a week later in the Arbeiter-Zeitung (on June 12, 1919). 23

Julius Deutsch organized the German-Austrian People’s Guard (Deutschösterreichische Volkswehr) when he led the Department of Armed Forces from 1918 to 1920. 24 Assignats were paper bills issued in France during the French Revolution.

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We gravitate toward Vienna! Abandon Vienna! These two slogans reflect, more sharply than any other relationship, the decline of the once beloved and admired “Imperial City.” “We gravitate toward Vienna”: This slogan from Eduard Herbst expressed the fact that all Germans in Austria considered Vienna to be the intellectual, political, and economic center of the monarchy, and saw in the greatness and flourishing of Vienna the guarantee of their prosperity.25 “Abandon Vienna”: That is the rejection of Vienna, that is the cry of disdain, even of contempt; all those who used to be so proud of the “German character” of Vienna now see a Vienna that suffers and mourns, and have cast the city to the dead, proclaiming proudly that they do not want to have anything to do with Vienna. And this death sentence is being proclaimed by that party which sprang from Viennese soil to grow to great heights! It is the Christian Socials who are setting the tone for the vitriolic uproar against Vienna; even Viennese Christian Socials are enjoying the fact that their fellow party members from the states are rejecting Vienna. The Christian Socials’ smear campaign against Vienna allows the Viennese population to gauge the value of those friends who so disdainfully renounce and callously abandon them in this time of need. The aversion to Vienna is an aversion to the impoverished city, which, psychologically speaking, is not so incomprehensible. In the prewar period, Vienna was mainly seen as the central marketplace, the city where wealth was accumulated, where the “public with purchasing power” was concentrated, and where everyone who had goods to sell wanted to go. [. . .] When the states that once adored Vienna now so arrogantly deride the city, it is because they once needed Vienna, and now Vienna is dependent on them. All the talk that sets a beloved “imperial” Vienna off from a reviled republican Vienna has no meaning whatsoever and arises only from an inability to discern the economic foundations of an ideology or the need to obscure them: because, of course, it sounds better to present the provincial aversion to Vienna as mere outrage against the republicans, the socialists, and the Jews. It is easier to present this aversion, with its particular intellectual air, than to be truthful about the temptation to hoard everything for oneself and to leave Vienna to its own fate instead of helping to ease the city’s need. [. . .] But even if the antagonism between Vienna and the states, given the extent to which it was caused by the current food shortages, only appears to be elicited by a temporary state of affairs (although this state of affairs stems from the general limits of agricultural production and could therefore torment us for decades), the impossible fact still remains that a “hinterland” of four to five million people is supposed to support and sustain a city of two million people—a city in which nothing grows. By every measure—the size of its population, its cultural, economic, and social structures—this gigantic city is the product of an empire; a population of six to seven million German Austrians would never have been able to bring forth a city of two million people. Vienna, once an embodiment of the empire, is now but its remnant, posing too large of a burden for its diminished foundation. This is what the people in the states intuitively sense, even if they cannot quite explain it, and even if they do not want to get to the bottom of it (the Christian Socials’ draft constitution is but an attempted coverup): this city of two million, which extends its tentacles over all the states, places a burden on them that could crush them, which is why they want to rid themselves of this onus before it is too late. To be sure, it is not exactly 25 Eduard

Herbst (1820–1892) was an Austrian politician in the liberal Constitutional Party.



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noble, nor is it well thought out from a national point of view, if the states resist supporting the gigantic city, resist remaining its “hinterland.” It can, however, be understood as a mode of self-preservation: every man for himself. It is more surprising, perhaps, that the instigators and fomenters of this provincial egoism reside in Vienna, that it is the Viennese Christian Socials who participate strongly in the spiritual and economic isolation of Vienna. Even worse: rather than mitigate and eliminate the economic factors underlying the impossibility of Vienna as a “capital” of two million inhabitants in a “country” of six million people, they seek to strengthen them. Socialist Vienna—and by “socialism” we are not referring to the Social Democratic majority in the Vienna Municipal Council, which would be superficial and wrong, but instead to the socialistically organized economy, which is what is really at stake—may be a horror and abomination to the citizens of the provinces; nevertheless, it is also the case that Vienna can only survive if it largely becomes the site of goods production, and that only as such can it eliminate the economic antagonisms that exist between this gigantic city and the rural regions. Because then, Vienna can become the city that gives back, not just the city that takes away. [. . .] A huge city in which people want to live off of the work of others—which they then call commerce, intellectualism, culture—is not possible in a country of six million. In contrast, a huge city in which people work, a city that produces goods is not a burden to anyone. Of course, by “work,” we do not just mean that people are “employed,” particularly if their employment involves the consumption of labor and raw materials. Instead, their employment must contribute directly or indirectly to an increase in the amount of goods or be necessary for such production. The city’s population density will greatly facilitate and enhance the process of production, making it more efficient. The surplus created by its labor will improve the city’s standing in the eyes of all, even of those in the “hinterland,” in the states. The socialization of Vienna, as the planned organization of productive and constructive labor, will be the salvation of a city that otherwise would have been doomed as a remnant of the former empire. It is easy to defend Vienna, even easier to indict it. The most difficult prospect will be helping the city. It is obvious that a paper constitution cannot solve the problem of Vienna, if only because the alleged political contradictions are actually economic in nature. But it is unconscionable to try to attribute Vienna’s lonely position to the spread and impact of socialism, because this only aggravates the agony and suffering of a city whose misery stems from the war. Anyone who shouts “Abandon Vienna!” villifies and turns his back on the city, which, despite all its vices, has been cradle and home to many great things.

8. Anton Kuh Vienna by the Mountains First published as Anton, “Wien am Gebirge,” Die Stunde, July 4, 1923, 3. Translated by Kristin Kopp. While individuals from the political left and right both expressed forms of post-imperial nostalgia, they were mourning the loss of different things. If nostalgia for lost imperial power and grandeur characterized sentiments on the right, the Left was more concerned with the fall of Vienna from a bustling, cosmopolitan, multiethnic contact zone to the capital of a provincial, inwardly focused successor state. The satirist Anton Kuh

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(1890–1941), a central figure in the coffee house literary scene, does not explicitly link his aversion to these developments to his Jewish identity. Yet a decrease in the cultural and ethnic diversity in the city particularly impacted members of religious and ethnic minority groups. When Vienna was still the imperial capital and the imperial residence of the AustroHungarian monarchy, the city’s full geographical title as taught in elementary schools was “Vienna on the Danube.” This unending river was the important feature; creating industries and connecting trade, it ran from the heart of Europe almost to the gates of Asia, carving a path through the middle of the empire. This river was the main approach into the city and the city’s privileged access route in the geography of the state. The Vienna that is just a capital city is now merely located along the Danube; it receives cursory benefit from the river but no longer holds command over it. It doesn’t have any more right to the waterway than does the former kingdom of Serbia or any of the other Balkan lowlands whose soil the river invigorates as it passes through. One no longer says “Vienna on the Danube,” and when one does say it, it lacks the former sense of expansively powerful imperial luster. Vienna simply does not lie on the Danube anymore—where, strictly speaking, it never actually lay—but instead it lies by the mountains (shortened to “Vienna b. m.”); not on the plain with its expansive gaze turned outward to the world, but instead pressed up against the mind-numbing mountainous highlands. There used to be two mental-topographic elements that brought forth the curious Viennese sentimentality: The broad view over the east and the north, and the nestled view of the west and the south—the gaze emanating into the distance and retreating back into narrowness. But now one of the viewpoints has fallen to the wayside. Soon we will also be able to hear it in the sentimental tone of songs, a wistfulness that breathes in a constrained space, stripped of its proud hue, will tend toward the Carinthian-Koschatic.26 The fact that Vienna lies at the foot of the mountains—like Saint Leonhard, St. Anton, and Brunn—grows more visible and palpable day by day.27 Since the end of the war, the inward-looking gaze is clearly winning ground. Attitudes have become more guarded, more rigid, narrower in their outlook; the joyful worldliness of the mixed-national hybrid is giving way to the kind of cheerless gnarl that the nose of the Tirolean displays in such sharp relief. Social interaction has become more cantankerous, as if we were all villagers damned to live with the same few people for eternity. Graz from the south and Linz from the west creep ever closer, Wiener Neustadt is as important as a new Vienna, fifty kilometers away from the old city center. Politics now exudes an air of Alpine pasture, whiffs of barn timber. Those who brawl in the local pub, bang around in backrooms, or beat march rhythms on the pavement wearing breeches and puttees,28 those who wrap black rags around their heads, carry tree stocks as walking canes, and scowl at every elegant garment or handsome carriage—that is the spirit of Schladming, Unterhollersbach, and St. Kathrein.29 The blokes with mandolins 26 Thomas Koschat (1845–1914) was an Austrian composer and choir director who popularized Carinthian folk songs. 27 Like Brunn am Gebirge, Vienna does not actually lie at the foot of the mountains. It borders on the Vienna Woods, the northeastern foothills of the Alps. 28 Puttees are long strips of cloth or leather, worn wrapped around the calves by Alpine tourists as well as by those aligned with right-wing, proto-Nazi groups. 29 These are all small villages and towns in the Austrian rural regions.



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strapped on their chests and yodeling-hats [Hoiho-Hüteln] on their heads, who are living in the reality of an entertainment supplement (for more mature youth); the gandering couples out a-courting who seek their maker in the forest, instead of sinking their gaze in the presence of each other; the drunken, un-Viennese student brawlers who are becoming more and more prominent in the taverns and beer gardens of the outer districts—all of them are mountain folk, forest-Krähwinkler,30 that the outcome of the war has turned into the privileged of the metropolis. But one thing remains: that good old Austrian spirit of police and bureaucracy. It has gravitated toward Wimpfenbrunn since time immemorial and reluctantly represented Europe.31 Today, Wimpfenbrunn is gravitating toward it. Last Sunday, when the costumes and faces of out-of-town guests (visitors of Catholics Day32) filled the streets of the city, one had to agree with the Lower Austrians who call Vienna “Weandorf.” Vienna is an Alpine capital—the rest of us are fighting a defensive battle together with the industrial slaves. The mountains are moving in on us— soon, we will be reading “b. M.” instead of “o. D.” [short for “on the Danube”] in our schoolbooks.

9. Otto Bauer Three Groups in the Anschluss Camp First published as “Drei Gruppen im Anschlußlager,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, July 7, 1927, 1–2. Translated by Kristin Kopp. Although the term “Anschluss” is now largely associated with the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, it actually named a political project strongly supported by the Social Democrats throughout the interwar period. Until the rise of Hitler, Social Democrats supported an Anschluss to a large extent because they felt that their Social Democratic agenda was in direct connection to the more advanced German worker’s movement. When Otto Bauer became the foreign minister of the provisional German-Austrian state in 1918, he undertook a secret trip to Germany to negotiate the terms for Anschluss. After the peace treaties prohibited this development, Bauer stepped down, but he continued to agitate for an Austrian union with Germany. The conservative Christian Socials, meanwhile, feared that the Catholic Church would lose power in a unification with the Protestant north and therefore favored various other political constellations—most notably that of a Danube Confederation led by Austria. For those concerned with the Anschluss, my article in “Der Kampf” seems to have led to their first realization that, among Anschluss supporters, there are very different ideas about how we will achieve an Anschluss, about the conditions under which it will be possible to achieve it.33 I offer my comments about this here.

30

“Krähwinkel” refers to a fictional place whose residents (Krähwinkler) are understood to be provincial and narrow-minded. 31 “Wimpfenbrunn” is another name Kuh uses to refer to the provincial surroundings of Vienna. 32 Catholics Day is a festival organized by the church. 33 Otto Bauer, “Wandlungen und Probleme der Anschlußpolitik,” Der Kampf 20, no. 7 (1927): 297–302.

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In speaking of Anschluss supporters, I want to start by excluding a certain group: those people who have not yet moved past the old particularism, past that saddest legacy of German history: Catholic Austria’s longstanding antipathy toward Protestant Prussia, which is itself the sad legacy of the battles between the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns. These are the people who still hope for the reunification of German Austria with the neighboring peoples with whom we were joined under the reign of the Habsburgs. These people are essentially opposed to the Anschluss. But since they are afraid to contest the power of the Anschluss idea openly, they disguise their opposition in revived fantasies of the pre-1848 Romantic period. They are dreaming of a new empire as a loose confederation of states that would loosely unite the sovereign German states, break up the dominance of the north, and integrate the neighboring peoples as far as the lower reaches of the Danube. The Holy Roman Empire of the Teutonic nation thus reemerges in the fantasies of clerical monarchists. It is a utopia and not a good one. This group is not up for discussion here. I only consider those to be true supporters of the Anschluss who seek Anschluss in a unified German Reich without being hindered by any inner aversion to the German areas in the north. Among these real supporters, we can distinguish three main groups. The first can be called the pacifist group. They hope to be able to achieve an Anschluss without war and without revolution, by calling upon the sense of justice of the world: by proving that German Austria is not viable on its own and by appealing to the League of Nations. They reject all violent means and believe that they can only achieve victory through the unified and determined will to Anschluss of the German-Austrian people. Therefore, it regards constant propaganda in support of the Anschluss as the most important weapon of struggle. Their greatest achievement has been in this, their propaganda. It is certainly true that everyone who wants Anschluss must, first and foremost, ensure that the idea of the Anschluss not be forgotten; they must keep the will to Anschluss strong, awake, and primed. But as true as this is, I do not believe that the will alone can break the mighty powers that are holding us back from an Anschluss. In 1918 and 1919, before the peace agreements were signed, strong currents in the United States and in Italy rejected the Anschluss ban, and one could still have hoped to successfully fight against including it in the peace treaties by appealing to the principle of the right of self-determination and by proving that German Austria would not be viable. To hope today, however, that an appeal to the law will mollify fascist Italy, that proof of our economic hardships will appease French imperialism, seems to me to be illusory. It is certainly true that the first prerequisite of the Anschluss is that our will remains strong; that is why we have rejected Seipel’s demand that we not talk about the Anschluss,34 that is why we support the propaganda favoring Anschluss. Yet this will can only prevail if major changes in Europe break the forces of resistance. The second group of Anschluss supporters—they can be called the militant group— knows this very well. They believe that a victorious war would pave a path to Anschluss. A war would give Germany the opportunity to join one or the other of the two warring parties and in this way secure the Anschluss as its stake in the spoils of war. We Social Democrats reject this path to Anschluss. Our Linz Program expressly excludes it. As determined as we are to achieve Anschluss, we still unconditionally and forever refuse to do so by participating in a war.

34

Ignaz Seipel (1876–1932) was the Christian Social Party chairman during the interwar period and two-time chancellor of Austria (1922–1924 and 1926–1929).



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The third group is the one whose views I have always championed. They can be called the revolutionary group. [. . .] In 1918 I championed the Anschluss as the national-level task of the proletariatdriven revolution. In my 1923 “Austrian Revolution,”35 I argued that a national unity of the German people will only be achieved once “the now interrupted revolutionary process begins anew” with the social revolution of the proletariat. In my article in “Der Kampf,” I only reiterated this previous argument. I attach importance to it for two reasons. The Anschluss should not merely be a dream for us. We want to see a viable path to Anschluss, a path that meets two conditions. First, it should not force us to delude ourselves into believing it possible to revise the map of Europe peacefully, without any conflict or upheaval; second, it should not force us to contradict our will that we not allow ourselves to be dragged into a war. Revolutionary hope shows us the way. But it does even more for us. By telling the workers that the Anschluss will not take place in isolation but instead will be part of the great upheavals that will transform Germany internally, and by linking the hope for Anschluss together with the hope for the social liberation of the working class, it dispels the fears of many workers that they would have to sacrifice many social achievements in exchange for Anschluss. By linking national and social ideals together, the will to Anschluss of the working class is greatly strengthened. This linking of the ideal of national unity with the ideal of social liberation—this understanding that the same revolutionary development will both bring about German unity and liberate the German working class—has been one of our foundational beliefs ever since the emergence of the German Social Democratic movement. In 1872 Wilhelm Liebknecht, accused of high treason, confessed to the Leipzig jury: “A twofold ideal has been my conviction since youth: a free and united Germany and the emancipation of the working people. I fought to the best of my ability to attain this twin set of goals and I will continue to fight for this twin set of goals as long as there is still breath in me. Duty demands it.”

35 Otto

Bauer, Die österreichische Revolution (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1923).

Photograph from a reportage by Bruno Frei documenting the miserable living conditions of Jewish refugees in Vienna, “With no furniture, the family sleeps on the floor,” ca. 1920. (Courtesy of Bildarchiv/Austrian National Library, ÖNB.)

CHAPTER NINE

DEMOGRAPHY Kristin Kopp and Werner Michael Schwarz

A

World War I, the population of Vienna dropped from some 2.1 million inhabitants to fewer than 1.9 million. One reason for this decline was the high death rate caused by food shortages during and after the war. Infants and children were chronically malnourished and thus among the most affected by the food shortages. In addition, epidemics such as the Spanish flu also took their toll across the entire population. Other reasons for this decline included the relocation of ethnic minorities to the successor states of the monarchy, war refugees returning home (most notably those who returned to the former Galicia, which had become part of the Republic of Poland), and, most importantly, the emigration of over one hundred thousand members of the Czech minority to the newly founded state of Czechoslovakia. Despite high pressure to assimilate, the Czech minority had been prominent in the city since the late nineteenth century, and it continued to remain an important cultural and demographic element in the years following 1918. In the immediate postwar years, the question of social inclusion and exclusion in Red Vienna centered on two specific concerns: first, who would be eligible to benefit from the city’s municipal services, and second, how would the city address the question of immigration? The answers to both must be understood in the context of racial anti-Semitism, the main targets of which were the Jewish refugees that had migrated from Galicia during the war. Accordingly, the question of citizenship in the new state—the determination of who belonged to the German-Austrian nation and could therefore benefit from its services—was defined almost exclusively by an attempt to exclude Galician Jews, despite their numbers not exceeding thirty thousand after 1918. The provisional German-Austrian constitution of 1918 had openly discriminated against long-standing Austrians from Galicia (which, to conceal its true aim, was also extended to include those from Istria and Dalmatia) with respect to those from other former crown lands; their citizenship had been made dependent on the right of residence in an Austrian municipality, which had carried a residency requirement of at least ten years. The Treaty of Saint-Germain suspended this regulation in 1919, but unintentionally continued to enable discrimination against Jewish refugees. The treaty made the “right of option” available to all inhabitants of the former monarchy, which meant that they each had the right to opt for membership in that state in which they felt they belonged according to “race and language.” Because this criterium of “race” was not clearly defined, it could be used by the Austrian authorities to deny citizenship to Jews from the former Galicia who were fter

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currently in Vienna. The Social Democrats did not oppose this policy as they wavered between their own anti-racist and internationalist claim, and a populism reflecting the overall mood. While the city of Vienna offered concrete assistance to Jewish refugees, worked to integrate them, and helped to stave off pogroms, the city government also participated in plans to expell refugees (as can be seen in the so-called Sever Decree of 1919). The second major topic of demographic policy after 1918 addressed emigrants who sought refuge from political persecution. Of particular concern were the political refugees from Russia, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey, as well as the Hungarians who fled after the suppression of the brief soviet republic in 1919. Social Democratic politicians such as Otto Bauer and Friedrich Austerlitz vigorously defended the right to asylum, which at the time only protected political refugees from being extradited; it did not guarantee material support or political rights. It is striking that, beyond the question of the right to asylum, the Social Democrats did not engage in public, programmatic debates about how best to deal with refugees. Also, unlike the liberal and communist press, the Social Democratic press showed little interest in their social situation. One exception is a text from the administration that can be read as a programmatic statement regarding the preferred receivers of Red Vienna’s social policies. In 1922, for reasons of transparency, the Housing Office (Wohnungsamt) introduced a “points system” for the allocation of housing that at first glance seemed remarkably unbiased. The criteria involved a complex combination of both immediate need (the housing situation in the narrower sense) and certain characteristics of the applicants, such as place of birth, length of residence in Vienna, and family status. Meanwhile, income level and personal wealth were not barriers to access. Couples with children were privileged, however marriage was not a precondition. Newcomers received fewer points than long-term residents and residents born in Vienna. According to the 1923 census, residents born outside Vienna accounted for almost half of the population, which included many Jews. Being a war refugee did not qualify one for extra points; being homeless was even a disadvantage. Behind the apparent objectivity and transparency, the scoring system was obviously the result of complex negotiation processes. On the one hand, it presented an objective set of criteria and a lack of bias in alignment with obligations based on international law and the Treaty of Saint-Germain in particular; on the other hand, it did not address the needs of some of the most vulnerable residents of Vienna, Jewish war refugees in particular. Further reading Milchram 2019b Pfoser and Weigel 2013, 2017 Schwarz (Ursula) 2019 Wonisch 2010

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1. Anonymous New Guidelines for the Ranking of Apartment Applicants First published as “Neue Richtlinien für die Einreihung der Wohnungswerber,” ArbeiterZeitung, March 27, 1922, 3. Translated by Kristin Kopp. Although Red Vienna would later become famous for its housing construction program, housing shortages placed great strain on the city’s resources in the first years after the war. The Social Democrats needed to develop a system for allocating housing to the neediest. In the early months of 1922, a new set of guidelines was released for ranking housing applications using a points system. Priority was given to those who had been in the city the longest—homelessness itself did not garner points. On May 1 of this year, the housing construction tax will go into effect; it will offer the only effective means of combatting the housing shortage and ending it once and for all. The housing construction tax will make it possible to build new housing units. But, given that the number of people applying for housing is increasing daily—there are already 86,000 applicants, 37,000 of whom are designated for “preferential” treatment—it will take quite some time to adequately meet the housing needs of the population with new construction. In the meantime, we must continue to focus our energy on distributing available housing in the most beneficial way. Our experience to date has taught us that the current rules for ranking housing applicants and assigning available, or soon-to-beavailable, apartments does not do a good enough job of assessing the masses of those in need of housing to identify and prioritize those who need it most desperately. For months, the Housing Office has been working on new guidelines for ranking housing applicants; these guidelines are now ready and are meant to go into effect in the next few days as a supplement to the ordinance issued on March 31, 1921, regulating housing requests. On Saturday the Viennese Conference convened in the Social Democrats’ people’s house in the Favoriten District under the chairmanship of Representative Sever to discuss the recommendations.1 City Councillor Weber gave his report on the guidelines.2 He prefaced his remarks by explaining that it will not be possible to meet all housing needs until the availability of housing is as large as the demand. Until then, the complaints of those unable to receive housing will continue. Today, there are dozens of applicants clinging to every free apartment, but of course only one of them can actually acquire it; the others will understandably complain about unfairness. We can only redress their situation with a process that maintains the greatest possible level of objectivity. And even then, we should expect that loud protests will continue until construction is in full swing. Starting now, the ranking of housing applicants and the distribution of apartments will be undertaken with greatest strictness, thereby putting an end to chicanery and, where possible, also harshness. Of course, every individual will need to put the interests of the whole ahead of his own. [. . .] 1

Favoriten is a working-class district south of central Vienna. Albert Sever (1867–1942) was the Social Democratic governor of Lower Austria (which included Vienna) from 1919 to 1920. After November 1920, Vienna became a separate state. 2 Anton Weber (1878–1950) was a Social Democratic politician and city councillor of housing.

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The points system. Officials will now have to evaluate each application according to the following point system: a specific number of points has been assigned to categories reflecting personal data and specific aspects of the housing need. After all of the relevant rubrics of the application form have been assessed, the points are added up and used to determine the distribution of housing. Inclusion on the priority lists, as established by the ordinance issued on March 31, 1921, regulating housing requests, is based upon the following principles: A housing applicant with ten or more points will be marked as “priority” and placed in group 1, with five to nine points as “worthy of consideration” in group 2, and with fewer than five points as “rejected” in group 3. The following will be considered:

3

The housing applicant has right of residence in Vienna3

2 points

Married less than one year

1 point

Married or living together in the same household for more than one year

2 points

For every child under the age of 14

1 point

For every child older than 14

2 points

Residence of the housing applicant in Vienna since birth

4 points

Residence of the housing applicant in Vienna for 10 years

3 points

Residence of the housing applicant in Vienna prior to August 1, 1914

2 points

Residence in Vienna for more than one year

1 point

The eviction of the applicant, which has already occurred, is legally binding, and was not caused by the applicant

5 points

The currently occupied apartment has been deemed uninhabitable by the building or medical authority

5 points

Disability or invalidity of 60 percent or more

1 point

Grave disability or invalidity (blindness, loss of both legs)

5 points

The pregnancy of the wife or partner of more than six months, certified by a doctor

1 point

An illness that is exacerbated by living in the apartment in question, which must be certified by a doctor

1 point

Subletting (not including subletting in the home of parents or parents-in-law)

2 points

Renting beds with nonfamily members (meaning when the housing applicant and his family members have to share a living space with the main renter): per family member

2 points

The right of residence (Heimatrecht) identified the membership of an individual to a specific municipality in Austria, where he or she had a claim to residence and could receive poor relief in cases of hardship.

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A household forced to live separately by prevailing circumstances, 2 points when the impossibility of living with the parents or parents-in-law has been determined Lack of kitchen in the primary tenant’s apartment

1 point

The overcrowding of an apartment, for each additional person

1 point

2. Edmund W. Eichler The Foreigners in Vienna: Of Conspirators, Emigrants, Dreamers, and Harmless Tradesmen First published as “Die Ausländer in Wien. Von Verschwörern, Emigranten, Träumern und harmlosen Geschäftsleuten,” Neues Wiener Journal, October 6, 1924, 8. Translated by Kristin Kopp. As the center of a former multiethnic empire, Vienna continued to attract artists, intellectuals, and members of the political opposition from many regions formerly belonging to the empire. The Neues Wiener Journal was not affiliated with any political party, but it tended to reflect anti-Marxist views together with a nostalgia for the former monarchy. It is therefore significant that the author argues that the government—and its police force—are capable of containing any threats that might be posed by the immigrant population in the city. From the viewpoint adopted in the journal, they are an interesting and harmless cast of characters who bring a certain charm to the public sphere. In recent days, another conspiracy has been hyped in the Viennese public sphere. Mysterious strangers, foreign spies, and informants; murder plots, irredentist conspiracies,4 secretive meetings, and more—a proper ingredient list for any successful conspiracy. The authorities have responded to these rumors and reports with an appropriately intensified level of investigation and oversight, while remaining calm and levelheaded. One thing is certain: Vienna is one of the largest centers of irredentism in Central Europe, as evident by the sizeable number of foreigners who have permanently relocated here. Nevertheless, Vienna has only rarely served as the birthplace of complots—whether political or purely anarchistic in nature. The surveillance of the foreigners by the Vienna state police is too tight, too meticulous. And not only that: the surveillance of the foreigners by their own governments, who maintain spies in Vienna, is too intense. Most of the cases in Vienna are nothing more than coffee house revolutions—Vienna, of course, has its fair share of these, along with a torrent of foreign émigré literature, and émigré and irredentist newspapers. For nothing is as predestined for complots as much as the Viennese coffee house scene, thanks to its tradition: the year of 1848 was cooked up in Viennese coffee houses; the Viennese coffee houses had already been feared by the uncompromising Metternich

4

The term “irredentism” refers to political movements seeking to claim additional territory for their nations by arguing for the annexation of regions held in the past. Here, the term is used in a broader sense to also include those at odds with their countries’ postwar governments.

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and his personal constable, the police president;5 the revolution was prepared in part in Viennese coffee houses; and the foreigners, the émigrés still gather in Viennese coffeehouses now . . . * * * The foreign émigré circles in Vienna recruit members from the furthest right to the furthest left wing. And this too has always been the case: Trotsky sat in the corner window of the Café Central, while the most recent Bourbon pretender to the throne lived in Vienna for a while in a small room in the Mariahilf District. And it is just like that today: the royalty of old Czarist Russia, Prince Trubetskoy and Prince Golitsyn, “work” here, as do Russian social revolutionaries and the most radical Bolsheviks. The latter, regulars at a café on the Ringstrasse, are in the best shape financially speaking; the former, the monarchists, at least the individuals themselves (there is, of course, always money for propaganda) are in the worst shape: within its walls, Vienna has two high-ranking Russian generals, one of whom is a shoemaker, the other, a salesman; one Russian admiral became a pastry chef for a time, while a colonel worked as a newspaper peddler. The political life of the Ukrainians in Vienna is also highly interesting. Their various organizations hold their meetings at Café Herrenhof and at a café in Josefstadt.6 They have their own national committee in Vienna. By the way, the former Ukrainian national government also has its headquarters in Vienna. After the annexation of eastern Galicia by Poland, they fled to Vienna, and from there, they are leading the movement to restore Ukrainian national independence. The main driver of the national movement of Viennese Ukrainians is the student club “Sitsch,” which has more than five hundred members and has already made public appearances with their musical performances and sporting events. The small Barbara Church on Postgasse is more or less the national church of the Ukrainians. It also contains the mortal remains of the Ukrainian national saint. In addition to the Russian and Ukrainian émigré groups, the Hungarian émigrés are also of importance; they are the strongest in terms of numbers but also the most fragmented organizationally and socially. Most of the Hungarian emigrants are already completely “acclimated” and have integrated themselves into the Viennese business and social worlds and have made inroads into the Viennese political sphere. The remaining irredentists are divided into various more or less radical groups. For the most part, they gravitate toward the Social Democrats, and only a small percentage still profess radical tendencies and align themselves with the Communist Party. In terms of political agitational and intellectual activity, the Hungarians are the most advanced, and a surprisingly large percentage of the Hungarian émigrés are writers, artists, and journalists. A number of the best names in literature, theater, film, and the press are now at home in Vienna due to the Hungarian emigration. * * * Of course, the largest number of foreigners in Vienna are the Czechs. But they do not fit into the above categories, because, here, there is no question of emigration: Vienna has long held a very significant percentage of Czechs, and this has not changed. The districts 5 Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, Prince von Metternich-Winneburg zu Beilstein (1773–1859), was chancellor from 1821 until the liberal revolutions of 1848 forced his resignation. 6 Café Herrenhof was located in the center of Vienna and frequented by intellectuals during the interwar period. Josefstadt is a bourgeois district in the center of the city. The Ukrainians, in other words, met in the center, not the working-class periphery of the city.

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of Brigittenau, Favoriten, and possibly even Ottakring are the centers of Czech life in the city. Their centers of agitation are not the coffee houses, but the small taverns on the city’s outskirts, where their social gatherings are never without their well-known national folk music. Vienna is home to about 150,000 Czechs, that is to say 150,000 nationally conscious Czechs who continue to claim an allegiance with Czechoslovakia. (The number of descendants of Czech families who already consider themselves to be quite Viennese, is far greater, especially in Vienna’s workers’ districts.) In terms of occupation, the majority of Viennese Czechs are either workers or small tradesmen. Their social organizations are highly developed, and the Czech gymnasts can be seen at all major Social Democratic rallies in their national Sokol uniforms with the red plumes.7 The other nations of Europe, especially the Balkan countries, are also represented in Viennese émigré circles and in the Viennese foreign clubs. If the Russians and Hungarians have politicians who must be taken more or less seriously, and the Czechs are harmless businessmen, the Balkan migrants in Vienna are usually fanciful dreamers. Dreamers, of course, whose temperaments and fanciful secret clubs probably make them the most dangerous of all foreigners in Vienna. It was a Balkan club—Albanian revolutionaries—who were held responsible for the only proven murder plotted in Vienna (the assassination of Essad Pasha). In a café in Josefstadt, where the Albanians are still active to this day, a death sentence was pronounced on the Albanian dictator. The Macedonian committees in Vienna, the Montenegrin, and the others—all of which have their headquarters in cafés on the Ringstrasse—are increasingly active. The Egyptian colony, which mainly recruits students, is large. * * * In terms of numbers, the Hungarians are the strongest group of foreigners in Vienna after the Czechs. They are estimated at more than twenty-five thousand, followed by about five thousand Russians and two thousand Ukrainians. The Hungarian emigrants also have the most newspapers with two large publishing houses at their disposal. The Czechs have two daily newspapers and a few weekly and monthly reviews; the Russians also have quite a few weekly newspapers of every color, the Ukrainians as well. Among the other emigrants, only fliers and other propaganda pamphlets are distributed. But the demand for foreign newspapers is strong in Vienna. The large portable newsstands that have been built on every street corner have become a necessity.

3. Anonymous Expulsion of Refugees First published as “Ausweisung der Flüchtlinge,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, September 11, 1919, 3. Translated by Kristin Kopp. During World War I, many Jews fled from Galicia and Bukovina to Vienna. In 1918 almost 90 percent of the refugees in the city were Jews. While we might expect that the Social Democrats would have advocated for this vulnerable population, a decision was reached to expel the Jewish refugees from the country—a decision ultimately rendered impossible to execute due to the lack of coal to fuel the trains. The following report of the expulsion order 7 The

Sokol club was a Czech national gymnastics organization.

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was printed in the Wiener Morgenzeitung, a Zionist daily newspaper whose editor in chief, Robert Stricker, is mentioned in the text. Yesterday an “Announcement concerning the departure-making (!) of those living in German Austria without right of residence” was posted in the streets of Vienna;8 it stated: The extremely difficult economic situation in German Austria makes it necessary to remove those who do not have right of residence in German Austria from our state territory.9 The amount of food that German Austria is allotted to feed its own people is grossly insufficient, and even though this supply does not even come close to meeting our most basic dietary needs, most of it must be obtained from abroad at great expense. In order to distribute the imported foodstuffs at prices that are not prohibitively high, the federal government is forced to subsidize them at enormous cost. Given the current state of our federal finances, we cannot afford to dedicate any appreciable amount to improving the lives of foreign individuals, especially since these individuals could be taken care of better and more cheaply in their homelands. The housing shortage is already acute. Because we are counting on the return of one hundred thousand prisoners of war from Italy who are already on their way, and because we also anticipate the return of German-Austrian prisoners of war from Siberia at a later date, it is crucial that we organize housing for returnees. Increasing the pace of building is not possible given the current situation, so we cannot hope for any solutions on that front. Therefore, the housing shortage can only be solved by the fastest and most urgent clearing of our state territory possible. The large rate of unemployment should also be considered. It is critical that we decompress the domestic employment market and lower the number of unemployed. Our economy has hit rock bottom, and any further strains on it will bring about complete catastrophe. Given these considerations, it appears necessary to demand that those who are only living here due to the exceptional state of affairs brought about by war and whose presence is not absolutely necessary leave GermanAustrian state territory. Under directive of the German-Austrian State Ministry of the Interior and Education, which has been tasked with carrying out this action, all former members of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy who do not have the right of residence in a municipality of German Austria, insofar as they did not already permanently reside in German Austria prior to August 1, 1914, are herewith ordered to leave GermanAustrian state territory by September 20. Anyone who has not met this directive by this date will be expelled according to the law of July 27, 1871, R.-G.-Bl. 88. Exceptions may be granted to individuals whose residence in German Austria lies in the public interest, who have been employed in German Austria for a significant amount of time, or who can show circumstances worthy of consideration, such as critical illness. They can appeal in writing to the political authority or to the police authority at their place of residence for permission to remain for the necessary amount of time required. Vienna, September 9, 1919. Sever, Governor.

This order by the Austrian government was completely unexpected; it was announced by posted notices and had not previously been made public in the newspapers in the way 8 The title of the original includes the word “Abreisendmachung (!)”; the exclamation mark indicates the strangeness of this term. 9 See footnote 3.

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the government usually communicates its decisions. It is also a breach of the binding promises made to Representative Stricker.10 As is well-known, an expulsion of the refugees had already been planned for the end of July and had been launched with a rousing antiSemitic article in the official party organ of the government, the “Arbeiter-Zeitung.” But at that time, the government could not ignore the views of Representative Stricker, who drew attention to the injustice and impracticability of such an order, resulting in the lastminute reversal of the expulsion plan. At that time, Secretary of State Eldersch promised Herr Stricker that he would first carry out a thorough vetting of all refugees and would only expel those for whom such an act was just, taking care to minimize hardship and cruelty. The government has now broken this promise by ordering the general expulsion of all foreigners without warning. Of course, the Galician war refugees are especially affected. We do not want to be misunderstood. We know that the city of Vienna is in a critical situation, that the food, housing, and coal shortages present serious difficulties. But we should first investigate whether the number of refugees in question is not relatively small, and whether it would be worthwhile and in the best interest of the city of Vienna to violate the code of hospitality and incur the curse of cruelty by expelling them. Some of the foreigners are certainly in the position to relocate, but a large part, and most of these are Jewish refugees, lives in the greatest misery, and expulsion will mean total ruin for these people. That is why Representative Stricker made the above-mentioned proposal to investigate the situation, which was approved and accepted as just by the government six weeks ago. The order is such a senseless and hasty step that it is clear from the outset that it cannot be upheld, especially since it runs counter to the provisions of the peace treaty. The proclamation of the Lower Austrian government means nothing more than a bowing of the Social Democratic rulers before the anti-Semitic sentiment on the street. In competition with the anti-Semitic press, the “Arbeiter-Zeitung” has been relentlessly inciting the population against the Jews and has heaped particular abuse and suspicion upon the Jewish refugees. It seems as though the Social Democratic government, whose policies and systems of government have so far not proven themselves well, is appealing to the old method of distracting the attention of the masses. Anyone familiar with our current situation will know that the removal of a large number of foreigners by the final date, September 20, will prove impossible. A large number of refugees have volunteered to leave the country and, for months, they have been designated for removal, but there is little prospect of actually transporting them out of the country in the foreseeable future. We fear that this ordinance will serve instead as a pretext for harassing those foreigners upon whom people would like to unload their aggressions. At any rate, the Jewish National Authorities will watch closely to ensure that the Jewish refugees are not subjected to brutality or cruelty. The manner in which this order is carried out will be closely observed not only in Vienna but throughout the world with the utmost interest. In the brief period of its existence as a republic, Austria has already done so many stupid things that one would sincerely wish that this time it did not have to learn from its mistakes. * * * The “Neue Freie Presse” reports: The implementation will be very vigorous this time, as returnees from Italy are now arriving on a regular basis and accommodation and food must be provided for them. The number of people who will be affected by 10 Robert

Stricker (1879–1944) was an Austrian politician in the Jewish National Party who served on the Constituent National Assembly (1919–1920). He was also chief editor of the Wiener Morgenzeitung, in which this article appeared.

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this announcement is estimated to be about 100,000 in the entirety of German Austria. Of these, about twenty to thirty thousand are likely to meet the requirements for the exemption that will allow them to remain in the country. The rest have to leave our state territory. For those who do not do so voluntarily, evacuation trains and forced expulsions are planned. The police have been made responsible for carrying out this action, but the workers’ councils have also become interested in the matter and have declared themselves ready to monitor the departure of those required to leave under the banner of “Housing Needs of the Repatriates.”

4. Bruno Frei Jewish Suffering in Vienna First published as Jüdisches Elend in Wien (Vienna and Berlin: R. Löwit Verlag, 1920), 89–91. Translated by Kristin Kopp. Bruno Frei (1897–1988) was the pen name of Benedikt Freistadt, a Marxist journalist and author, whose Jewish family moved from Preßburg (today, Bratislava) when Frei was twelve. After studying philosophy and moving in Marxist circles, Frei launched the weekly newspaper Die frohe Botschaft (The good news) through which he hoped to influence the leftist elements in the SDAP. Captivated by the soviet republics established in postwar Hungary and Bavaria and disillusioned by the lack of a similar revolutionary movement in Austria, Frei left Vienna for Berlin in 1920. Prior to his emigration, Frei published his famous photojournalistic investigation of the conditions under which Jewish refugees were living in Vienna, from which the following excerpt is taken. h) A refugee home. On Hernals’ Main Street,11 near Elterlein Square, stand two dilapidated houses, one a two-story building, the other a one-story building. [. . .] The two dilapidated houses are the property of a Viennese bank. They were set to be demolished before the war to make room for a new bank building. As a sign that the power of financial capital has replaced the former power of feudalism. But Beelzebub, who at that time was raging through Europe in the guise of war, got the better of the scheming gentlemen. Refugees came from all parts of the world, old women from the East, repatriated families from France, ignorant of the language of the country, without shelter, without bedding, without any support. They became the lords of the dilapidated houses. In the first years, their rent was taken out of their refugee support, and they were considered to be renters. But since then, no one takes note of them, they have been forgotten in the dire circumstances of the present. They have been left with the broken building and the beds that were donated to them. They can do as they please. That was the welfare of the old state. There are eighteen Jewish and one non-Jewish renter in the larger house, and five Jewish and three non-Jewish renters in the smaller one. Each room houses a family. They 11

Hernals is a working-class and lower-middle-class district of Vienna, bordering the Vienna Woods.

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do not complain, and they do not grumble. They are listless, shrouded by the calm of a despair that is long-suffered, but whose urgency diminishes as the conditions causing it continue to persist. Their fates show that here, in these tightest of quarters, the Jewish and non-Jewish members of this fate community bear the same suffering at the same time with the same degree of helplessness. And no one is there to testify to the innocence of the innocent or to indict those who have unjustly persecuted the innocent. There is a damp, airless hole with a bed in it. The bed fills the whole room. One door leads to the street, the other to the courtyard. It would be difficult to imagine that the room had ever been inhabited in the past; it was more likely a daytime shelter for the porter. In the bed is a sixty-year-old, heavily rheumatic Jewish woman, helpless and abandoned. She has been living in this water-drenched rat’s nest for a year and has not received any medical treatment. In her home in Bukovina, she had been the widow of a rich merchant and had owned two houses. In a trembling voice, she says that one of them had been “built of stone.” Now she relies on the charitable gifts of compassionate neighbors and fellow countrymen to save her from rapid starvation, even if only provisionally. She is still receiving refugee support for the time being, but she is supposed to clear out of the “apartment” soon. The big question: Where to and how? The bank needs her house. It has to build a new branch. This is very important. The gentlemen were already outside and the day of the demolition has already been determined, the day on which “the old diligence” will have to go.12 One cannot imagine the impression made on the visitor by the woman, lying there motionless, begging for bread. She is not likely to have to bear the martyrdom of her life for much longer. Opposite her lives a Christian carpenter family from France, expelled and forced to relocate here. The man emigrated from Hungary to France forty-five years ago, married a French woman, and pursued his carpenter’s trade. In 1914, already an old man, he had to leave for Vienna with his wife and children because his papers showed that he held the right of residency in Moravia.13 And in the barbaric past, which hopefully lies behind us for good, papers were more important than human suffering and human happiness. The woman does not speak a word of German, but the fourteen-year-old Fernande goes to secondary school [Bürgerschule] of the city of Vienna. The youngest boy and the old father are constantly ailing due to the wet conditions, because the rainwater trickles through the collapsed ceiling of the dilapidated house, and on the walls, the water from above mixes with the ground moisture rising from below. He also tries to pursue his carpentry in Vienna, the master in exile, but he is already too old and too ill to withstand the nameless misery. It also has taken too long, and the exertions were too many. He is tired. Would like to rest. But there is no rest in the world anymore, and he fails to grasp this. In the other house lives a Jewish merchant from Lille. His wife and seven children were brought to Vienna after they had been dragged off to a prison camp where they had to live under worse conditions than livestock, without straw, starving and freezing. He too had emigrated years ago, angry about the conditions in Austria. His son was sixteen years old when they were interned. Two years later, he was sent to a camp to be trained to be a soldier by his fatherland. Today he is already covered by earth. The father passed that age at which being a soldier appears to be appropriate. Now he too has been sent to join his family. But he is at a loss of what to do here. God knows he is not idle by choice! . . . He checks all the boxes for being considered a black marketeer: a salesman, a Jew, a refugee. And yet he is not one. Why not? Apparently, the talent for this occupation does not 12 The

nickname for the building. was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time.

13 Moravia

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lie so hard and fast in the race. His wife complains. He does not. Complaining is women’s way. Men press their lips together in silence. And this man too—this offspring of the fear-driven wandering Jews, who has had to abandon his shop for the second time in order to wander the wide world—this man remains silent. What should he do? Complain? Would it help him? Remain silent. Who knows what God wants. He must want something. Otherwise, he would not torment people like this. That is a plausible idea. But one cannot know what he wants. And no amount of speculation will help. So remain silent. That is the philosophy of remaining silent, as it came to exist in the soul of the simple Jew, whose spirit is fed from the East. It surely contains a grain of truth. Such are the fates and life circumstances of refugee families in the city of the Golden Heart, in the community of believers who call themselves “the merciful, the sons of the merciful” in the language of the Orient.

5. Anonymous Foreigners in our Labor Market First published as “Ausländer auf unserem Arbeitsmarkt,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, June 27, 1925, 1–2. Translated by Kristin Kopp. The following excerpt discusses a bill proposed by the Austrian Federal Government intended to regulate the access of foreign workers to the Austrian labor market. It reveals the ambiguous position of the Social Democrats on the question of immigration. On the one hand, the text praises the initiative of the newly formed, Social Democratic–controlled Chamber of Labor, which sought to protect native workers in times of economic crisis from the competition of nonunionized “cheap labor” from abroad. On the other hand, the bill of the bourgeois government was criticized because its implementation may have led to bureaucratic hurdles for jobseekers and invited police harassment of political refugees. In Austria, there are 150,000 unemployed people looking for work in vain, yet foreign workers still continue to pour into the country. The employers are basically organizing an influx of foreign workers. The Alpine Mining Company has lured South Slavic and Italian workers into its mines even though many thousands of native workers remain unemployed in Styria. Meanwhile, large brickworks have applied for work permits for foreign brickmakers with the justification that there are not enough trained brick workers in Austria, as if it would be impossible to train unemployed construction or unskilled laborers for brickwork. Landowners are attracting foreign seasonal workers into the country, and large industrial manufacturers have laid off Austrian laborers to replace them with Germans from the Reich: in one case, a large company requested visas for the Reich Germans on the grounds that they were specially qualified industrial analysts; when they arrived, it turned out that they were accountants who had only been brought in to break the Free Trade Unions. But even aside from the immigration coordinated by employers, foreign workers continue to pour into Austria. Apprentices from Czechoslovakia are once again applying for positions at small Viennese companies, even while good apprenticeships are not easy to find for the children of Viennese workers. Although the municipality of Vienna now employs more than 10,000 construction workers at its building sites, we still have more than 3,000 unemployed builders in Vienna. This is due to the fact that unemployed construction workers are not only coming to Vienna from the other

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Austrian states where nothing is being built, but that builders from Czechoslovakia have also reappeared on the Viennese labor market. A sizeable number of immigrants are also military refugees from neighboring countries where they have compulsory military service; many young men who want to escape conscription come to Austria, especially from Poland. In the vocational job market, this influx is painfully evident. Almost all countries have closed their borders to our unemployed, yet our borders are crossed week after week by foreign workers and employees in search of work. Despite our devastating unemployment levels, immigration to Austria is greater than emigration from Austria. Of course, this will make the situation in our labor market ever more precarious, and the prospects for our unemployed to find work will only become worse. In a 1923 petition to the government, the Chamber of Labor already proposed a legal regulation governing the immigration of foreign workers and their employment in Austrian companies. But, understandably, such an arrangement is very unpopular with employers; they do not want to allow their right to employ foreign scab labor to be restricted, and they hope that the overcrowding of the labor market will eventually make it easier for them to break the power of the unions and depress general wage levels. And when employers are opposed to something, the legislative mill grinds very slowly. It is only now, a year and a half after the Chamber of Labor called for legislation, that the government has drafted a bill to “protect the domestic labor force” [. . .]. According to this bill, no employer will be allowed to hire foreign workers during periods of high unemployment unless they obtain an exemption from the proper authorities. If an employer already employs a foreign worker, he may continue to employ him in the future; the restriction only applies to new arrivals, but not just to workers who have just immigrated to Austria, but also to those foreigners who might already live in Austria but who only arrived during or after 1919. Permission to employ such foreign workers can only be granted by the Industrial District Commission [Industrielle Bezirkskommission], or, in the case of agricultural workers, from a special commission composed of representatives of the regional government, farmers, and agricultural trade unions. One sees at first glance that the implementation of such a law would cause significant problems. Every employer who hires a worker would have to demand from him that he prove his Austrian citizenship. It would therefore be necessary, first and foremost, to ensure that this requirement not create difficulties or costs for the unemployed in the hiring process. Every employer would have to keep a list of foreigners he employs and present it to the authorities. It would be necessary to ensure that this could not be misused by the police to harass workers, and in particular, that it would not endanger the right of political refugees to seek asylum—protecting this right is a duty of honor for Austrian workers.

6. Anonymous Czech Provocations in Vienna First published as “Tschechische Provokation in Wien,” Der Telegraph, August 13, 1920, 4. Translated by Kristin Kopp. The Czechs made up the largest national minority in Vienna, even after more than one hundred thousand Czechs emigrated from Vienna at the end of the war. They left behind a minority population that was overrepresented in the working class, and that became the target of right-wing resentments. Der Telegraph was the name of the evening edition of the Deutsches

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Volksblatt, which, prior to the war, had been the most prominent anti-Semitic and initially pan-German newspaper in Austria. It continued to align itself with the Christian Social Party until 1922, when it was edged out of the market by its competitor, the Reichspost. We have received written report: Since the Czechs in Vienna have begun enjoying special treatment and attention from Social Democratic leader Dr. Renner and Mayor Reumann, they have become more excessive and provocative, not only in their demands, but also in their behavior. They believe that the pressure exerted by Prague on German Austria offers sufficient protection for all their outrageous attacks. Ever since the city of Vienna, via its school representative Speiser,14 has provided the Czechs with valuable municipal schools for free use—schools built by the German Viennese with their hard-earned money—the Czechs have acted like the lords of Vienna. For example, in the Twenty-first District Floridsdorf, where the Kuenburg School was made available to the Czechs. Directly thereafter, the Czech National House was built in the immediate vicinity, in Brünner Street, and covered with Czech signs. The Germans quietly accepted this with their well-known lamb’s patience. But that was not enough for the foreign Czech immigrants. They are solid supporters of the Floridsdorf Communists and agents of the Russian Bolsheviks; they take a lively interest in the communist machinations in Vienna and intervene in Austria’s internal political processes. They are a dangerous element that undermines our ability to maintain peace and order in the state. German workers have been repeatedly attacked and defiled by these uninvited guests who compete for their jobs. In the Czech National House, the offensive hate song: “Hrom a peklo” (in German: “Hang the noose around the German’s neck!”) is sung frequently.15 The German workers are not in agreement with their party leaders’ friendliness toward the Czechs, because it has resulted in their German brothers being driven out of the factories. Provoked by the Czechs, they have now smeared the Czech National House with tar and painted over the Czech signs.

7. Anonymous The Czech School System in Vienna and the German School System in Czechoslovakia: A Speech by Otto Glöckel First published as “Tschechisches Schulwesen in Wien und deutsches in der Tschechoslowakei. Eine Rede Otto Glöckels,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, August 20, 1926, 1. Translated by Kristin Kopp. The Treaty of Saint-Germain contained protections for ethnic minorities in Austria. Article 68 specifically stipulated that for the children of “Austrian nationals of other than German speech,” school instruction shall be given “through the medium of their own language.” While the Social Democrats complied with these requirements, many bristled at the 14 Paul Speiser (1877–1947) was an Austrian Social Democrat politician who was a prominent activist in the Free School Association (Verein Freie Schule), which was founded in 1905 and became the official educational association of the SDAP after 1918. 15 Hej, Slaveni (“Hey, Slavs”) was a Slavic patriotic song that served as the anthem of both the Pan-Slavic movement and the Sokol physical education movement. The verse to which the author alludes—Hrom a peklo, márne vase / proti nám sú vzteky!—translates to “Thunder and hell, in vain are / your rages against us!”

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resources expended in the process. Of particular concern was the question of reciprocation: were German-speaking children in neighboring states, and Czechoslovakia in particular, being provided with education of the same quality? Karlsbad, August 19. On Tuesday evening, in a crowded public meeting in Karlsbad, the president of the Vienna State School Council Glöckel spoke on the topic of “Democracy and Schools.”16 In discussing the new Viennese school system, he met with stormy applause when he turned directly to the government representative and said: In Vienna, we also have Czech schools. The peace treaty obliges us to build Czech schools for the Czech children of Austrian citizens. We have faithfully adhered to the contract and have even exceeded it by providing not only the Czech children of Austrian citizens but also the children of Czechoslovak nationals with free education. We are aware that the Habsburg period is over, where Czech schools were shut down or not allowed to open, all under ridiculous pretexts. In Red Vienna, the right of the Czech child to a national education is fully recognized. The Czech children in the Czech schools enjoy the same rights and advantages as the German children. They receive the same amount of free teaching material, and there is an average number of twenty-eight or twenty-nine children in both the Czech and German classes. But we also want German children in Czechoslovakia to be treated in exactly the same way as Czech children in Vienna. We Social Democrats are accustomed to recognizing equal rights for all, and, as real democrats, we are accustomed to practicing that to which we theoretically adhere.

8. Anonymous German to the Core—with a “Háček” First published as “Kerndeutsch mit einem ‘Háček’,” Österreichischer Straßenbahner, May 15, 1931, 5–6. Translated by Kristin Kopp. The háček is a diacritical mark (ˇ) prevalent in the Czech language but not used in German. Given the long history of relocation and intermarriage within the Habsburg Empire, it was (and continues to be) common for German-identified individuals to bear Czech names. The Österreichischer Straßenbahner (Austrian streetcarman) was a left-leaning newspaper that poked fun at the right-wing pan-Germans whose very names betrayed their “impure” German ancestry. The author calls his opponents “Seicherl,” which, in the Viennese dialect, meant a weak, foolish, narrow-minded person. In 1930 the popular comic figure “Seicherl” was introduced in the Social Democratic daily Das kleine Blatt (The little paper). A pudgy man who sympathized with Hitler, he was always accompanied by his dog, Struppi, whose commentary on the actions of his master represented the voice of reason. We have recently taken a closer look at the report that the “Apoliticals” published in their newspaper about their general meeting.17 It shows that the “Apoliticals” still have not 16

Otto Glöckel (1874–1935) was a Social Democratic politician, initiator of the Viennese school reform, and president of the Vienna State School Council (Stadtschulrat für Wien). 17 The “Apolitical List” of the streetcar employees stood in opposition to the Social Democratic Free Trade Unions (Freie Gewerkschaften). Before they joined the pan-German German Trade

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learned how to run a meeting properly, that their cashier’s report contains little more than hope for the future, and that the Anschluss to the German Trade Union Confederation mainly took place because the Seicherls felt that they could not decide otherwise while remaining “true to their German roots.” However, we drew attention to the fact that the “German descent” of many of these Seicherls looks quite “špatně” [bad]—half of them have to write a “háček” over one or more letters, because these people have names such as Rybička, Čočka, Hlaváček, Ružička, Slaviček, Škipal, Mrkvička, Křiž, Lavička, Šefčik, Orliček, Křepelka, Kačuba etc. The Seicherl newspaper does not deny this fact, but it foolishly seeks to explain it in the following way:18 We do not want to get involved in any questions regarding the relationship between the Czech names of our members and the national attitude of our organization. It is well known that many “core-German” families have Czech names, which can be explained by the old Austrian practice of settling the Czech areas with ethnic Germans.19

It is true that Czech territories were interspersed with ethnic Germans. That is why, in regions that are entirely Czech, there are people who do not speak a word of German but have German names, such as: Wagner, Stein, Weber, Bauer, Grossmann, Rieger, Lederer, etc. But it is absurd for the Seicherl newspaper to want you to believe that the ethnic Germans interspersed in Czech territories gave up their German names but otherwise remained “German to the core.” The fact is: Before the war many Czechs (in the monarchy) migrated into German territories. It is a well-known fact that the influx of the Czechs to Vienna was particularly large, consisting of about forty thousand people a year. Czech apprentices came in droves, later settling in Vienna as assistants or master craftsmen; they married and fathered children, many of whom, like the Seicherls, declare that they are “German to the core”—despite the Czech names they have inherited from their fathers. The “argument” that the Seicherl newspaper used against us so injudiciously proves only the opposite of what the Seicherl newspaper wanted to prove: The ethnic Germans, with whom the Czech territories were “interspersed,” became the ancestors of those Czechs who now walk around with pure German names. And vice versa, the “German to the core” Seicherls with Czech names are the descendants of the Czechs who immigrated from Časlau, Kouřim, Přibram, Tábor, Vysoké Mýto, Kůtná Hora,20 and other Czech towns—this is where these “German to the core” families that the Seicherl newspaper drivels on about come from. They are “German to the core” with a “háček” in their names. But even the bearers of “German to the core” names such as Mostböck or Hick— as much as they may put on Germanic airs—cannot guarantee that their veins do not carry Slavic, Hungarian, or other alien blood. Maybe some ancestor of the Mostböcks, Hicks, or other bearers of German names once took a liking to a buxom Bohemian, a fiery Pole, Hungarian, or Italian, married her, and “contaminated” his pure German blood with other strains. Who knows what our ancestors did and how they did it. Union Confederation in Austria (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund für Österreich) in 1931, the “Apoliticals” had been part of the Federation of Austria’s Independent Trade Unions (Bund unabhängiger Gewerkschaften Oesterreichs), which were close to the Styrian right-wing Heimwehr militias. 18 The reference is to this newspaper’s political opponent and competitor, Der Straßenbahner. 19 From the article “Den Halstüchlern ins Stammbuch,” Der Straßenbahner, May 1, 1931, 4–5. 20 A misspelling of Kutná Hora.

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9. Anonymous The Persecution of Gypsies in “Red” Vienna First published as “Zigeunerverfolgungen im ‘roten’ Wien,” Die Rote Fahne, February 7, 1932, 11. Translated by Kristin Kopp. Die Rote Fahne (The red flag) was a newspaper published by the Communist Party that provided a consistent critique from the Left of Social Democratic politics and the Red Vienna government. Here, the paper is denouncing the government’s treatment of the Roma and Sinti population, which had an ongoing presence in the city even as its individual members usually only temporarily resided there while journeying through the region. It must be stated at the outset that, as governor of Vienna, Mayor Seitz holds the highest-ranking authority over the police. On the basis of falsified reports, the police have been undertaking the persecution of gypsies for the past three days. All of the city’s poorest quarters are being raided by the police—they are looking for gypsies. Sources report that about sixty gypsy families, who had probably been expelled from other villages, have recently fled to Vienna. In order to whitewash their campaign of persecution and legitimize these unprecedented raids, the police are claiming that the gypsies are wealthy merchants from Romania and Hungary. Yesterday, sixteen gypsies who were spending the night in a cheap hotel in Leopoldstadt were ferreted out and arrested.21 The next day they were deported. The women and children—one marvels at the courtesy of the police—were allowed to follow their heads of family by train. The police go as far as to say that many gypsies live in Vienna without having the required identity papers. Anyone familiar with the practice of the Austrian authorities knows that no municipality in the whole of Austria grants gypsies the right of residence. Wherever gypsies show up, gendarmes appear and relocate them to other places. The eternally persecuted people thus only need arrive in Vienna to ultimately find themselves forced across the state border. In another raid, thirty-five Gypsies were arrested and also forced across the border. The hunting of people in Vienna is carried out with the brutality for which the police is known across the city. Rubber cudgels are also seeing their day. A true hunt for people in “red” Vienna.

21 Leopoldstadt

is a central district of Vienna.

Image from the film Opfer des Hasses (Victims of hate, 1923, dir. Hans Marschall), showing young men learning a trade at the apprentice workshops (Lehrwerkstätten) of Agudas Jisroel’s Jewish Relief Agency. (Courtesy of Filmarchiv Austria.)

CHAPTER TEN

JEWISH LIFE AND CULTURE Rob McFarland, Nicole G. Burgoyne, and Gabriel Trop

I

sent to the “party leadership of the German Social Democrats in Austria” on January 21, 1919, four Viennese Jewish socialist organizations pledged their support for the Social Democrats in the upcoming election for the Constituent National Assembly of German Austria.1 But the pledge came with a condition: The groups united in the Jewish Social Democratic Party “Poale Zion” in Austria (a group that advocated both Marxism and Zionism) were unified in their demand that the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) overcome the “opportunism of the day” and “renounce their position on the Jewish question.”2 The general position of the Social Democrats was that Jews should assimilate and thereby renounce or downplay their religious commitments. Were the Social Democrats to give up the demand for assimilation, the party could still embrace “social justice [. . .] the basis for the brotherly union of the proletariat of all nations.” While Jewish socialists aimed their ire at the Social Democrats, the party was also under intense fire from bourgeois and nationalist forces who derided the party as verjudet, contaminated by Jewish thought and dominated by Jewish leadership.3 Indeed, many of the driving personalities involved with the Austrian Social Democratic movement were from Jewish families, including its founder, Victor Adler, and later such party luminaries as Otto Bauer, Julius Tandler, Hugo Breitner, Robert Danneberg, Käthe Leichter, and Julius Deutsch. The complexity of Viennese Jewish identity can be seen in the offer of the Jewish socialists in their letter to the leaders of the supposedly verjudete SDAP: If the party would revise its approach to the Jewish question, the Jewish socialist associations vowed to join them in the “fight to the death against the dehumanizing and Volk-defiling force of Jewish capital.” These Jewish groups thus weaponized anti-Semitic tropes against other Jewish groups, showing the toxic ubiquity of anti-Semitism.4 n a published letter

1

“An den Parteivorstand der deutschen Sozialdemokratie in Österreich,” flyer, Austrian Labor History Society (VGA), Parteistellenarchiv, box 128, file 806. 2 A letter by the General Jewish Workers’ Association “Poale Zion” (Allgemeiner jüdischer Arbeiterverein “Poale Zion”), Jewish Socialist Workers’ Association “Poale Zion” (Jüdischer sozialistischer Arbeiterverein “Poale Zion”), Association of Jewish Social Democrats “Poale Zion” (Vereinigung jüdischer Sozialdemokraten “Poale Zion”), Academic Association of Jewish Socialists “Cheruth” (Akademischer Verein jüdischer Sozialisten “Cheruth”). 3 Friedrich Weiß, Argumente gegen den Sozialismus: Bürgerliche Einwände und sozialistische Antworten (Vienna: Verlag der Organisation der Sozialdemokratischen Partei, 1927), 8–10. 4 See chapter 31.

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The complexity of the political, social, and religious identity of Vienna’s Jewish citizens is inexorably tied to the unstable and increasingly dangerous conditions that surrounded them. While the Red Vienna era was tumultuous for all Viennese citizens, Vienna’s Jewish inhabitants experienced the years of the First Republic in a state of perpetual crisis. World War I unleashed a violent anti-Semitic tempest against the Jewish populations of wide swaths of Eastern Europe, including Jewish citizens of former crown lands such as Galicia and Bukovina. From well before the end of the war right up through the early years of Red Vienna, throngs of displaced, war-ravaged refugees sought safety in the city they had once seen as the imperial capital.5 In the city where Theodor Herzl had made his name, first as a dandy and a feuilletonist and later as the founder of Zionism, Vienna’s Jewish population was split along many different ideological lines. Its official body, the Jewish Community Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien), had long been dominated by the liberal Austrian-Israelite Union, with strong influence from the Orthodox Agudas Jisroel party and different Zionist groups including the Jewish National Party and the socialist Poale Zion. Each group had its own representation in Vienna’s media landscape, from the Yiddish Zionist Wiener Morgenpost (Vienna morning post) and Poale Zion’s Unsere Tribüne (Our tribune) to the Union’s Die Wahrheit (The truth) and the Jüdische Presse (Jewish press) of Agudas Jisroel, along with many other Jewish publications.6 These newspapers were displayed alongside nonreligious publications such as the Neue freie Presse (New free press) that nevertheless came to be associated with Vienna’s assimilated Jewish intelligentsia. The influx of war refugees disrupted the delicate détente between these Jewish groups in Vienna. The newly arrived Jews from the East, known as Ostjuden, did not only draw the ire of the non-Jewish Viennese populace but also the scorn of what came to be known as the Westjuden, the Jewish Viennese who had assimilated themselves during the heyday of liberalism.7 The refugees were most closely aligned with the Orthodox groups, for they had long secluded themselves from the Christian world around them. They carefully followed ancient dress codes, spoke Hebrew and Yiddish instead of the local vernacular, and avoided economic or cultural exchange with outsiders wherever possible. The newcomers came to be associated with Leopoldstadt, Vienna’s poor and crowded Second District, already stigmatized in anti-Semitic representations of Jewish Vienna.8 Although the new arrivals were aligned in some aspects with Orthodox Judaism, they were also excited about Zionism, even though most of them had little interest in the visions and experiments of socialism beyond what was happening in Palestine. To assist in the care and integration of the refugees, the different Jewish movements founded health, welfare, and social facilities that resembled some of the much larger institutions of Red Vienna. One such institution was the Orthodox Agudas Jisroel party’s Jewish Relief Agency (Jüdisches Hilfswerk). In 1923 they produced a full-length film titled Opfer des Hasses (Victims of hate), following the suffering of Jewish refugees and their arduous trek from their eastern homelands to the social institutions of Jewish Vienna. Accompanied by an orchestra and an opera singer performing Jewish songs from Eastern Europe, the film sought to recast the narrative of the Ostjude in Vienna and the duty of the Jewish community to assist the refugees and 5 See

chapter 9. Jonas Kreppel, “Das jüdische Leben: Österreich,” in Juden und Judentum von heute (Vienna: Amalthea-Verlag, 1925), 710–18. 7 Heinrich York-Steiner: “Differenzen zwischen Ostjuden und Westjuden,” in Die Kunst als Jude zu Leben: Minderheit verpflichtet (Leipzig: Kaufmann, 1928), 323–38. 8 See the Joseph Roth text in chapter 31. 6



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to reconnect with what Orthodox Viennese groups felt was the true, ancient Judaism that the refugees brought with them. An increasing number of Viennese Jewish writers, thinkers, and artists were influenced by this longing for an ancient, unspoiled Judaism. In the illustrated literary monthly Menorah, the art and architectural historian Max Eisler bemoaned the way that assimilated Viennese Jews were caught up in the tasteless architectural excesses of Historicism with its gaudy ornamentation. Eisler found hope in Oskar Strnad and other young Jewish modernists, whose clear, simple forms best fit the aesthetics of a perpetually displaced and wandering people. Many leaders of the Jewish Community Vienna wondered how the community could survive the anti-Semitic onslaught around them and imagined ways that a Jewish cultural revival might counteract the wave of Jewish suicides, the growing number of Jews converting to Christianity, and the overwhelming effect of general secular assimilation. In the Zionist newspaper Die Stimme (The voice), the Jewish community’s vice-president Josef Löwenherz called for a renewed effort to raise Jewish children in their cultural tradition. His article was immediately followed by the weekly list of Jews who had officially asked to have their names removed from the registers of the community. The sociologist and Zionist leader Leo Goldhammer published shocking statistics about the living conditions and suicide rates of Jews in Vienna. But there were also positive, affirming impulses that arose from the crisis-worn Jewish community. Breaking with the unspoken rules of assimilation, a growing number of Viennese Jews took part in the development of a general movement that Heinrich York-Steiner called “conscious Judaism” (das bewußte Judentum).9 He points to the decisions made up to 1924 to exclude Jews from the German and Austrian Alpine Club, Austria’s largest organization of naturalists, hikers, and mountain climbers.10 As a result of this and other indignities, Jewish thinkers, artists, sports enthusiasts, and social advocates founded institutions that celebrated and enlivened the Jewish experience in Vienna.11 Indeed, signs of a resurgent Jewish culture were visible in spite of an increasingly toxic anti-Semitic atmosphere. Anitta Müller-Cohen, head of a Jewish relief agency and agitator for Jewish women’s rights, was elected as a member of the Vienna Municipal Council at the beginning of the First Republic. In 1925 the Jewish Hakoah soccer team, founded in 1909, rose to the top of the Austrian sports world.12 In Vienna, a sophisticated Yiddishlanguage subculture emerged in 1919 but dissipated over the course of the 1920s. During this short period, poets such as Melech Ravitch wrote Yiddish-language poems, and cultural critics such as Moshe Silburg sought out discursive positions in which Jewish autonomy and social justice might mutually reinforce one another. In October of 1927, the Jewish theater Jüdische Künstlerspiele opened in the Nestroyhof entertainment complex in the Leopoldstadt District with a production of Sholem Asch’s drama Der Glaube (Faith). Over the next eleven years—right up to the “Anschluss” in 1938—the theater hosted works by Jewish playwrights and performers, as well as Yiddish theater troops from Vilna, Moscow, New York, and even the famed Habimah ensemble that had relocated to Tel Aviv. While some Zionists followed the Jewish-national call to resettle the land of the covenant, others supported the Zionist movement from Vienna or, like Felix Salten, visited Palestine and wrote home about the rejuvenating effect that Zion would have upon all Jewish people, wherever in the world they may live. In an interview with an American reporter, Arthur Schnitzler went so far as to predict a Jewish cultural renaissance in Vienna. 9 York-Steiner,

“Unser Weg,” in Die Kunst als Jude zu leben, 632. See chapter 19, especially the article by Franz Kleinhans. 11 See Hans Tietze, Die Juden Wiens (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2007 [1933]), 262–67. 12 See chapter 18, especially the article by Roch. 10

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The selections in this chapter offer a glimpse into Jewish life and culture from within, focusing on how Viennese Jews came to terms with and made interventions in the complex social, economic, and political realities of Red Vienna. These attempts to assert agency are tragic in the light of the oncoming horrors of Nazism, but they also point to another possibility: a creative, vibrant, irretrievably lost Jewish Vienna that could have been. Further reading Beller 1989 Börner, Jungfer, and Stürmann 2018 Freidenreich 1991 Milchram 2019a Silverman 2012 Soxberger 2013

1. Eugen Höflich Bolshevism, Judaism, and the Future First published as “Bolschewismus, Judentum und Zukunft,” Esra: Monatsschrift des jüdischen Akademikers 1, no. 2 (1919): 41–47. Translated by Nicole G. Burgoyne. A native of Vienna, Eugen Höflich (1891–1965) became known for pan-Semitism during World War I. He supported himself as the author of serialized novels until 1927, when he was allowed to emigrate to Palestine. Höflich took the name Moshe Ya’akov Ben-Gavriel but continued to write exclusively in German. He was the editor in chief of the short-lived journal Esra, a Zionist publication that folded in January 1920, after only eight issues.13 Höflich’s scathing critique of socialists as “adding machines turned into flesh which have precisely calculated the arrival of the era of happiness” expresses deep skepticism of humanity’s inclination to make sacrifices for the broader community. According to Höflich, Judaism celebrates individualism while also finding its place in a community that includes Asia. Höflich’s 1923 Pforte des Ostens (Gateway of the East), which he called his most important book, describes pan-Semitism as a prelude to pan-Asian aspirations. However those who adhere to Bolshevism might be constituted, their Jewish ancestry is not the direct cause of their politically social activities. The direct cause is much more the European masses, whose beastliness toward the weak and weakened has always been an expression of their existence, to whom Judaism was something that had to be suppressed. Nothing can be suppressed, however, without this suppression provoking a strategy of counter-pressure. If even Jews who have lost their ethnic heritage [Volkstum] respond to this suppression with Bolshevist tendencies, Bolshevism cannot be described as a Jewish affair. Bolshevism is not a Jewish affair because the healthy elements of the Jewish people [Volk] are drawn to Zionism, not Bolshevism. Zionism, which is still at its beginnings, is but an elemental cry for freedom of the oppressed (and it can only remain a pure idea as long as it remains a cry); it is an enslaved people’s (such as the Jews’) immanent impulse to revolutionize their surroundings. Both the healthy and the sick Jew are revolutionary; one, however, is 13 All

eight issues of Esra are available online at www.compactmemory.de.



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revolutionary because he stuck with the [Jewish] people in order to save them and mankind, the other because he abandoned his people with the tragically mistaken idea that the notion of an ethnic people is outdated, and that mankind consists of a more or less homogenous mass that can be fused to form a block using certain theories. It seems to me that the ultimate unviability of Bolshevism is grounded in this false view, specifically the established program put forward by Bucharin, that only knows individuality in both individuals and the people as something to be overcome. Therein lies the error of the theoretician who lacks fantasy, who, having reshaped mankind at his desk, suddenly grabs hold of actual power with which he attempts to turn theories into practice. A calculating machine turned into flesh that has precisely calculated the arrival of the era of happiness, has built a system that, even though it was logically developed, ignores the need that emerges from the human imagination, namely the need for constant external changes and the individual’s unbreakable will to assert its individuality. However, in the end the Jew, more than anyone else, is a romantic and an individualist. He will ultimately reject Bolshevism, his materialism (if it exists at all, it is a product of the diaspora) is never so great that he could reconcile it with a world that consists of precisely conscribed production and consumption machines. One day he would ask himself: what good is economic socialism when man’s convictions are not socialist? [. . .] He will recognize that new classes will grow out of the depths, and that they will have similar characteristics to the economic dictatorships of the earlier noble classes; that a European revolution is only ever a one-day revolution in its consequences, even when a month-long trail of blood preceded it. Still, such European revolutions are only the bloody grotesques of a real revolution, likely a stage in the tragedy of European humanity, because at their basis is not the revolutionizing of hearts, but rather the revolt of stomachs. Their goal is not humanity but rather comfort. [. . .] Just as much separates us from Bolshevism as separates us from that kind of Judaism that considers itself European and measures itself by European standards. The Jew who recognizes the discrepancy between Bolshevism and Judaism will also recognize discord between Judaism and capitalism, Europeanism and mercantilism, and he will seek the purest forms of life in the way of his people. He has two possibilities. Either he will mystically acknowledge the godly center and the possibility of unification with God in order to find salvation for mankind, surpassing religion and dogma to reach the clearest heights of religiosity and so affect the most distant final future of his people who are concerned for the future of mankind. Or perhaps he will seek the forms for our day, which could offer the opportunity for Judaism to bring people together. Accepting the reality around him, he will attempt to rescue whatever humanity is left to be rescued within mankind these days. One should mention here the incredibly fruitful ethical values of Judaism, if one wished to demonstrate the long path that lies ahead. It is certain that at the end of this path we will find the form of socialism that does not know the term “classes.” Physical needs will not lead mankind to this end, but rather a will to realize mankind’s socialist conviction, which arises from socialistically inclined ethnic peoples [Völker]. On this path, however, there is no Bolshevism, no social democracy, no economic or political party and no violence. Rather this path leads to Asia, to the Asia which creates religions and communities, where Europe can at most build states and class impulses. Our path leads to the Asia that is socialist from its ideological beginnings right up through its eventual dictatorship, a dictatorship that will consist of love for all mankind.

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2. Moshe Silburg What I Have to Say to You First published as “Vos ikh hob aykh tsu zogen,“ Kritik 6 (1920): 8–14. Published in German in Thomas Soxberger, Nackte Lieder. Jiddische Literatur aus Wien 1915–1938 (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2008), 118–24. Translated by Gabriel Trop with assistance from Jenna Ingalls. Moshe Silburg was an important figure in postwar Vienna’s left-wing, Yiddish-language literary and intellectual circle. Born in Russia (and thus an Ostjude, an Eastern European Jew), which he was forced to leave because of alleged revolutionary activities, Silburg arrived in Vienna in 1918 where he was a Hebrew teacher and one of the editors of the publishing house Der kval (The source). In 1920 he founded the short-lived Yiddish-language journal Kritik in which the essay “What I Have to Say to You” was first published over the course of five installments, the last of which is excerpted below. Kritik was a remarkable journal inasmuch as it focused on Yiddish literary criticism in addition to economic, political, and cultural commentary. As a Jewish socialist, Silburg was invested in the worker’s movement as well as in a particular Jewish identity. Over the course of his argument for Jewish self-determination in “What I Have to Say to You,” however, he positions himself against certain tendencies in the contemporary Jewish context: against assimilation and integration (thus against figures such as Otto Bauer), against elitist utopian modernists whom he calls “parody-intellectuals” (thus against Martin Buber and his journal, Der Jude [The Jew]), and against militaristic and extreme forms of Zionism. In this essay, Silburg sees progressive socioeconomic issues, or the production of an ideal “Jewish worker,” as deeply imbricated with an assertion of cultural particularity. Back to the ghetto! I can see already how the best minds from the Right and the Left immediately swarm in droves in order to attack me: Back?! To the ghetto?! I am pronouncing this dark medieval word intentionally, and I don’t mean the yellow badge that Jews had to wear on their backs: I mean “autonomy.” And I don’t mean that form of autonomy that designates a mere legal status and thus could be used either for good or for ill. [. . .] I mean that specific spiritual autonomy, that magic circle that every particular character generates—as individual or collective—in order to preserve its inner integrity. Precisely this magic circle, which will not open itself to any foreign influences—the ghetto—is the first condition of its existence as such. Here lies the deeper sense of individuality: every human being, every human group harbors in itself the desire for its own four walls, for its own atmosphere. Moreover, the more pronounced the character, the stronger and the more impulsive is the need and the quest to be “with oneself.” This “being with oneself” of the individual, the incessant grouping and “schools of thought” of the collective is the source of constant renewal and the vitalization of the human spirit. (This is absolutely not contradictory with the other higher ethical law of life, namely that everything comes from and belongs to humanity as a whole.) [. . .] For the first time in his history, the Jew is being put to the test in the most extreme and most precise sense and is free to choose: to be or not to be. Before him lies the greatest freedom—according to human concepts—to create from himself the most human specimen of the Jewish worker: to bring one’s own living language, one’s own school, one’s own particular spirit to the highest human and specifically Jewish development. Here is the



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gateway to life, and here can be built the high beacon that will show the way forward for all people, in all countries. But at the same time, we are faced with the emptiness of the choice “not to be”: assimilation. Oh yes, he still exists, the well-known parody-intellectual of the Left, the leader of the workers, the enlightener of the proletariat. He, friend of the people, finds the Yiddish language good enough to educate the worker, but only to bring him to the point where he can understand how base and without culture his own language is! [. . .] Back to the ghetto! I know that this word is nothing more than a deep, loud sigh in the depth of the night of someone who would thereby assure himself of his own existence in the world of shadows. But my words are not directed at the cynic, the skeptic, the parodist. They are directed at my comrades, those who, like me, bear the “sorrow of thousands of generations,” those who are the only heirs of the old Jewish intelligentsia. We who are disillusioned and also farsighted, we who understand that the healthy kernel for the further renaissance of the Jewish people is to be found only in this disillusionment—our time is now or never! But before that, we must come to a severe reckoning with ourselves. Who is aware of the fact that in the homes of those who are our greatest minds—those who dedicate their lives to the Yiddish language (I am not at all speaking of those that speak Hebrew), from Mendele to Sholem Asch14—oh, the irony of life!—that in these homes, all sorts of languages are being spoken, but not Yiddish; who is aware that children are being raised in every mindset, but not in the Jewish mindset! This self-debasement must be put to an end! A magic circle, a closed circle from Russia to America, must be spun. A singular effort must emerge among our intellectuals, in the writer, the thinker, the activist: stringent consistency. Everything and everyone is, if not for us, not necessarily against us—but outside of us! The Jew who speaks in another language, who educates his children in another language, is a human being just like any other person. It is, however, as if he belongs to a different people, one that stands outside our circle. A high wall between us and the parody-intellectuals must be built, our surroundings must be purged of him, our life must be purified! Those of us who do not believe in their people, those who are discouraged—they should declare it openly and with a loud voice. We have had enough of torn souls, enough of the parody of a life! The great disillusionment has come—we stand at the end.

3. Melech Ravitch Preface (from Naked Songs) First published as “Hakdome,” in Nakete Lider (Vienna: Kval-ferlag, 1921). Published in German in Thomas Soxberger, Nackte Lieder. Jiddische Literatur aus Wien 1915–1938 (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2008), 134–36. Translated by Gabriel Trop. Melech Ravitch is the pseudonym of Zechariah Choneh Bergner, one of the most important literary figures writing in Yiddish in Vienna during the short period after the war which saw 14

Mendele, or Mendele Mocher Sforim (1836–1917), was one of the most important authors to begin writing in Yiddish and already in the nineteenth century was considered to be the grandfather of Yiddish literature; Sholem Asch (1880–1957) was also a renowned and highly regarded author who wrote in Yiddish.

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an intensification of Yiddish-language print culture. Ravitch was born in 1893 in Galicia (and thus an Eastern European Jew). He moved to Vienna in 1913 where he lived until he moved to Warsaw in 1921. In the wake of the Czernowitz Language Conference of 1908, which sought to legitimize Yiddish as a culturally significant language—an attempt which failed to enter the mainstream—Ravitch decided to write in Yiddish. Although his earlier poems are written in a neoromantic vein, Ravitch turned toward a modernist, expressionistic style, albeit inflected by the contemporary urban, working-class political culture to which many Yiddish-language authors belonged. The influence of expressionism can be seen in his collection Naked Songs—one of the most representative documents of Yiddish poetic modernism of its time—in the emphasis on the New Human as well as in the elemental vitalism and aestheticism that runs throughout the work. The poems in this collection, along with the programmatic preface reproduced here, were written after he contracted tuberculosis, and they reveal an individual aware of his mortality (although he would go on to live until 1976). He adopts a critical attitude to Jewish religious culture in these poems: Ravitch published a poetry collection in 1918 entitled Spinoza, and indeed, the Jewish heretic Spinoza, who believed that nature and God were one—and who was thus excommunicated from his own Jewish congregation and perennially accused of atheism for denying a transcendent God— serves as the source of poetic inspiration in this instance as well. I am not more than you, not less than you; not more and not less clever than you! I belong, like you, to endless expansion, to infinite thought and to infinite death. Here: see the arid consciousness that within these four walls governs what little I possess in the world, and know that I nevertheless know the value of my song. You won’t surprise me; I also know its worthlessness and its end better than you. In the end, the earth equalizes the difference between body and body, and with time, all of our minds will be equalized as well. ~ Whatever I poetically created in my youth, I did it “on the threshold” of my poetic path.15 Today, this is in every respect alien to me. In “The Light of the Morning Star” (which only included seventeen poems printed together), I attained a certain proficiency of poetic form. Then came the war, the time of absolute helplessness for us, the average intellectuals of Europe. Our “great minds,” the prophets, they fell silent or fled to wherever Swiss milk flows—and we, without leadership, rushed in our confusion headlong into sheer Christianity. You will still find a remnant of this in my—nevertheless soulful— “Ruingrass,” which grew from my experience of the world in which I now dwell. With a clear, conscious, radical, and confident throw of the dice, I later convinced myself once and for all that I had found my footing in Spinoza’s humanly perfect, lucid world. The true origin of my activity is in thought and nowhere else. It is my factual, cognitively secure, and nonfanatical road to optimism and happiness: the road that all relentless and consistent logicians must travel. The “Prehistoric Landscapes and Ballads” (not yet published) are more of an artificial expression of my—perhaps already fully realized—mastery of form, my proficiency with 15 Ravitch

here alludes to the title of his first collection of poems, “On the Threshold” (1912).



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poetic form. The wildest chord of my naked songs. In these naked songs I am completely myself: not my deed, only my being; not my work, only my core. My fever and my rest, my optimism and my pessimism, my relation to the world and to individuals. My wornout city soul and the village linens of the healthy desire that envelops it. My conscience and that which others designate in me as: heart. My sadism, my misfortune, my belief in the revolution (even against Spinoza) and screaming out of me from deep pain, my elemental contempt for every form of religiousness. My desire is my happiness: my happiness is your happiness. Today our faulty understanding draws forth from the fount of creativity with a sieve what it ought to scoop out with a certain hand and a metal cup, exhausting it until it reaches the ground, down to the ground. Here in these songs I am naked, intensely naked, scalped. Under the tutelage of Spinoza, I have come to an end with God; and under the tutelage of Marx, I have come to an end with the evil ruler: man. I have unraveled the tangled knots of happiness, physical and mental. Both of them. And am already— —in everything: The raw material for the human being to come. The primordial chaos of the world to come, a world overflowing with happiness, potency, wisdom, and a conscious oneness with nature. And again my four walls. My song is at an end. The “Naked Songs,” the last book of my songs. Weighing in the balance and strangling there must be! I will indeed no longer belong to the youthful, pulsating writers of songs. And I will not self-consciously lie down in the warmed feather bed of my own poetic demise! I still want to complete my former lyrical trajectory, to add something to it, to rectify it, to change it.—May it be complete, lucid. What do the impotent, unsympathetic one-hit-wonder clowns matter to me! I have become what I am through my will, and with my will I will come to an end. I want to dedicate more than my body and more than my spirit to our literature, a literature to which my fate and my native tongue have led me. And our literature needs human beings and works of art—not songs and poets. Other forms are raging in me and carrying me along. Infinite thought, stand by me!

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4. Anitta Müller-Cohen The Return of the Jewish Woman to Judaism First published as “The Return of the Jewish Woman to Judaism,“ Menorah: illustrierte Monatsschrift für die jüdische Familie, no. 1 (1923): 14. Edited by Rob McFarland. Anitta Müller-Cohen (1890–1962) was a part of Vienna’s assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie. Her interest in the women’s movement and in social justice led her to found the Zionistoriented Social Aid Community Anitta Müller (Soziale Hilfsgemeinschaft Anitta Müller), which organized relief efforts for refugees, women, and children in the chaotic aftermath of World War I. She became an internationally known advocate for the victims of war and famine. An outspoken Zionist, Müller-Cohen saw the potential for a great religious and cultural renewal among Austria’s Jews. In this early piece, written—in somewhat fractured English—for the first edition of the Viennese Jewish family journal Menorah, Müller-Cohen recognizes the consequences of the practices of assimilation, even when it was necessary in order to perform basic humanitarian acts. If Judaism is to recover its voice and its purpose, she explains, it will only happen because Jewish women will bring about a cultural and moral renaissance within their religious community. This excerpt has been edited for comprehensibility and clarity. We know that in times of terrible persecutions, the Jewish woman has been a true companion and comforter to her husband in all kinds of distress. She cherished in her heart a love for her faith and for her people; it was she who, for centuries, fostered the traditions of Judaism. The Jewish woman guarded the religious and national treasures in the quiet life of the Ghetto. She was the center of healthy family life, and the national feeling that arose during that time is chiefly because of her. When the walls of the Ghetto were torn down, there began a new period in the development of the Jewish woman. Suddenly the world and freedom were attainable to her. She acquainted herself with cultural life and with her own mind, which had until then been restricted to her little world. Her mind was now free to take in all of the knowledge that was available to her. Soon, the Jewish woman occupied a leading position among those who contended for emancipation and for participation in all kinds of modern cultural work. [. . .] The development of women’s emancipation, her organizing activity in relief work and social care represents the larger intellectual development of Jewish women and shows the way that the representatives of Judaism have taken a prominent part in the cultural and economic development of all countries. But it is a sad and humiliating fact that the Jewish woman’s new cultural acquisitions and tasks have diminished her active interest in Judaism. Judaism does not fill up her being anymore, it has been reduced to a minor affair. Always and everywhere, she tried to join women from other confessions who were working for the same aims. She wished to equal them, she tried to please them and thus she lost her individuality and her pride and Jewish consciousness, without attaining what she longed for. The Jewish woman can only be a sister to another Jewish woman. She can only help and save her own people as a mother. Only Judaism will reward her with love and gratitude for her devoted work. Like the Jewish man, the Jewish woman lost her steadiness when she lost her strong Judaism and was designated as an intruder.



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And then came the great distress. War flooded the country like a torrent, and people slaughtered each other like madmen. This distress inspired a wish in the Jewish woman to help and to sacrifice. She took part in relief work with all of her heart and with all of her capacities. [. . .] The time of ardent relief work has passed, the time when we were all united in our compassion. Naively, we underestimated the gravity of the work of reconstruction, and we believed that the end of the war would see a continuation of the good human qualities of mankind. [. . .] The Jewish people, always leaders in whatever movements come along, also took their place as leaders during the crises of the post-war era. The successes and failures of these efforts were followed by hatred and anger against the Jews. The Jewish question came up again in discussion. It is part of the European crisis, the crisis of mankind. An immense wave of anti-Semitism has washed over Europe. [. . .] While the persecutions of former times worked to increase the religious feeling of the Jewish people, in our own times we have witnessed a decline in Judaism. Everybody goes his own way, and the feeling of responsibility with regard to Judaism has vanished. A portentous idleness has seized our hearts, and this explains why we silently endure our current persecutions. We must unite on the territory of Judaism. We must feel once more that we belong together, and our united Jewish strength must answer the attacks and the oppression. But we Jewish women are not to fight with the sword. Our task is educational work among our people. Whoever wishes to live in freedom must join us. This task makes us look forward to the upcoming meeting of the Council of Jewish Women.16 [. . .] In all countries of the world, there are women who forget their everyday cares . . . to discuss the interests of their people. The Congress will give Jewish women an opportunity to exchange their ideas. It will improve their minds. Its aim is to promote the welfare of our whole people. [. . .] It is a woman’s task to oppose increasing materialism with a high idealism, and to erect a wall of moral gravity to defend us against increasing selfishness. Women alone can foster ideals in the hearts of our youth, educating them to become people of strong will and courage, with a capacity for sacrifice. [. . .] This congress of Jewish women could be the introduction of a new chapter in the history of the Jewish woman, and we hope that future Jewish historians will give this chapter the heading: The Return of the Jewish Woman to Judaism.

16 The International Council of Jewish Women held their first world congress in Vienna from May 6 to 11, 1923. Anitta Müller-Cohen was one of the organizers. See “Weltkongreß jüdischer Frauen in Wien: Stimmen der Teilnehmerinnen aus verschiedenen Ländern,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, April 29, 1923, 2.

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5. J. L. Benvenisti Arthur Schnitzler Foretells Jewish Renaissance First published as “Arthur Schnitzler Foretells Jewish Renaissance. An Exclusive Interview With the Eminent Littérateur,” The American Hebrew, February 29, 1924, 460 and 474. Although more readily associated with fin-de-siècle coffee house culture than Red Vienna, Arthur Schnitzler’s (1862–1931) enduring masterpiece Fräulein Else (1924), with its possible allusions to the narrator’s Jewish heritage, was written in the turbulent inter-war years. Foreshadowing later research into his diaries and letters which yielded Schnitzler’s most famous statement of identity “Ich bin Jude, Österreicher, Deutscher” (I am a Jew, an Austrian, a German), this rarely cited interview explicates this view. It also offers a rejection of the contemporary Zionist movement and comments on the nature of anti-Semitism and assimilation of Jewish minorities. Arthur Schnitzler, perhaps best known to English readers through his “Anatol” cycle, “The Road to the Open,” “Casanova’s Homecoming,” and “Dr. Graesler,” stands in the forefront, not only of Jewish creative artists, but of the creative artists of the world as well. His faith, therefore, in the coming of a great Jewish artistic renaissance is a faith which must give pride and hope to every member of the Jewish Community. Arthur Schnitzler here sets forth his views on Zionism, anti-Semitism and kindred subjects. [. . .] I found Schnitzler in his little house in the suburbs of Vienna, in itself no mean achievement (finding him, I mean), for Schnitzler is one of the most sought-after people in Europe and has more or less to barricade himself against intruders. Schnitzler had broken off some dictation to come down to me, and had to rub his eyes a little, so to speak, before he could launch out on the new topic. Also he seemed at first disinclined to grant the interview. “I never give interviews,” he said. “All I have to say on the Jewish question is in my book, ‘Der Weg In’s [sic] Freie’” (The Road to the Open). “Herr Doctor,” I said, “I have not read ‘Der Weg In’s [sic] Freie’ once but three times, and it is to discuss that book I have come to you.” Whereupon an extraordinarily sweet smile illuminated Schnitzler’s face. “You are very flattering,” he said, and motioned me to a seat. And quite suddenly we were chatting at ninety miles an hour. [. . .] That Schnitzler should have had plenty to say on the Jewish question was only to be expected. He has written about it enough. “Professor Bernhardi” touches it. The immortal ineffable “Leutnant Gustl” is full of it. But, above all, ‘Der Weg in’s [sic] Freie’ is remarkable for its brilliant, I might almost say its brutal, treatment of this subject. In Heinrich Behrmann the Jewish littérateur Schnitzler has drawn with such masterly and dispassionate accuracy a certain type of central European Jew that I have always maintained no study of the Jewish question could be considered complete without a perusal of this work. [. . .] “The solution of the Jewish Problem,” said Schnitzler, “is one which each individual must find for himself. There is no general solution. Zionism does not seem to me to be a



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solution at all. It seems to me too much actuated by sudden impulses, by resentment, by a mere desire to escape from one’s environment and scarcely ever to spring from a wellreasoned decision. This does not prevent me from admiring Zionism, I admire people who can reach out so high and dream so splendidly, but they will never convince me. I need hardly point out that the Zionist plays actively into the hands of the antiSemite. He confesses to a weakness in our position which, to my mind, does not exist. My parents, for instance, come from Hungary, but my desire takes me back neither to Hungary nor Palestine. I am rooted here in Vienna, my home and the home of my youth. I have grown up identifying myself with its highly individual culture. I am part of it, and it is part of me. Why should I leave this country because a few ignorant and ill-bred fools of anti-Semites tell me I do not belong here? Do I believe that there is a basic individual Jewish character apart from certain traits which environment has forced upon it? That is a difficult question and yet I should, if anything, be inclined to a negative answer. I do not believe that the Jew is essentially spiritually different or that there is a difference of spiritual rhythm between him and the Gentile. The attitude of the world towards him has produced certain psychological modifications. Take away this attitude, and those modifications will vanish. I believe that if a child of Jewish parentage, even of the humblest sort, were to be taken to another country, kept in ignorance of its origin (though I am far from recommending such a course as a ‘solution’ of the Jewish question), and if that origin were also kept from its associates, this child would grow up, absolutely unconscious of a difference between itself and its playmates, except perhaps that it might develop and become aware of a keener and quicker brain. Why anti-Semitism has gained so much in strength recently? I think it has to do with the general state the world is in at present. Remember that a wave of hate has swept over the peoples of the earth, and that hate is a very real deep-rooted instinct which must have its vent once it is aroused. Some object must be found for it, and it is therefore not unnatural that it concentrates on a section of the community that enjoys a certain traditional privilege of persecution, a section of the community, moreover, which for some reason or other is weakened by an excessive objectivity and by a certain inclination to selfanalysis, and is therefore perhaps a readier victim. Do I think that the Jews are a creative people? I most unhesitatingly answer that I do. Look at the names that we can show within a short space of time. More than that, I believe we are on the verge of a great Jewish renaissance. What is the nature of the artistic message Judaism has to convey to the world I am unable to say. But there is a promise of springtime in the air. Time alone will show the nature of the blossom.”

6. Felix Salten New Humans on Ancient Ground: A Trip to Palestine Published as Neue Menschen auf alter Erde: Eine Palästinafahrt (Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1925), 39–46. Translated by Rob McFarland. In spite of his popularity as a feuilletonist and as an author, Felix Salten (1896–1945) maintained a much closer tie to institutions of Vienna’s Jewish community than other successful assimilated Jewish figures that shared his prominence. Salten served, for example, as the president of Haruach, the Association of Jewish Writers and Artists. In 1924, Salten traveled to

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Palestine and wrote about his experiences in a series of feuilletons that were published in the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung (Vienna general newspaper). In 1925 these collected essays were published by the Paul Zsolnay Verlag under the title Neue Menschen auf alter Erde: Eine Palästinafahrt (New humans on ancient ground: a trip to Palestine). In his essays, Salten carefully deconstructs the European narrative that gave rise to stereotypes of the Jewish money-grubber, the degenerate Jewish city dweller, and the shrewd Jewish merchant. Once reunited with their long-fallow land, the real narrative of the Jewish people becomes visible in the many ways that their long-interrupted symbiosis makes the land fertile and productive again. More importantly, the new settlements in Palestine have a rejuvenating effect upon the Jewish people, even those who remain in Europe. Now I begin to understand the meaning, the only meaning that the desolation of Palestine can have. And I am not so appalled, not so distraught about the miserable state of the terrain as I was in my first days here. This land has been trampled on, plundered, and abused, and it has languished since losing its people. But its people have also been trampled on, plundered and abused since they were forced off of their God-given native soil, and, as a people, they have also languished ever since. Where, then, could this persecuted, this outcast people have turned? What kind of purpose could they have in this world, what kind of stability and will to survive, if this land were not lying there waiting for them? Nothing was left for the Jewish people except complete disintegration, a gradual dissolving into the sea of other nations. This demise could have happened long ago, they could have dissolved completely, and Israel would have disappeared without a trace in the hurricane of nineteen centuries. It could have given in to the storms that battered it, a wreckage devoid of sails and rudder. But the land lay there and waited. The land never recovered since its native children had been torn away from it, uprooted just like the forest with all of its trees had been torn from the breast of the mountains. The land lay there, it suffered and waited. It did the very same thing that the Jews did: suffered and waited, for nineteen hundred long years. But nineteen hundred years is not too long a time for this land! And it is becoming evident that nineteen hundred years is not too long for this people. This people became city dwellers in exile, and . . . Wait a minute! Exile has clouded our vision with so many lies that we almost repeat them like eternal truths. So, the Jews have become city dwellers, they have surrendered themselves to peddling and to haggling for any bit of extra money, because they love money above all else? Certainly, people forced them into cities, people restricted them to certain areas and kept them in ghettos. People kept them from owning land and forbade them to live freely on their own piece of earth. And so they became city dwellers! They were denied access to working avocations, restricted from tradesmen’s and craftsman’s guilds, they had no choice but to become merchants. [. . .] In their ghettos, the Jews are craftsmen and workers, they are teamsters and smithies, tinkers and carpenters, just as they are jewelers and clockmakers. And whenever their exile brought them into contact with the earth, they became diligent farmers, animal breeders, and wine growers. Proof can be found in those estates in Hungary that were owned, leased, or overseen by Jews. And one Prince Urussow, a governor in the Ukraine in the eighties in an area where Jews were allowed to own land, recounts in his memoirs that he was endlessly amazed at the Jewish farms and vineyards which, in his own words, were comparable in every way to the Rhine area’s wine culture. As a member of the Russian ruling class, this prince and governor was certainly no friend of the Jews. But still, he maintained that it would perhaps be beneficial to let the Jews settle parts of the huge



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Russian hinterlands, thus setting an illuminating example for slothful Russian peasants. And the prince said all of this with an astonishment that was free of any goodwill. Nobody bats an eyelash when Jews are slandered in the worst way, yet everyone is speechless or at least stutteringly astounded when they notice something good about a Jew. The Jews know only very little about their own people, but the Gentiles have no sense for the Jewish character. Hence the Jews were ignored or, more often, reviled by the nations of the world. Better said: they are hated because of the ignorance of others around them. Palestine now offers a magnificent opportunity for the Jews to show what they are truly made of. It will be their Rhodes,17 the place where they finally prove to themselves and to the world what they are capable of doing. This land, which has suffered and waited so long, has no use for those who know the trickery and deceit of the ghetto, the slinking and creeping of the diaspora, the cow-trading world of assimilation. What is needed, however, is everyone who is ready and able to help with the work of their own hands so that the soil may again become fertile. A people that brings with it a willingness to make sacrifices, to give their lives so that these fields may yield harvests again, so that the whispering of the trees can again be heard on these mountain slopes. In this inhumanly tedious labor, this people will again raise a class of workers that has long been missing among them: a class that is rooted in the earth, a class that creates things with their bodies and with their muscles, simply, reliably, without hysterics. No one else has what it takes to save this land. [. . .] The Jews on the other hand have been bonded and sealed with Palestine since the dawn of time. It is their land, the earth of their roots. These strands could not be ripped apart after two millennia, the strands that hold people and land together. Therefore, Palestine will always remain the soil of the Jewish root, in all eternity. Amen.

7. Max Eisler On the New Spirit of Jewish Architecture First published as “Vom neuen Geist der jüdischen Baukunst,” Menorah: Jüdisches Familienblatt für Wissenschaft/Kunst und Literatur  4, no. 9 (1926): 519–527. Translated by Rob McFarland. In his role as an art historian, Max Eisler (1881–1937) was a proponent for contemporary artists and designers including the sculptor Anton Hanak, the architect Otto Prutscher, and the designer and theatrical architect Oskar Strnad. On the occasion of the centenary of the neoclassical Jewish Temple on Seitenstettengasse in Vienna, designed by Joseph Kornhäusel and dedicated in 1826, Eisler contemplates the status of Jewish art. Critiquing the gaudy orientalism of Vienna’s synagogues and the short-sighted artistic and architectural policies of Vienna’s Jewish community, Eisler turns to Strnad as an example of an artist well equipped to give form to objects and spaces that reflect the spirit of the Jewish people. He locates this 17

Salten is alluding to the Latin proverb “hic Rhodus, hic salta,” taken from Aesop’s Fables. In the fable, an athlete brags about the excellent long jump that he had once achieved on the island of Rhodes. A listener used this proverb—translated as “this is Rhodes, jump here”—to encourage the braggart to repeat his supposed feat.

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spirit in the simple and useful designs of Zionist settlements in Palestine. Eisler became a regular commentator on Jewish architecture in the pages of the Viennese Jewish newspaper Menorah, criticizing the new Jewish building at Vienna Central Cemetery, weighing in on the various designs for the synagogue in Hietzing, and consistently praising the clear, clean designs of Vienna’s Jewish modernists. Jewish function, Jewish content: these do not make a Jewish work of art. Function and content are merely given conditions that constrain an artist even before he lifts his hand to start working. Not every temple, not every Bible-inspired work is necessarily Jewish. That depends on the nature, the ability, and the genius of the creator. [. . .] No, the Jewishness of a work of art certainly does not lie in the content, and in terms of the applied arts, craftsmanship, and architecture, it does not lie in the function. That also applies to the prayer hall that is the subject of our discussion. In order to be counted as Jewish, it must have the form and the soul of a Jewish temple. Which it does, according to its devotees. But does it really? It was not long ago that we visited a modest, even squalid Viennese temple, accompanied by a well-respected architect. A simple hall with a wide-reaching barrel vault. Obviously constructed in great haste, using primitive materials. Certainly not beautiful, but strong and pure in character. At least that was the impression of our accompanying expert, who had never entered the building before. [. . .] The builder thus recognized the very central kernel of the problem and addressed it sincerely and thoroughly. The space may not have been built by a master craftsman— probably by a simple handworker—but it was built in the spirit of that religious community that it was meant to serve. The architect recognized the space as a real Jewish temple: a gathering room, built out of necessity. But this necessity is the most important thing, for the Jewish temple of today should gather believers and provide outward shelter for their silent fellowship. It should not draw attention to itself, but it should help them turn their reverence inward. We have become wanderers, far from our ancient sacred homeland, and our gathering places should not have been built as majestic palaces, which serve us poorly. The temporary shelter of tents and storehouses provide a much more fitting space for refugees and fugitives, for a people whose prayers are full of longing to return to a lost ideal. These temporary buildings were always ready to be disassembled. Where, if not in our temples, do we have the moral responsibility to tell the whole truth? And where, if not here, should we be moved by the solemnity of an unembellished, sober form that reflects so poignantly the stressful circumstances of our lives? Instead, we love exactly the opposite, namely the palaces that have been all the rage for the last fifty years or more. They are made up of all sorts of different mixed styles, spiced with all kinds of oriental affectations, most of them “Moorish.” All kinds of exotic influences are invited in, only the Jewish ones are left out. But still we call these buildings “Jewish.” Their form: a three-nave basilica, oriented eastward toward an open pulpit, with or without a dome overhead. All of this is foreign to us, forcing us to worship in one directional orientation. The reading of the Law was always a multidirectional experience. This was the central feature of the Jewish synagogue. But still we call these foreign buildings “Jewish.” On top of everything else, the walls—not to mention the windows—are wastefully covered for no apparent reason with red-blue-golden arabesques, true orgies of decorative stencil art. [. . .] What is even solemn about this art? What is Jewish?



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[. . .] The Jewish national movement may have opened all sorts of doors, but in the realm of art, we are stuck in the ghetto. [. . .] That should disturb us more than it does. What is doubly disturbing: consider how important art has become to us in every way, even in the practical and social sense. It has been moving this way for quite some time. Then consider as well the prominent positions achieved by so many of our Jewish artists, especially when it comes to architecture. It is hard to imagine a more jarring contrast. At a time when our responsible leaders from all different political parties (with uncharacteristic unity) yearn for representative follies— “Toss up a palace wherever you can!”—at a time when Jewish architecture is defined by decorative and symbolic nonsense—“stick a Star of David wherever you can!”—at this same point in time, the lives of our settlers in the Holy Land demand a different, much more sober kind of architecture: practical street networks and working quarters, housing for the city and the countryside, barns and stalls. Who can deny the dignity and the Jewishness of the prosaic life of our settlers, and the specific needs they have for our architects! They need builders who will craft something simple and useful, builders who resist falling back into old-fashioned sentimentality. Builders who do not erect pretty structures, but things that are well executed. [. . .] Even the grumblers among us have to agree with any halfway competent observer who has weighed in on the subject. To save face, the grumblers will put it this way: “We may have some reservations about this or that, but in spite of all of our hesitance, we must clearly admit that in the last few years the school of architects surrounding Oskar Strnad has attained world-wide acclaim and a world-class reputation.” One can claim with impunity that Vienna has not produced a more fundamentally important architectural movement since the days of Otto Wagner. [. . .] This movement has served as a driving force behind the vigorous building industry of our time. Progressive thinkers from all political persuasions have used this movement’s ideas to meet basic human needs as well as aesthetic quandaries. Only those of the Jewish persuasion have ignored it. Why? Perhaps because this kind of art is not Jewish? [.  .  .] Our judgment has yet to be proven. It shall be proven by the nature and essence of this new movement. [. . .] For any investigation of this movement will show that it is the Jewish Spirit which is building these new forms. Free from retrogressive tendencies, and thus vital. Free from bombastic proclamations, and thus pure.

8. Josef Löwenherz The Cultural Duties of the Viennese Jewish Community First published as “Die kulturellen Aufgaben der Wiener jüdischen Gemeinde,” Die Stimme: Jüdische Zeitung, January 12, 1928 (19. Tebeth 5688), 10. Translated by Nicole G. Burgoyne. From 1924 to 1937, Josef Löwenherz (1884–1960) was the vice-president of the Jewish Community Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien). He wrote the following article to be included in an edition of the Viennese Jewish newspaper Die Stimme (The voice) that

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was dedicated to the memory of Zwi Perez Chajes, Vienna’s charismatic and beloved vicechief rabbi who had passed away one month earlier. Evoking the name of Chajes, Löwenherz calls for a renewal of Jewish cultural and religious education as a way to revive and energize the Jewish community. He claims that Jewish parents in Vienna are not properly preparing young children for a life of active participation in Jewish religious and cultural practices. Löwenherz suggests that Vienna’s Jews should follow the passionate example of Chief Rabbi Chajes by opening their hearts and their pocketbooks in support of Hebrew schools, religious education, teacher training institutions, and charitable organizations that care for the Jewish unemployed workers, widows, orphans, and refugees in Vienna. Although the leaders of Red Vienna sought to replace religious schools with secular institutions, it is fascinating to compare Löwenherz’s vision of Jewish education with Red Vienna’s educational reforms (see chapter 16). It is also important to remember Löwenherz’s fervent dedication to the renewal of Judaism in Vienna, especially since he is most often remembered for his later attempts to protect Vienna’s Jews as the Nazi-chosen director of the Jewish Community Vienna after 1938. In parallel with the “Away from Rome! movement”, there is an “Away from Judaism movement” that is currently doing its level-headed best to systematically alienate Jewish youth from Judaism.18 Even though this anti-Jewish movement has not yet taken on outsized dimensions, its appearance deserves to be taken seriously because it is precisely the youth, our most precious resource, who succumb all too easily to the siren call of secular socialism. We as the Jewish Community [Israelitische Kultusgemeinde] must therefore consider it our most sacred duty to carefully draw each Jew into the circle of our community right from the tenderest of ages. Under the weight of this realization, the Zionist factions of the Jewish Community have tirelessly tried to ensure a solid Jewish upbringing for all children, even for the youngest children. The best example of this effort can be found in Jewish kindergartens all over Vienna, where hundreds of Jewish children are immersed in the proper Jewish spirit under the supervision of appropriately trained teachers. [. . .] As our children reach school age, we must give them our fullest attention. Unfortunately, the typical Jewish home leaves much to be desired in terms of Jewish upbringing. The usual Jewish religion classes, which are limited to two hours a week, cannot possibly make up for this shortcoming at home. We recognize that without the study of the Hebrew language, the practice of most other aspects of Jewish culture can only remain half-hearted. Therefore, the Zionist factions have always insisted on the obligatory introduction of Hebrew language classes. We must also continue our push to supplement religion classes with Bible schools, Talmud-Torah schools, and Hebrew language instruction. The Jewish Community currently covers the complete costs of four Bible schools, and we also give financial support to another twenty-six Hebrew language schools, Talmud and Torah schools, and Bible schools. The leaders of the Jewish Community wish that they could set up a model Bible and Hebrew-language school in each district that could absorb all of the smaller teaching institutions which now barely manage to eke out a miserable existence. To manage an effective education of the Jewish youth in the spirit of Judaism, we will need Jewish teachers who are completely devoted to their professions. By initiative of our dear, departed Chief Rabbi Prof. Dr. Chajes, the religious teachers’ seminar was founded 18

Given Austria’s deep-seated Catholic culture, the Away from Rome! movement (Los-von-RomBewegung) was part of the pan-German political program in the late nineteenth century to shift toward the Protestant faith.



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for training a new generation of highly qualified teachers. Our beloved late chief rabbi also organized courses at the theological teaching faculty for the training of Jewish high school teachers. [. . .] It is also important to mention the religious services for young people which are now held in all of Vienna’s community temples on Saturday afternoons. These services make it clear that only school children who are well versed in the Hebrew language can fully participate in our services. The Jewish Community has also risen to the occasion when it comes to our so-called “internal welfare” institutions. Last year, members of the community donated 65,000 shillings in subsidies to a total of nine institutions for orphaned and abandoned children. This emphasis on “internal welfare” also includes professional education institutions [. . .] for the education of Jewish craftsmen and the Elisabeth House for the professional education of Jewish girls. [. . .] The creation of the Jewish Youth Office is also the initiative of the Zionist factions. The office financially and morally supports the various Jewish youth organizations. The Jewish Community must continue to create centers for Jewish Youth in the Jewish districts of Vienna, places where young people can spend their free time and broaden their knowledge by making use of our free Jewish libraries. We also need to organize tours for young people through Jewish Vienna and Austria in order to make our youth familiar with the heroic past of our ancestors. Their physical well-being must also be the constant concern of the cultural community. Here it should be mentioned that because of the insistence of the Zionist factions, a part of the Augarten field has been turned over Jewish youth for recreation and sports. The budget committee for the year 1927 closed with a deficit of 250,000 shillings, and the budget for 1928 projects an even greater deficit. There is no doubt that we must focus on maintaining a financial balance. We must implement a number of costsaving measures, and taxes and fees must rise. However, under no circumstances should we maintain a financial balance at the expense of youth education. A material deficit can be overcome, but we will never overcome the moral deficit that we would create if we were to ignore the education of Jewish youth in the spirit of Judaism. A community with the status of the Jewish Community must never burden itself with such a deficit.

9. Leo Goldhammer Weary of Life: A Warning to the Jews First published as “Lebensüberdruss. Eine Mahnung an die Juden,” Menorah: Jüdisches Familienblatt für Wissenschaft/Kunst und Literatur 9, nos. 7–8 (July/August 1931): 377–80. Translated by Nicole G. Burgoyne. Leo Goldhammer (1884–1949) was a sociologist, lawyer, Zionist leader, and representative of various Jewish organizations. This essay appeared in a monthly journal associated with the Viennese Zionist movement, but at no point explicitly advocates emigration. The idea of revitalizing Jewish life in Europe still seemed possible and pressing. As the Jewish people makes up the most distinctive element of big cities today, it is clear that they would most strongly show all the negative consequences of this manner of living and indeed it does show. Since 1910 a constant increase in the number of suicides and attempted suicides may be observed. For example, in 1928 the number of Jewish

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suicides in Vienna had doubled compared to 1913, while the number [of suicides] among Catholics had only increased by one third. [. . .] No other aspect of Jewish life than the daily increasing number of those tired of life illustrates that things cannot go on this way and that we can no longer stand idly by and watch the decay of Judaism. The waning of the principle of joy in life, which comes with the Jewish religion; the cessation of the famous Jewish family life; life in the big city which contributes to people’s loneliness and uprootedness; the unfavorable living situations; the bitter, nerve-wracking fight for existence that is worsened by the abnormal organization of the professions; the exhausting war against the social, economic, political, and legalized hatred in their immediate surroundings have the effect that the Jew pays this bill that is presented to him with the most precious good that a person possesses, with his life. Still, the old saying holds: where there is a will, a way must be found. We who strive for the preservation of Judaism cannot allow that yet more Jewish people fail to take the available way out, a way we have failed to point out in the past with huge consequences. Today it is necessary to ignite and strengthen the desire for the new.

Part IV New Values

“God, Devil and Co.” Clerics from different religions stand outside of a company storefront selling “dogmas varying in quality and price, from the simplest to the finest.” Caricature on the cover of the satirical anticlerical Social Democratic newspaper Die Leuchtrakete 4, no. 11 (November 1926). (Courtesy of ANNO/Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

RELIGION AND SECULARISM Gabriel Trop and Rob McFarland

I

of one of the most important works of modern Austrian literature, Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 Traumnovelle (Dream Story), the protagonist is driven through the streets of Vienna toward a house in the suburbs near Gallitzinberg hill in order to participate in the ritualistic orgy of a secret society. The participants are at first dressed in the habits of monks and nuns. Later, the men exchange their monastic robes for the costumes of noblemen and the women remove all of their clothing. The scene overwhelms the protagonist with desire, although as an outsider, he never gains full access to this mysterious, dangerous world of eroticism. The journey from the center of the city to the periphery has often been likened to a journey from bourgeois order toward the transgressive libidinal energies associated with the unconscious. In this instance, unconscious desire and sexual transgression manifest themselves in the profanation of symbols of power (the clothing of monks, nuns, and noblemen) that were formerly held sacred in Austrian culture and political life—metonymically standing in for the Church and the nobility—while at the same time positing these very same symbols as fetish objects and thus as endowed with a peculiar imaginative and even erotic fascination. This episode can be regarded as a window onto the complex dynamics that pervade questions of religion and secularization in Red Vienna: while Viennese culture, at least according to the dominant Social Democratic vision, seems to shift toward increasing secularization, religion and the question of the sacred never disappear from the intellectual landscape. Indeed, religion and the sacred are constantly reappearing or being rethought in different forms, almost—as Schnitzler’s text suggests—as a return of the repressed. The topography of Schnitzler’s text may be productively mapped onto a political dynamic: the further one traveled outside of Vienna across the other Austrian regions, the further one moved from the seemingly secular political culture of the Social Democrats to the Catholic conservatism of the Christian Social Party. Historiographies of Austria have thus tended to see in the period after World War I a cultural clash between opposing ideals with their corresponding geographical locations on the map of Austria: the progressive, secularist Marxism of Vienna against the conservative, corporatist Catholicism of the Austrian rural regions. The almost mythological status of the Austrian culture wars had their respective figureheads in Otto Bauer, the Jewish Social Democratic thinker and politician, and Ignaz Seipel, a Catholic priest and head of the Christian Social Party who served as chancellor from 1922 to 1924 and again from 1926 to 1929. n one of the most iconic episodes

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Although historical reality rarely divides along such neat lines, it is nevertheless true that the culture of Social Democratic Vienna was heavily inflected by Marxist anticlericalism. Regular contributors to Social Democratic journals such as Karl Leuthner wrote anticlerical articles before and after the collapse of the monarchy, for example, “Against the Clericals”1 and his pamphlet “Religion and Social Democracy.”2 Otto Glöckel, the pedagogical reformer and first minister of education of the Austrian Republic, was responsible for the Glöckel Decree of 1919, which eliminated compulsory education in religion as well as daily prayer in public schools. While the explicit stance of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) in the Linz Program of 1926 was anticlerical (although not, significantly, against Christianity as a form of spirituality), it was also liberal in its leaning: religion ought to be a matter for individual choice, although the Social Democratic state would nevertheless be structured so as to push back against the disciplinary imposition of religious worldviews on its citizenry and against the political weaponization of religion. However, some of the most significant contributions to religious culture and thought of this time are not to be located along a political spectrum stretching from Marxist anticlericalism to corporatist Catholicism but may be seen as contributions rooted in other discursive fields, such as literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. Other contributions constitute willful disruptions of this schematic representation, for example, in the attempt of the “little” Otto Bauer (not to be confused with the Jewish Social Democratic leader Otto Bauer) to think the politics of socialism as rooted in the spirit of Christianity. Some remarks are necessary about the status of Judaism in this chapter as well as the place of other religious traditions in Vienna: first, Jewish life and thought has been deemed so important as to warrant its own separate chapter in this book; and second, the contributions gathered here focus on the most prevalent tensions that run throughout Vienna in this period and thus fail to take into account the potential richness of religious traditions that are not as discursively concentrated in this time and place (above all in the case of Islam and Protestantism). The selections nevertheless intend to show that Vienna after the collapse of the monarchy was not simply a secular Social Democratic city but a time and place for which the questions surrounding the sacred, the spiritual, the mystical, and the religious constituted urgent and open lines of inquiry that pushed the imagination and critical thinking in ever new directions. Further reading Aussermair 1979 Steger 1987 Wasserman 2014

1 Karl 2 Karl

Leuthner, Gegen die Klerikalen (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1907). Leuthner, Religion und Sozialdemokratie (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1923).

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1. Religion and Church (from Program of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of German Austria, Enacted at the Party Convention at Linz on November 3, 1926) Published as “Religion und Kirche,” in Programm der Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschösterreichs, beschlossen vom Parteitag zu Linz am 3. November 1926. Translated by Gabriel Trop. The Linz Program outlines the main platform of the SDAP, the party in power in Vienna from 1919 to 1934. Otto Bauer (1881–1938), the main architect of this section and its ideas, found it so significant that he published a commentary on it in 1927.3 Although this section is informed by a Marxist critique of religion (religion as the opiate of the masses), it nevertheless makes room for individual choice (religion as a private matter). It is a remarkable document with wide-ranging implications, among which may be counted the following: religion as a way of looking at the world (Weltanschauung) rather than an institution; the equality of all such views, thereby weakening the primacy of Catholicism whose dominance had been part of the historical legacy of the monarchy; the attempt to uncouple religion from state institutions, laws, and practices (schools, universities, weddings, divorce, and registration of births and deaths, for example); in addition to weakening the institutional power of religion, strengthening the respect for individual belief and reconfiguring the resultant power dynamics so as to serve the emancipatory political vision of Austro-Marxism (liberation of the working class). 7. Capitalism keeps large masses of the people in a condition of misery, ignorance, and servility. This condition also determines the religious opinions of these masses. Only in a social order that delivers the entire populace from misery and ignorance, that makes the achievements of science accessible to each and every person and elevates every person to the status of an equal member of a community free from class domination, can each individual be capable of bringing his or her worldview into harmony with the results of science and with the ethical dignity of a free people. The struggle to realize such a social order is the task of Social Democracy. To this purpose, Social Democracy must unite all people who have been exploited by capital and large-scale property owners, whatever their religious opinions might be, however their opinions might have been swayed regarding the condition of misery and ignorance in which capitalism holds them captive. Social Democracy therefore unites all people who want to participate in the class struggle of the working class and of those classes of the people assembled around the working class, without any differentiation according to their religious conviction. Contrary to clericalism, which turns religion into an issue of party in order to divide the working class and keep the broader proletarian masses of people loyal to the bourgeoisie, Social Democracy regards religion as a private matter of the individual. Social Democracy therefore does not oppose religion, the convictions and feelings of individuals, but it does oppose churches and religious societies that use their power over

3

Otto Bauer, Sozialdemokratie, Religion und Kirche: ein Beitrag zur Erläuterung des Linzer Programms (Vienna: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1927).

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believers in order to work against the liberation of the working class and to support the dominion of the bourgeoisie. Social Democracy opposes the currently operative state-church law. It demands a regulation of the relation between church and state, a regulation that secures the rights of every church and religious organization to teach and to act according to their beliefs as well as the rights of every individual to live according to the doctrine of his or her church or religious community, but does not permit the state to force citizens to contribute economically to the church, to participate in ecclesiastical religious education and ecclesiastical observance and to submit themselves to ecclesiastical commandments. Social Democracy therefore demands the separation of church and state according to the following principles: All worldviews (religions, philosophical and scientific denominations of all sorts) are equal before the law. Everyone has the right to choose freely his or her commitment to a worldview (church, religious organization, free religious or nonreligious community with the same worldview); parents decide for their children up to the age of fourteen. All communities united by a common worldview (churches, religious organizations, etc.) are bodies guaranteed by private right. They order and administer their affairs themselves, and they bestow their offices without any participation on the part of the state. They must themselves pay for the costs of their administration and religious practices, for the costs of the education that supports their worldview (religious education) and the development and maintenance of ministers and religious instruction teachers. Expenditures from public funds for these purposes are excluded. The entire pedagogical and educational system is worldly. However, it is accorded to every community united by a worldview to take care of the education of their worldview (religious education) and the religious practices of their schoolchildren outside the parameters of general education. The parents decide about the participation of their children up to the age of fourteen. Theological faculties are to be withdrawn from the Association of Universities. There will be a common right to marriage for all citizens regardless of denomination. Marriage will take place before the public authorities; however, everyone is at liberty to have a church wedding ceremony after the ceremony administered by the state. The impediments to marriage because of differences of religious faith or consecrations and vows as well as the indissolubility of catholic marriages do not have any validity for the state. Marriages after divorce that heretofore have been prohibited will be recognized in accordance with state law. Registries will be administered by the public authorities.

2. Jakob Reumann Dedication Speech for Vienna’s Crematorium: “Vienna’s Crematorium Opens, In Spite of Everything!” First published as “Das Wiener Krematorium eröffnet. Trotz alledem und alledem!,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, December 18, 1922, 1. Translated by Rob McFarland. Jakob Reumann (1853–1925), who grew up in working-class conditions and self-identified as proletarian, was a close companion of Victor Adler during the early years of the SDAP. One of the most important Social Democratic politicians, Reumann began his political career in 1900

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as a member of the Vienna Municipal Council; in 1917, he was elected city councillor, and in 1919, he became the first Social Democratic mayor of Vienna. One of the first completed projects of the new city government was the construction of an impressive, modern crematorium not far from Vienna Central Cemetery. The conservative press decried the practice of cremation, which had been forbidden by the Catholic Church. In 1922 Richard Schmitz, a conservative member of the federal government who later became the Austrofascist mayor of Vienna (1934–1938), declared the crematorium illegal and banned the city of Vienna from opening the completed building and using it for cremations. In a bold statement of sovereignty, Reumann moved ahead with the building’s dedication ceremony. Eventually, Schmitz’s ruling was overturned, and the Social Democrats celebrated the crematorium—known as the Feuerhalle Simmering— as a political victory and as a successful prestige project. Amidst the silent suspense of all participants, the mayor then dedicated the crematorium with the following speech: My most honored ladies and gentlemen! You have been invited to witness the opening of the crematorium, a work that has been welcomed but also denounced. I thank everyone who has accepted our invitation. In the decisions that led to the erection of this crematorium, the majority of the Vienna city administration shared the opinion that the cremation of the dead has exceedingly great moral merits, but above all else great economic and hygienic advantages. They decided that the time had come to follow other great cities in their implementation of this form of interment. We are all familiar with the battles that have heretofore hindered cremation in our country. As far as the ethical and aesthetic moments of this argument are concerned, any lingering doubts will be alleviated by a simple tour of this facility, which satisfies even the most modern demands. According to the latest findings of modern science, there can be no serious disagreement about the advantages of the incineration process over the process of decomposition in the earth. It is also a misconception that the process of incineration must necessarily offend the religious sensibilities of our Catholic citizens. Deceased Catholic citizens of Austria and Vienna have already been cremated in other countries, all without the slightest evidence that our Catholic population has had their religious feelings hurt. Just because a cremation facility has been built in Vienna, religious customs are not affected in the least, for confessional ceremonies will be able to continue unhindered. [. . .] Cremation is not obligatory. Free will may decide for or against it, and no one can possibly claim that free will is not welcome here. Over the course of yesterday evening I received, in my capacity as the state governor of Vienna, a directive from Federal Minister Schmitz that cremation is forbidden in Austria. The legal and material status of this directive will naturally have to be decided, but is it not strange that in our present time, when the constitution of the old monarchy has been laid to rest and all of the accompanying side effects are supposed to have died with it—especially the way that police were given such excessive power, to the point where our old order could rightfully be called a police state—in our present time, when thoughts of freedom are protected by a democratic-republican constitution, is it not strange that a federal minister can give a directive that cremation is forbidden just because it is not specifically allowed? Thus we have kept our plans today for a dedication ceremony. Despite the antagonism in some circles, many people will gladly welcome the moment when cremation is made possible in Austria. With this in mind I hereby turn over this crematorium to its

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expressed purpose, and I hope and expect that the will of the people will determine the legality of cremation. The populace has gained its own voice to speak, and it will not let its own freedom of expression be limited by arbitrary directives.

3. Cardinal Friedrich Gustav Piffl Shepherd’s Bulletin First published as “Hirtenbrief,” Wiener Diözesanblatt 61, no. 1/2 (1923): 1–6. Translated by Rob McFarland. After a career in the leadership of the Klosterneuburg monastery, Friedrich Gustav Piffl (1864–1932) was named archbishop of Vienna in 1913 by Emperor Franz Joseph, and Pope Pius X called Piffl to be a cardinal in 1914. As the representative of the Holy See in Vienna, Piffl embodied the will and the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Although the Church’s ban on cremation was often unpopular, even among many Austrian Catholics, Piffl was an outspoken critic of the city of Vienna’s efforts to build a crematorium. In his “Shepherd’s Bulletin,” Cardinal Piffl doubles down on the position of the Catholic Church regarding cremation. I am compelled to speak to you about one more question today. It is the question of cremation, made all the more compelling because of the public interest surrounding the completion of the crematorium in Vienna. When I announced the new regulations having to do with the Church’s refusal of funerary rites for those who leave a written testament requesting the cremation of their own remains, I was accused of making rules that were more strict than the church regulations in countries where cremation is already established as a practice. This accusation is unjust, for the content of these new regulations complies exactly with the ruling of the Holy See, which has proclaimed its cremation policy to all corners of the Catholic world. The Catholic Church has, from its very beginning, rejected the burning of the dead as a heathen practice, and it has held fast to the tradition of burial according to the words of Holy Scripture: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). Since that first Good Friday, when the body of Jesus was removed from the cross and lain in a new grave in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea, every Christian body, like Christ’s body, has, in normal circumstances, been laid to rest in the earth. For the Christian, death is a form of “sleep,” a resting from the toils of the earth; in an even more beautiful and more profound manner, the Holy Scripture calls death the “seed” that is entrusted to the furrows of the earth so that, after a short period of rest, it may once again rise up. It was for this reason that the ancient Christian name of the burial grounds was “resting place—cemetery,” and it is for this reason that we urge in our daily prayer in Mass to remember the departed, those “who have gone before us with the sign of faith and rest in the sleep of peace.” This is why the Church shies away from the violent destruction of the body of the Christian and grants it, full of love, the consolation of rest in the womb of the earth, so that he “blossom to more beautiful fortune” (Schiller). This practice of burial, sanctified by tradition and time, was first disturbed by the French Revolution, whose godless leaders burned the first human remains on the Champs

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du Mars in Paris in 1794. Thus, cremation has been, from its very beginning, a child of the revolution, and just as its first practitioners were outspoken enemies of the Church and religion, so also are those who agitate and spearhead the cause of cremation in our own day. Behind all of the sanitary, aesthetic and economic arguments made in defense of the burning of corpses, there lurks the modern heathen’s hidden hatred of the teachings of Christianity, a vain delusion that our heartfelt belief in the resurrection and the afterlife in the eternities could ever be shaken and destroyed by the violent and complete immolation of the Christian body. This is why the Catholic Church is against the burning of corpses and is of one mind in this respect with practicing Protestants and Jews. Regardless of the extent to which nonbelievers and freethinkers may do as they think best, we Catholics will continue to bury our dead just as the body of Christ was buried; we will also continue in the spirit of pious love to protect and adorn the graves in which those who were beloved by us and dear to us in life now slumber. For us, All Souls’ Day, now and in the future, will be the great day for the pious remembrance of our dead, a day on which the words of our Redeemer sound with sweet consolation to our ears: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die” (John 11:25–26).

4. Max Winter The Living Mummy: A Look at the Year 2025 First published as Die Lebende Mumie: Ein Blick in das Jahr 2025 (Berlin: E. Laubsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1929), 26–33; 97–107; 121–35. Translated by Rob McFarland. Max Winter (1870–1937) is best known for his investigative reporting, especially for his habit of disguising himself so that he could live on the rough with Vienna’s prison inmates and homeless population. After serving as a Social Democratic deputy in the Imperial Council, Winter was a member of the Provisional National Assembly and later became a vice-mayor of the city of Vienna, helping to lay the groundwork for Julius Tandler’s welfare system. In The Living Mummy, Winter imagines a utopian Vienna that has enjoyed one hundred years of Social Democratic rule. The novel’s protagonist, Richard Fröhlich, is a mummified astronaut from the days of Red Vienna who is brought back to life in 2025. His lovely nurse Alexandra and other prominent leaders—such as School Director Ensler, who is also featured in the following excerpts—give him a tour of the paradise that Vienna has become and explain the many ways that Austria has brought peace and prosperity to the whole world. An important step in this process involved overcoming the power of the Catholic Church, and then all religion. Old times and new times. [. . .] [School Director Ensler:] “[.  .  .] Even back in your day there were specific spaces where smoking would have been an affront to good manners. You couldn’t smoke in your so-called ‘houses of worship,’ in the buildings which are known today as ‘festival halls . . .’” [Richard Fröhlich:] “What, you don’t have any churches anymore?”

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“Sure, the buildings remain, but they no longer serve any more god-cults like they did back then. They serve to promote the cultivation of humanity. We put quite a bit of work into these festival halls. They were built, remodeled, and decorated by the very best artists, and they provide us with solemn, uplifting experiences. The shell has remained, but the content has changed: Service to humanity instead of service to the gods.” “A strange era . . .” “Not so strange as you might think. As people became more and more educated, worship services continued, and the great majority of priests were greatly relieved when they were given the opportunity to become servants of humanity. In their honor, we have carefully recorded everything about them in our history books. Their souls were torn between faith and knowledge, and their fear of change made them ignore the warning voices of their consciences. But ever since the state began to offer reeducation courses that transitioned people from their phony lives of feigned piety into new, meaningful lives as useful citizens, the economic curse was lifted off of them and they signed up in droves. Many of them became the guardians of the festival halls and organizers of the concerts and lectures that took place in them. Churches became places for exhibitions and reading rooms, and as the people and spaces evolved, the morals evolved as well.” “But how was it possible to convince the broad population to go along with all of this?” “. . . so that nobody smoked on the streets anymore, so that Chinese women turned away from the crippling practices of foot binding, and all women left their corsets behind, and we returned to the noble lines of the classical Greek body figure . . . All of this was made possible through a gradual process of education and enlightenment for the mind, and through the practice of beneficial exercises for the body. [. . .]” [. . .] A world without corporal punishment. [. . .] “[. . .] I believe it was still common in your time for parents to spank children when they thought that the children were being disobedient or naughty?” “Yes, sadly, it is true. And we Kinderfreunde [members of the Children’s Friends organization] waged a desperate battle against it, often supported by teachers and public school boards. But at every turn we met resistance from the leaders of the Church, who still had great influence over women and mothers . . . And are children still beaten today?” “No, not for a long time. And neither of us,” said Alexandra, “can remember the time when the last father was taken to court and prosecuted for abusing his children. Today, the public ethos would not stand for it. Through parent education, through the modeling of good and best practices, the beating of children has been eradicated for two generations in the United States of Europe. It simply does not happen.” “Simply does not happen . . . What glorious times these are! And back in my time, it was a daily occurrence. [. . .]” [. . .] “So spanking was not an isolated phenomenon back then? It really was part and parcel of daily parenting?” “Yes, it was commonplace in German-speaking countries. Nobody saw it as anything out of the ordinary. It was the Children’s Friends who first spoke out against raising

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children using corporal punishment, perpetuating violence. That was what led to their first intense conflict with the Church. The Children’s Friends, who were first organized in Austria, went head-to-head with the Catholic clergy. Austria was a Catholic country; Catholicism was the majority religion. The Catholic Church was the master over the souls in its realm. The clergy behaved in a way most of them—unfortunately—do. They were in the vanguard, battling for the rights of the rulers over the rights of the people. These cantankerous priests were the last holdout of capitalism. The Children’s Friends preached that people must be taught to think for themselves. In their arrogant roles as “shepherds” and “supreme shepherds,” the Catholic bishops ignored the fact that their flocks had grown in knowledge and power and sent out parental advice in their “Shepherd’s Bulletins” that directly contradicted all of the work of the Children’s Friends. “Do not spare the rod, for the rod and punishment bring wisdom” is how they phrased it in the first of these bulletins. These “Shepherd’s Bulletins” were read out loud over every pulpit on a given Sunday, and all Catholic priests in Austria spoke out on this day against the Children’s Friends and called upon the mothers in the congregation to take up the rod against their children.” “The priests misused the teachings of Christ, his teachings of charity?” Alexandra cried. “Do not get too worked up about it! The only reason the people let them get away with this contradiction was that they were not educated enough, and they had been taught to defer to the outsized influence of the Church. You cannot possibly imagine the lot of a woman in those days, how oppressed, how humiliated, how beaten down she was as she went through her sad existence, how insufficient was the education that she received, how limited the sphere of influence that she had in her life. A family apartment consisted of a sleeping chamber and a kitchen, in dark buildings lining narrow alleys, no air, light, or space. [. . .] Only once a week could a woman escape this oppressive, narrow world, and that was on Sunday when she went to church. The Catholic Church provided plenty of pageantry. [. . .] Imagine a woman leaving the darkness of her apartment and stepping into the subdued light of this space. Rays of sunshine dance among red, blue, and yellow shards of glass. Somewhere, inevitably, a ray of heavenly light would shine into the dark, cavernous interior of a church and illuminate the carved image of a marble saint or magically bathe a gold or silver statue in color. [. . .] The eyes of the poor woman were captured as soon as she looked up. This fed the old belief in miracles, in higher beings. She mistook human handiwork to be the work of God, when it was actually the work of gifted artists, or, in other words, technicians of belief. [. . .] There would be the lovely sound of children singing—the choir boys that they raise for themselves— and everything would combine to move the soul. It was as if a farmer had turned back the earth with his plow and then sown seeds into fertile earth. Oh, they knew what they were doing, those Catholic lords of my time! When a proletarian woman made it this far, and a priest would step into the beautifully carved pulpit and preach the word of God (as he maliciously claimed), it was not a divine message, but “spare the rod, spoil the child.” It was a message of revenge, calibrated by the strong to wield power over the weak. [. . .] The glass room and Viktor Adler Hall. [. . .] “Welcome, Gentlemen.” Ensler reached his hand toward the delicate hand of a woman.

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He introduced his guest: “This is Mr. Richard Fröhlich.” “And this is Frau Hilda Schniderschitz. . . . Today our famous guest will be learning about your literacy school [Lesearbeitschule]. Would you please tell us, dear colleague, what you were just doing on the roof of the school?” “Yesterday we were in Viktor Adler Hall, and today the children wanted to know how high the tower might be. I told them the height, but in order to make a real impression of what one hundred and thirty-sixty meters looks like, I led them up onto the roof. Then they could see for themselves how this Viennese landmark towers over all of the other buildings around it.” “Where is the Viktor Adler Tower?” asked Richard. “There, right in front of your nose.” Ensler pointed with his hand toward a slender tower that rose above the pointed roof of a church. “But that is the tower of St. Stephen’s Cathedral!” “It was, once. Ever since we transformed St. Stephen’s into Viktor Adler Hall— since this building no longer serves one religion, but it has become the common property of all people who profess a belief in Socialism, a pure faith in humanity—ever since then, this building has become the most dignified cultural institution in the whole city. Just like everywhere else, it went from cult to culture. Earlier, it served the cult practices of a religion, but today it serves the culture of all people. In order to celebrate this upgrade in purpose, we changed the name of the glorious building to honor the man who woke the Austrian proletariat from its sleep: Dr. Viktor Adler.” “Bravo, twenty-first century, bravo! “Do not sell short the achievements of your own century. That was accomplished in the seventies of the last century. Even in 1950, the majority of Catholic congregations were overseen by Social Democratic priests, and twenty years later—even in Vienna, that old Catholic center of Europe—the Catholic Church was ready to join up with the worldwide religion of socialism, and they were ready to turn all of the existing cult infrastructure into cultural infrastructure. Most of the things that had perpetuated the old superstitious teachings had disappeared by then anyway. The Social Democratic preachers had been embarrassed by the remaining tokens of the brainwashing of the populace and had removed them. These items found a home in the old treasuries of the churches, for many of them were priceless and they could not be destroyed. The rest of it was easy.”

5. Sigmund Freud Future of an Illusion First published as Die Zukunft einer Illusion (Leipzig, Vienna, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1927), translated in 1989 by James Strachey as The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1989), 45–48; 69–73. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is well known as the father of psychoanalysis. In Future of an Illusion, Freud turns implicitly against discourses—such as one sees in the works of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961)—that sought to link psychoanalysis and the occult. Instead, Freud inscribes psychoanalysis in the tradition of a critique of religion and superstition going back to the Enlightenment; he interprets religion as a cultural form akin to a childhood neurosis

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that eventually can and should be overcome on the path to a self-sustaining, rational way of life. [In] past times religious ideas, in spite of their incontrovertible lack of authentication, have exercised the strongest possible influence on mankind. This is a fresh psychological problem. We must ask where the inner force of those doctrines lies and to what it is that they owe their efficacy, independent as it is of recognition by reason. VI I think we have prepared the way sufficiently for an answer to both these questions. It will be found if we turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas. These, which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection—for protection through love—which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfilments shall take place. Answers to the riddles that tempt the curiosity of man, such as how the universe began or what the relation is between body and mind, are developed in conformity with the underlying assumptions of this system. It is an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father-complex—conflicts which it has never wholly overcome—are removed from it and brought to a solution which is universally accepted. [. . .] VIII [. . .] We now observe that the store of religious ideas includes not only wish-fulfilments but important historical recollections. This concurrent influence of past and present must give religion a truly incomparable wealth of power. But perhaps with the help of an analogy yet another discovery may begin to dawn on us. Though it is not a good plan to transplant ideas far from the soil in which they grew up, yet here is a conformity which we cannot avoid pointing out. We know that a human child cannot successfully complete its development to the civilized stage without passing through a phase of neurosis sometimes of greater and sometimes of less distinctness. This is because so many instinctual demands which will later be unserviceable cannot be suppressed by the rational operation of the child’s intellect but have to be tamed by acts of repression, behind which, as a rule, lies the motive of anxiety. Most of these infantile neuroses are overcome spontaneously in the course of growing up, and this is especially true of the obsessional neuroses of childhood. The remainder can be cleared up later still by psychoanalytic treatment. In just the same way, one might assume, humanity as a whole, in its development through the ages, fell into states analogous to the neuroses, and for the

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same reasons—namely because in the times of its ignorance and intellectual weakness the instinctual renunciations indispensable for man’s communal existence had only been achieved by it by means of purely affective forces. The precipitates of these processes resembling repression which took place in prehistoric times still remained attached to civilization for long periods. Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father. If this view is right, it is to be supposed that a turning-away from religion is bound to occur with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth, and that we find ourselves at this very juncture in the middle of that phase of development. Our behaviour should therefore be modelled on that of a sensible teacher who does not oppose an impending new development but seeks to ease its path and mitigate the violence of its irruption. Our analogy does not, to be sure, exhaust the essential nature of religion. If, on the one hand, religion brings with it obsessional restrictions, exactly as an individual obsessional neurosis does, on the other hand it comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. But these are only analogies, by the help of which we endeavour to understand a social phenomenon; the pathology of the individual does not supply us with a fully valid counterpart. It has been repeatedly pointed out (by myself and in particular by Theodor Reik4) in how great detail the analogy between religion and obsessional neurosis can be followed out, and how many of the peculiarities and vicissitudes in the formation of religion can be understood in that light. And it tallies well with this that devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one. Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect. We may foresee, but hardly regret, that such a process of remoulding will not stop at renouncing the solemn transfiguration of cultural precepts, but that a general revision of them will result in many of them being done away with. In this way our appointed task of reconciling men to civilization will to a great extent be achieved. We need not deplore the renunciation of historical truth when we put forward rational grounds for the precepts of civilization. The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. Here, too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies. But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say and feels that he has been deceived; and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression. We 4 Theodor Reik (1888–1969) was one of Freud’s first students and a practicing psychoanalyst in Vienna. Freud wrote the preface to Reik’s 1919 study of the psychology of religion through the lens of ritual, Probleme der Religionspsychologie, Bd. 1, Das Ritual (Leipzig, Vienna, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1919).

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have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.

6. Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus First published in English as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, edited and translated by C. K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Company; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), 183–89. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is one of his most important works. The Tractatus belongs to the oeuvre of the early Wittgenstein. In this text, Wittgenstein develops a philosophy of language that attempts to differentiate senseless propositions from propositions that have sense; only facts can express sense. He thus reproaches philosophy for wasting its time with senseless (or rather nonsensical) propositions. According to this philosophy of language, metaphysical questions (in philosophy and in religion) are without sense; the deepest problems are actually not problems at all. However, in its final gesture, the text itself turns to the supposedly “senseless” questions of aesthetics, ethics, and religion, suggesting that it might not be so easy to cast away the ladder of philosophical discourse once one has climbed upon it. 6.4 All propositions are of equal value. 6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it nonaccidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world. 6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher. 6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one.) 6.422 The first thought in setting up an ethical law of the form “thou shalt .  .  .” is: And what if I do not do it. But it is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense. This question as to the consequences of an action must therefore be irrelevant. At least these consequences will not be events. For there must be something right in that formulation of the question. There must be some sort of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but this must lie in the action itself. (And this is clear also that the reward must be something acceptable, and the punishment something unacceptable.) 6.423 Of the will as the bearer of the ethical we cannot speak. And the will as a phenomenon is only of interest to psychology.

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6.43 If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language. In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole. The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy. 6.431 As in death, too, the world does not change, but ceases. 6.4311 Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit. 6.4312 The temporal immortality of the soul of man, that is to say, its eternal survival also after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive for ever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. (It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved.) 6.432 How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world. 6.4321 The facts all belong only to the task and not to its performance. 6.44 Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is. 6.45 The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole. The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling. 6.5 For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered. 6.51 Scepticism is not irrefutable, but palpably senseless, if it would doubt where a question cannot be asked. For doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said. 6.52 We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course, there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. 6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?) 6.522 There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical. 6.53 The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e., the propositions of natural science, i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method. 6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. 7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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7. Franz Werfel Realism and Inwardness First published as Realismus und Innerlichkeit. Rede, gehalten am 6. Mai 1931 im Kulturbund, Wien (Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1932), 21–23; 34–36. Translated by Gabriel Trop. Franz Werfel (1890–1945) was a novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist. Born in Prague to Jewish parents, he was deeply influenced by the Catholic nurse who raised him. Even though he claimed to have believed in Christ, he never officially converted to Catholicism, and in his writings, he seeks to find a higher mystical religious doctrine that would mediate the truths of Judaism and Catholicism. Realism and Inwardness is based on a speech he held on May 6, 1931, at the Cultural League (Kulturbund) in Vienna. The league was founded in 1922 by Karl Anton Rohan. Even though it featured speakers as diverse as Paul Valéry, Max Brod, and Heinrich Mann, the league catered largely to a conservative audience. Indeed, its platform embraced a return to Catholicism, criticized rationalization, industrialization, and proletarianization, and at times even echoed fascist ideologies. In this essay, Werfel criticizes the predominance of a “realist attitude” (Realgesinnung). The term is a special philosophical concept developed by Werfel to designate all cultural tendencies and value systems that instrumentalize human agency in the pursuit of systemic optimization: he thus finds this attitude in the nihilistic materialism that pervades both American Fordism and Soviet Bolshevism. He attempts to find a solution to the malaise of materialism in the resources of a human being cultivating his or her fantasy life, inwardness, and a sense of transcendence. We must try to further our knowledge. Every ideal that seeks to shape the life of humankind, and consequently the realist attitude [Realgesinnung] as well, is eudaemonistic. It sets as its final goal the realization and generalization of happiness. How does the eudaemonism of the prevailing form of materialistic belief aspire to the happiness of the human being? It attempts to mitigate the material misery of the masses and thus to finally bring about a state free of suffering, one commensurate with human dignity. The most valuable political faction brought about by this materialistic form of belief—European social democracy—has in this respect (in spite of its tragic failure at the outbreak of war) won for itself immortal glory. Right here in Vienna, anyone with eyes to see must be fully blinded by political spite if he or she fails to recognize this fact with deep gratitude. I have in mind above all the exemplary childcare of the city. Even when we justly recognize that radical realism is, for the most part, the starved dream of a demeaned humanity, we ought not to let this woeful admission hold us back from exposing it as a murderous mistake. The absence of suffering is indeed a precondition for happiness, but it is far from being happiness itself. [. . .] What, then, would be happiness? I can only find one tenable formula: Happiness is richness of reality that has been reshaped and converted into inwardness. Why search for new formulas, however, since the formula has already been pronounced a long time ago? Its truth thunders through the ages: “The kingdom of heaven is in you!” The realist attitude digs for buried treasure in the wrong place. Its capitalist wings, by virtue of the sterile ideal of labor, accumulate surplus value—that is, potential enjoyment, not in order to enjoy but to be able to labor continually for the purpose of some new

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accumulation. The witty word chain about the legacies of the spendthrift is correct: “The father doesn’t indulge in anything, so that his son doesn’t indulge in anything, who doesn’t indulge in anything, so that his grandson doesn’t indulge in anything . . . etc.” On the other side there is the communist conception of happiness: perfect material harmony through the sacrifice of the spiritual individual. Both capitalism and communism forget that human inwardness might be suppressed for a few decades but not forever. Both forget that the kingdom of god, the possibility of redemption, lies only in us. Both forget that happiness is spirit. The realist attitude, or materialistic belief, is a false ideal; it is in the most human sense a heretical ideal and as such more dangerous than cancer, more contagious than spotted fever, and more distressing than paralysis. But false ideals cannot be broken through criticism alone. The correct ideals must take up the struggle against them. The vital question of our culture is whether the spiritual attitude, which still lives on in certain domains, is strong enough to counter the realist attitude. Creative inwardness, the mental-spiritual human being reveals itself in the three spheres of religion and ethics, science and speculation, and art and phantasy. How much these spheres have already been destroyed is difficult to judge. The dwindling of confessional religions seems in any case considerable. The proletariat has fully adopted the liberal atheism of its leadership. With only few exceptions, the great masses of workers cling to this tawdry denial of God. The average city person also has the same belief, at least in his attitude to life, even if he still partially maintains some form of devotional commitment. It is always the same story. The fashionable spirit of yesterday becomes the banality of the masses of today, sinking ever deeper like used goods until finally they become bartered at the most obscure flea market. [. . .] Restoration of values! Ladies and gentlemen, the history of the human race is no more the history of its diet, which is what modern superstition would have us believe, than Schiller’s life story is the biography of his metabolism. No: it is and will forever be the world history of the formations of values and ideals that transform all matter from within. [. . .] The transformation of values and ideals always takes place in a spastic and revolutionary manner. But the prehistory of this transformation proves every time that it is of a purely spiritual nature. The antinomian sectarianism of Judea had to culminate in Jesus and Paul in order for Christianity to emerge. The eighteenth-century encyclopedists Voltaire and Rousseau had to do their work in order for the bourgeois revolution to succeed. And perhaps Marx was less essential for the completion of the social revolution than the great nineteenth-century literary works of sympathy and misery, with Tolstoy and Zola leading the vanguard. However, should the spiritual human being—a being inwardly rich, capable of being disrupted, the creative and the artistic human being— finally have his turn and topple the realist attitude, then the preparation of this faraway revolution would demand even greater hardship and an even more tempestuous impetus. Above all we must have the courage to despise the current fashion, even if we ourselves become despised by this fashion and the so-called zeitgeist. Please do not underestimate the courage required to take this step! You would more easily persuade an elegant man in a tailcoat to jump into water than to pair a black tie or yellow shoes with his tailcoat. And a radical fashionista, a social agent, a prole-snob, or a materialistic fop would sooner shepherd sheep under linden trees than deny the truth of his own all-conquering economical worldview. It is, however, our task—beyond all vanity, even if we are in constant danger of being decried as reactionary—to infuse the world with the attitude of spirit. In order to be able to infuse the world with this attitude, however, we ourselves

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must be fully permeated by our belief. And what belief, my friends, could be easier, freer, more undogmatic, more certain, more beatific than the belief that, in spite of the real misery in the world, the highest goal of our happiness, of our very existence, consists in the improvement of our inner life. Is the ocean in and of itself something miraculous? No! Or the Himalayas? Or a mountain lake? Or a deciduous forest? Let us assume that instead of around five and a half feet tall we were sixty-five hundred feet tall (considering the measure of the cosmos, a meaningless difference): the ocean would be but a puddle of rain to us, the Himalayas but a doorsill, and the forest but a tuft of grass. Or let us say we were so clever that we could always and everywhere, behind all things, perceive their so-called real meaning. Then the sea would appear to us as an extended aggregation of chemical elements whose combination results in seawater, and the forest would appear as a matted brush of boring horsetails. In tree insects and songbirds, we would see only homogenous parasitic vermin preying on foliage. In a beautiful face, we would see only the flawlessness of gland secretion, and in mental aptitude only a fortuitous arrangement of physiological and social conditions. But thank God, our soul is much too clever to be that clever. A beautiful face touches us intangibly; a great work of the spirit forces us to our knees. A serious valley fills us with sorrow, sea and fern with strange fear. Why are we frightened and what do we fear? We are frightened by the miracle in ourselves; we are frightened by the muse lying dormant in every human being, the messenger of God who repeats anew the work of the creation every second. For the world begins in the human being. And the human being can only live in the name of the miracle.

8. Otto Bauer Religious Socialism First published as “Religiöser Sozialismus,” Menschheitskämpfer 1, no. 8 (September 1927): 29–30. Translated by Gabriel Trop. The author of this text is often called the “little” Otto Bauer (1897–1986) in order to distinguish him from the more well-known Austro-Marxist thinker by the same name. In 1926 Otto Bauer cofounded and became chairman of the Union of Religious Socialists (Bund Religiöser Sozialisten). The Religious Socialists adopted a political eschatology inasmuch as they saw socialism as coextensive with the fulfillment of a religious calling. Not only was Democratic Socialism not a secular movement for Otto Bauer, but rather, its agenda followed necessarily from Christianity as a lived practice. I. One thing is clear: the task of religious socialists cannot be exhausted simply by bolstering socialist doctrines and socialist systems with religious principles, Bible passages, and occasional sermons. Let us be quite concrete: our task cannot be exhausted simply by trying to provide theological proof that the doctrines of Karl Marx are compatible with Christian ethics or with a sociology based on the church. If we only sought to refute the incompatibility of Christianity and socialism—and both orthodox church-going

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Christians and orthodox system socialists claim such an incompatibility—we could easily fall into the trap of one-sidedness. This could also tempt us to dedicate our time and efforts to a wholly unfruitful endeavor, namely setting up our own system of “religious socialism.” To be sure, we would end up aiding the socialist cause with such a task, since we would thus increase the number of votes for Social Democracy. But such successes would be merely temporary. Because what is at stake most of all is the following: that we live socialism out of the spirit and power of Christianity. Christianity, as a bourgeois religion of the state, is always conservative. Christianity in the sense of the Sermon on the Mount, however, is always revolutionary, always rooted, from the ground up, in renewal. “Our God is a God of the living and not of the dead.” In Christianity, the redeeming act of Christ lives on not as a singular historical experience but as a continual redemption and rebirth of mankind. And socialism? Is it simply in quest of a better mechanism and systematic planning for economic progress, of a more refined social legislation, of a better organization of society? Is it not first and foremost the demand that the new mankind be born in our hearts and souls? Yes, this is where Christianity and socialism meet, and indeed, in such a way that socialism here receives its deeper spiritual grounding and fecundity as part of the order of the world. Those energies that we religious socialists bring to bear on the socialist movement have their source in our being Christians, that is, where Christianity becomes incorporated into our very being. This is not to say that we should relinquish an intellectual treatment of the different questions and theories of socialism. Every reader of our paper knows that we do not do this. Precisely the following questions have been at the forefront of our endeavor: the proletariat, its tasks, class struggle, political unity, etc. These questions have yet to be answered definitely, and many of them have yet to be addressed: the question of property, the theory of value, etc. But for us, addressing these questions is not some otherworldly theoretical problem (poring over problems out of passion). These questions are asked of us because of our common life with Christians and socialists. Also, this work is extremely necessary—not only to refute the previously mentioned false opinion concerning the incompatibility of Christianity and socialism. Rather, it is necessary because we must lift our socialism out of the sphere of feeling and volition and into the realm of conscious understanding; in short, we must attain a concrete way of posing the task to be achieved. II. Socialism, lived through the power and spirit of Christianity, consists in the revolutionization of the proletariat. The absolute Christian in the socialist movement is not a “little lamb,” not one who walks softly, no man of bad compromises, not a moderate. His Christianity forces him to strive for totality, to the very end—also when it comes to being a socialist. He knows that joining the party, paying contributions, and occasionally visiting an assembly meeting are not sufficient. Socialism demands more, it demands the whole human being, with all powers of the heart, the mind, and the will. And it demands this in every moment of life. The impact of the proletarian movement suffers greatly from the fact that there are still proletarians who think with socialist categories when it comes to their wages and workers’ rights and their political rights in the state, but who are still rooted deeply in the bourgeoisie in their other habits of life (from time to time even in relation to their fellow human beings). We dare to say this, we who announce, with a certain passion, the

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mission of the proletariat. It is not that we are claiming the right to do so because of our passion but rather that we derive the obligation to do so from this passion. How do we get out of this bourgeoisification of the proletariat? To be sure, by seeking to improve the standard of living through politics, by opening up educational opportunities (school reforms) and the like, and by seeking to overcome the feelings of inferiority in the proletariat through full equal rights legislation. But does an improvement in social relations automatically result in the ethical rebirth of man? Two facts indicate otherwise. First, those who live in “orderly” relations are not always the best human beings. Second, even we socialists are compelled to speak about an education for socialism and we work for such an education. An appeal to the moral energies in man is what is needed, an awakening of the powers of the soul, an inspiration. And here again, religious socialists see a particular task. Their Christianity means to be fulfilled by the power of the spirit. If socialism truly places such great demands on man, how is he supposed to do without those powers, the powers that come from lived Christianity? However, we do not imagine communicating such powers in pious sermons (those who live among workers know how little they are inclined to listen to those), but rather, in representing anew the various domains of life infused with this spirituality. We can name some of these domains of life here: politics, economics, the relation of man and woman, family, child education, domestic life, body culture, etc. In other words: for us, it is not about the literal, moralizing interpretation of the Bible and textual passages, but rather, about the real incarnate representation of spirit that lives in the workers in all areas of life. This will be our appeal to the ethical energies of man, our awakening of the powers of the soul, which is at the same time a depiction of concrete tasks for the individual— tasks through which these powers can prove themselves and thrive. III. This religious socialism is no mere protest against the predominance of social injustice. It finds no more perfection [in this protest], as pious devotions and quiet contemplation, for example, represent consummate religiosity. Religiosity is not a thing in itself, sealed off from the rest of human life; on the contrary, it seizes and moves the entire being, the whole life. It is not a mere sensation, but an action. Thus, the religious socialist becomes a socialist because of his religiosity. Such a religiosity also protects the religious socialist from being degraded to a howling dervish of socialism. We prove that we indeed grasp religious socialism as something other than protest by standing in the middle of the socialist movement, not as followers or gap fillers, but as fellow combatants, as active participants. We religious socialists fulfill our task in the grand proletarian-socialist movement.

Hans Haidenbauer’s poem “Die Frau von heut.” It depicts the “woman of today” in various situations: as a mother, as an athlete, as an adventurer, or as a worker at her desk. Die Unzufriedene (The dissatisfied woman), June 28, 1930. (Courtesy of VGA.)

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE NEW WOMAN AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS Marie-Noëlle Yazdanpanah and Veronika Duma

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the implementation of male suffrage in 1907, the Proclamation of the Republic on November 12, 1918, set the stage for universal and equal suffrage in Austria.1 In those turbulent times marked by strikes and demonstrations, Social Democracy established itself as a force for order. From this position of power, the Social Democrats succeeded in implementing universal male and female suffrage in December 1918. But the acquisition of active and passive voting rights was not due solely to the social and political upheavals that occurred in the wake of World War I. Rather, the women’s movement in both its bourgeois and proletarian incarnations played a key role in the long and constant struggle for participation that led up to women’s suffrage. Women now officially entered institutional politics and their organizations as both voters and political actors in the aftermath of the war. After the first election in February 1919, 8 women representatives entered the Austrian Parliament, 7 Social Democrats and 1 Christian Social.2 Between 1920 and 1923, 12 women served as representatives, a number not to be reached again in Austria until 1978. During the first postwar voting period for the Vienna Municipal Council (1919–1923), 19 of its 165 members were women. The attainment of formal political rights was the prelude to a series of struggles for comprehensive political, social, economic, and cultural participation. Political themes and concerns for women of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP) ranged from “equal pay for equal work” to the amendment of Articles 144 to 148 criminalizing abortion, which carried over from the Austrian Empire’s penal code of 1852. Women of the SDAP also voiced their demand for equal access to education and career opportunities. At the same time, challenges in the areas of housing, work, and living were central themes of a politics animated by a women’s movement whose actors debated alternative forms of living. Under the mottos “socialization of the household” and “rationalization and centralization of housekeeping,” women engaged in deliberations about the reorganization of reproductive work. They highlighted the multiple burdens borne by women, which included work outside the household for wages, housework, and the work of childrearing. Likewise, they thematized the working conditions of women workers, housekeepers, and female salaried leven years after

1 Even

so, female sex workers were excluded from voting until 1923. Adelheid Popp, Anna Boschek, Gabriele Proft, Marie Tusch, Amalie Seidel, Emmy Freundlich, Therese Schlesinger, and Hildegard Burjan (CS).

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employees.3 With their demands, these women aimed to establish state bodies and facilities that could undertake what had hitherto been coded as “women’s work.” They also sought the expansion of social infrastructure such as daycare centers, social assistance institutions, and free-time facilities. The debates of the socialist and bourgeois women’s movement are inscribed in the architecture of Red Vienna in the form of central and communal kitchens, cooperative laundry facilities, municipal housing complexes, and the single-kitchen building (Einküchenhaus), a multi-unit apartment building featuring a centrally administered kitchen staffed by cooks. Alongside regular party events and meetings, the (print) media of the women’s arm of the SDAP played a particular role in communicating these “women’s themes.” Key publications included the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung (renamed Die Frau in 1924) and Die Unzufriedene (The dissatisfied woman). Reorganization in all areas of life was meant to mold not only the New Human but in particular also the New Woman while paving the way for a socialist society. According to the ideal image, the New Woman was modern, open, bold, relaxed, independent, hygiene conscious, and athletic. She was characterized as having a youthful appearance, a slim and boyish figure, bobbed hair, and the practical reformed clothing signaling emancipation. In contrast to the Flappers, the ideal (socialist) woman did not smoke or drink. Hans Haidenbauer’s 1930 poem depicts her as a comrade to her husband and a friend to her children. For even if she was modern and employed, the ideal Social Democratic woman remained a mother in a small family. For conservatives, the altered relations between the sexes and the image of the New Woman constituted a threat—especially for authoritarian and fascist forces whose anti-egalitarian and antifeminist proclivities tended toward the consolidation of patriarchal and hierarchical relations between the sexes. The women of the SDAP addressed the effects that conservative-authoritarian crisis politics had on women. At the same time, they politicized the budget policies of the Christian Social government from a gender-specific perspective. Women (and girls) were particularly affected by the state’s policy of budget reductions, given that the multiple burdens borne by women intensified with the dismantling of the welfare state and social infrastructure. The promotion of traditional, conservative family constellations and gender roles revealed itself in exemplary fashion with the contentious Double Income Ordinance (Doppelverdienerverordnung) of 1933,4 which aimed to abolish employment for women and forced them back into the sphere of unpaid domestic and reproductive labor. The accomplishments of the women’s and workers’ movements were successively rolled back as a result of the austerity measures adopted during the financial crisis, the increasing abandonment of democracy, the emergence of an authoritarian government, and the rise of fascism. To name but a few examples, parties and unions were forbidden, voting rights were effectively abolished with the suspension of all national, state, and municipal elections, and the constitutional equality of men and women was annulled. 3 See, for example, Käthe Leichter, Wie leben die Wiener Heimarbeiter? Eine Erhebung über die Arbeits- und Lebensverhältnisse von tausend Wiener Heimarbeitern (Vienna: Verlag Arbeit und Wirtschaft, 1928) and So leben wir . . . 1320 Industriearbeiterinnen berichten über ihr Leben (Vienna: Verlag Arbeit und Wirtschaft, 1932). See also Handbuch der Frauenarbeit in Österreich, ed. Käthe Leichter and Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte in Wien (Vienna: Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte, 1930), and chapter 4. 4 The regulation stated that married women were to be terminated or pensioned from civil service jobs, or not even to be hired in the first place. See Adelheid Popp, “Verdrängung der Frauenarbeit,” Die Frau 43, no. 2 (February 1934): 4–6.

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By 1934 the reestablishment of conservative images of women had become official state policy. Further reading Duma, Hajek 2015 Ellmeier 2006 Gruber 1998 Hauch 2009 Mesner 2010 Prinz 2009 Yazdanpanah 2019

1. Therese Schlesinger Women and the Revolution First published as “Die Frauen und die Revolution,” Der Kampf  14, no. 2/3 (1921): 73–76. Translated by Franz Hofer. Therese Schlesinger (1863–1940) was one of eight women elected to Austria’s Constituent National Assembly in 1919 after the introduction of universal and equal suffrage for men and women. At the same time, women began to garner interest as a new voting group. During the national election on October 17, 1920, the Christian Social Party received the most votes (41.79 percent), followed by the Social Democrats (35.99 percent) and pan-German parties (17.25 percent). A higher percentage of women voted for the Christian Socials than for the Social Democrats.5 Schlesinger linked this poor performance to a lack of what Social Democracy offered women: the Social Democratic platform was deficient in particular policies that addressed women’s concerns, while the party itself often demonstrated a lack of understanding, even empathy, toward the plight of women. Before becoming a member of the SDAP in 1897, Schlesinger served as the vice-president of the General Austrian Women’s Association (Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein, AÖFV).6 She advocated for women’s rights in labor, life, and family, composed the segments pertaining to women for the SDAP’s Linz Program of 1926, and published extensively. Women have strongly asserted their influence in every previous revolutionary movement, sometimes decisively. Moreover, today’s masses of women are more significant than ever because of the near complete integration of the female proletariat into working life. With that in mind, the following questions are of paramount importance: In future struggles, will we be able to count on the participation of a female proletariat guided, in large part, by objective considerations that have been carefully thought through? Or will the nature of this participation be guided merely by the passionate inspirations of the moment? 5 See

Robert Danneberg, “Wie haben die Frauen gewählt,” Der Kampf 14, no. 9 (1921): 337–42. AÖFV was founded in Vienna in 1893 by Auguste Fickert, Marie Lang, and Rosa Mayreder. The association’s important achievements included universal suffrage and the struggle for equal opportunities and equal rights.

6 The

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When we search for the causes of women’s apathy regarding intra-proletarian party struggles, we find that they correspond to the reasons why Austrian Social Democracy suffered a setback among the female electorate on October 17. [. . .] Immediately after October 17, it appeared to have dawned on a good number of our comrades that we might need to work somewhat more assiduously at capturing the imagination of the female proletariat than was previously the case. Not long ago, everyone was talking about specific kinds of agitation as well as the expansion of the female workers’ press. But all of this has died down of late. Even the most diligent efforts to capture the imagination of the female working class will only enjoy marginal success as long as we fail to demonstrate—through actions—that Social Democracy recognizes the suffering of the female proletariat and strives with its full power to mitigate this suffering. How little has been accomplished in this respect so far! Certainly, Social Democracy has obtained voting rights for women and has, through its sociopolitical achievements, lightened the burdens of both women and men. But up until now, social democracy has done almost nothing to help female workers in precisely those facets of life in which they suffer much more than men. Presently, Social Democracy is no more able than any other party to push back against the increasing costs of living, a cost borne more heavily by women and mothers than by proletarian men. This is precisely why Social Democracy needs to invest itself all the more urgently in the task of bringing wages for women into line with higher prices. To this day, the male working class finds it entirely natural and self-evident that women are paid a much lower hourly wage than men [. . .]. [. . .] The miserable remuneration of women’s work gives rise not only to undernourishment and the fatigue associated with it; it also has the female worker force her excessively weary body to do additional work. Her means do not allow her to hire others to cook her food, do her laundry, or scrub her apartment—something no male worker has to worry about. She must perform all of these tasks not only for herself but for her family too. This means nothing other than being compelled, every day and every hour, to offer her employer the gift of her strength and resilience, her time and health, and the joys of motherhood—a debt for which, ultimately, the entire working class will have to pay dearly. If, in any given branch of industry, men’s wages were so miserable that workers were regularly forced to work several hours elsewhere at the end of their shift just to procure the necessities of bare life, their comrades would certainly instruct those workers about their duties to struggle for better wages instead of working themselves to death. Those workers can count on every manner of help and support from organized labor in their wage disputes. When finding itself in a similar situation, though, the female proletariat is forced to fall back on its weak position, its fate sometimes adversely affected by the male proletariat. Competent observers in Germany (as well as in certain parts of Austria) regularly attest to how, with the silent blessing if not the actual help of the trade unions, women are being forced out of work in order to make way for men. [. . .] Under such conditions, is it any wonder that the majority of women workers do not entirely feel a sense of satisfaction with any of the socialist parties? Given the circumstances, we can only marvel that there are so many thousands of class-conscious and keenly engaged female party comrades—burdened with both employment and housework; burdened with the weighty anxieties of procuring the most essential of foodstuffs; burdened with the duties of motherhood: A woman who still finds ways to muster her

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time and energy to keep abreast of events and to work in her union or political organization—such a woman must truly inspire the highest admiration. That such enormous achievements are beyond the reach of the vast majority of the female proletariat should come as no surprise to any thinking person. But how little interest we find among organized labor for efforts that aim at putting an end to the double burden of working women! Certain circles of people have expended great effort in breaking with the obsolete and inefficient form of domestic economy characterized by its squandering of time, strength, resources, and living space. These circles have attempted once and for all to align the domestic enterprise with the system of division of labor, technological progress, and concentration [on a narrower range of tasks]. Yet these efforts encounter the indifference of precisely those social classes whose women and children are devastated by the evils that prevail in these areas. [. . .] The construction of single-kitchen buildings [Einküchenhäuser] incurs immense costs. So, too, does the conversion of existing buildings into this kind of housing. To be sure, these costs are serious. But fixating on these costs is not an entirely valid strategy. Workers’ apartments erected by public entities and workers’ construction cooperatives are built (in insufficient number) according to an outmoded and harmful system that continues to persist. There—again and in the same houses or housing complexes—fifty overburdened women slave away, working themselves to death in their “free time” cooking, scrubbing, washing, and ironing instead of relaxing, enjoying time with their families, or enthusiastically engaging in class struggle. While the socialist parties fight a heated civil war over the single correct method of struggle that will succeed in ushering the proletariat to power, they unanimously abandon the largest part of the female working class to indifference and reaction.

2. Anonymous Mass Protest against the Murder Clause, Article 144 First published as “Massenprotest gegen den Mordparagraphen 144,” Die Unzufriedene, October 8, 1927, 3–4. Translated by Franz Hofer. The struggle against the criminalization of abortion outlined in Articles 144–48 of Austria’s penal code was a significant issue for the women’s movement and the women’s wing of the workers’ movement. Social Democratic women introduced several parliamentary initiatives to alter the law, but without success. Instead, they shifted their demands away from the deletion of the paragraphs surrounding the so-called term solution (Fristenlösung), calling instead for the adoption of an indicator solution (Indikationslösung)—that is, the inclusion of language pertaining to indicators such as the health and social conditions of the pregnant woman. Communist women criticized these watered-down formulations.7 This report on the protests against Article 144 exemplifies the spectrum of positions among Social Democrats. The arguments ranged from justification strategies drawing on demographic politics, neo-Malthusianism, and eugenics to the advocacy of individual (women’s) rights.

7 See

Anonymous, “Die neuen Beschützer des §144,” Die Rote Fahne, May 30, 1924, 1–2.

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Social Democratic women consistently portrayed Article 144 as a “class article” which primarily affected proletarian women.8 The Wiener Konzerthaus was occupied to the last seat. Three thousand women, representatives of all political entities from across Austria passionately articulated their positions against the maintenance of Article 144, which is celebrating a cheerful resurrection in the government’s proposed Article 253. [. . .] Representative Adelheid Popp pointed out the inhumanity that, in our time of severe social distress, would seek to preserve this murder clause in its current form. Even Germany saw fit to improve its penal code in this respect, with the new Article 254 reading: An abortion within the meaning of the penal code has not occurred if a doctor interrupts the pregnancy should it be deemed necessary for the health of the mother and the preservation of her life.

If complications arise during the act of giving birth, the doctor may let the child die in order to preserve the life of the mother. The German law proceeds from the recog­ nition that it is more important to preserve the life of the mother for her already-born children than it is to sacrifice the life of the mother for the sake of a newborn child—that it is more important to preserve her life than to orphan yet another child through its mother’s death. German law makes provisions for medical indicators, that is, the judgment of a doctor regarding whether a mother is capable of carrying her child to term and giving it a healthy birth. In reality, nothing in Austria will improve with this new Article 253, for it is the same class article as the old Article 144, which is only ever applied in its full severity against women of the proletariat. Our opponents reproach us with the claim that proletarian women struggle against Article 144 only for the sake of comfort! That is a lie! Every healthy woman desires a child if she is in the position to bear this child and raise it to become a healthy and industrious adult. But an interruption of pregnancy must be permitted if the health and social conditions of the woman make it impossible for her to raise healthy children under orderly circumstances. We demand the unconditional modernization of our statutes in alignment with Article 254 of Germany’s penal code. Beyond that, it is our greatest task to enlighten women. We need to say to them that they should prevent matters from leading to abortion in the first place, that it is the duty of every woman to use protection if her health or economic circumstances are so unfavorable that they would endanger the life of the mother or the prosperity of the child. All women for whom the well-being of the people is close to their hearts—and for whom it is not just a manner of speaking—must engage in this kind of educational work. City Councillor Professor Tandler referred to the fact that the government’s rejection of medical indicators amounts to proof that the government mistrusts the medical profession. [. . .] The mass production of children is not our wish and aim. Their fitness and their capability of leading a fulfilling life is decisive! We are no longer a military state in need 8 See

Adelheid Popp, “Der Paragraph 144,” Die Unzufriedene, October 8, 1927, 1–3.

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of cannon fodder. If the mother dies during childbirth, the infant mortality rate will rise as well, for the child’s most important caregiver would be lost. Whoever claims that the working-class woman does not desire children is lying! She wants children, but only in the conscious knowledge that she can give birth to healthy children and provide them with a dignified life. She has a difficult enough task having to bear children, and a still more difficult task in raising them. It is her most sacred right to watch her children grow into adults. It is her right not to be compelled by law to continually bear children, which weakens her body and delivers her over to a premature death! The law must remain constant: the fulfillment of a people’s awareness of its rights! And for that reason, we in Austria must demand the modernization of our statutes in alignment with Germany’s Article 254. Member of the Federal Council Therese Schlesinger repeatedly interrupted by thunderous applause, took up a passionate position against compelled motherhood. Unfortunately, the legislative spirit of the past 150 years resides in the deep recesses of the consciousness of thousands of men and scores of women. To this day, a woman is valued in the following terms: as an object of male desire, and as a childbearing machine for the state. Above that hypocritically defended sanctity of the fruit of a woman’s womb is the sanctity of the mother’s life! Murder: that is what our government— presided over by a priest [Chancellor Ignaz Seipel]—calls the interruption of pregnancy! Necessary and heroic: that is what our government calls the murder of warfare. (Booming applause!) We are struggling for dignity and for a woman’s right to determine what happens to her own body. The state should have the right to intervene in the interest of promoting childbirth only when it can, at the very least, guarantee each person the minimum necessities of existence from birth onward. We demand an improvement of the penal code in the modern sense of the word, just as Germany has done through Article 254. We demand the possibility of an abortion only when the woman’s health and social conditions necessitate it. A modern statute must take these justified aspirations into account. But here is what we must do in addition to all of this: struggle to introduce motherhood insurance and strive to enlighten women regarding how they can best protect themselves against unwanted pregnancy. Let us not fear that the world might die out through the adoption of such a law! Deep in the heart of every true woman resides the desire for a child; this is the fulfillment of her most intense desire, but only if she can give her children a healthy body and a reasonably secure future. An enormous mass of sick, ailing, and unemployed people is not the ideal of a people. The rise of a people is only possible when the health and strength of its limbs are economically secure. The women’s choir from the Favoriten district, which led off the assembly with a song to freedom, concluded with the “Song of Labor,” in which the assembled women joined in enthusiastically.

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3. Marianne Pollak From Crinoline Dress to Bobbed Hair: Revolution and Fashion First published as “Vom Reifrock zum Bubikopf. Revolution und Mode,” ArbeiterZeitung, December 5, 1926, 10. Translated by Franz Hofer. Marianne Pollak (1891–1963), editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and Das Kleine Blatt, analyzes the relationship between fashion and politics in this article. Class differences have traditionally expressed themselves through fashion, which, in turn, reflects both economic and gender relations. In times of political and social upheaval, fashion emerges as an expression of the liberation process, recognizable in the paradigmatic image of the “new,” employed, and independent woman of the 1920s. Pollak lectured and published about women’s work, the household, child-rearing, culture, and fashion. In these fields, she was an opinion leader within the workers’ movement. Fashion has long been the special domain of women. Through makeup and hairstyle, through neckline and folds, women have known how to please men for thousands of years. Outfits and styles of dress are, more than anything, a vital and manifest expression of the eroticism of a particular era. Revolutionary epochs in history have always eased strict clothing regulations and created space for a freer and more unconstrained style of dress. At the same time, clothing is one of the most significant means of class differentiation. Every new fashion comes from the ruling class, who ensures that the masses do not attempt to emulate them in the cut and design of their garments. But the higher rationality of human clothing lies in its practicality, insofar as it protects the body from inclement weather and does not impede the use of a person’s limbs. [. . .] Fashion mirrors economic relations with particular clarity. During the age of absolutism, a deep chasm separated the masses of laboring subjects from the society of ruling bon vivants. This sharp separation found reflection in the fashion donned by the nobility, which made the body completely unsuitable for any kind of labor. [. . .] With the French Revolution, once again, a great historical upheaval collides with the stiffly grandiose forms characteristic of the rococo style. The nobility, those fragile luxury dolls of royal sensuality in their long wigs and jabots set with precious stones, left their powdered heads on the guillotine. Meanwhile, the Parisian people surged through the narrow streets like a fierce tempest. And for that, no crinoline would do. The flowing garments of antiquity became revolutionary fashion: the fashion of the empire, the corsetless Greek tunic that, fastened beneath the chest, enveloped the body flatteringly with its gentle folds. The motionless decades of the pre-March period, from the Vienna Congress [1814– 1815] to the 1848 March Revolution, and following a short period of revolutionary fervor, the reaction of the 1850s [to the revolution] are the real golden age of the corset in women’s fashion. Like the human spirit at the time, the female body was constricted and abused in the most insensitive way. Just as the reserved man in a top hat and stiff neck collar served as the symbol of status quo-signaling respectability, the woman, too, was a symbol. She was to appear dignified and placid in every situation with her tightly compressed waistline and countless folded petticoats which finally degenerated into the monstrous crinoline.

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What followed is merely an alteration in the disfigurement of natural forms. When the crinoline could no longer be surpassed in its grotesque girth, the wire frame was tossed on the scrap heap. But the bodice remained, asserting its power for five more decades. [. . .] It is no coincidence that the perfidious reign of the bodice could only be smashed by a historical epoch of upheaval. Our own sex is the witness and beneficiary of the thoroughgoing revolutionization of women’s fashion. Not more than twenty years ago, it was still common practice among the bourgeoisie and deep into the ranks of the working class to acquire or make their daughters’ accoutrements piece by piece. But my, how these outfits looked! Meter-long, frilled shirt extensions were stitched by hand, loop by loop and point by point. Solid black socks were purchased. Stiff-fitting, curved camisole vests that just barely exposed the neck were cut to size. And fluffy flannel was worked into underskirts. Just imagine what today’s sporty girl would look like in such a flannel undergarment! [. . .] The war that forced our men into the trenches opened up all areas of working life to women. They found entry into the government ministry and the munitions factory, sat down at desks and at the reins of horse-drawn carriages, did business, and drove streetcars. Everywhere, female labor replaced enlisted men; indeed, it was women’s work alone that made possible the reasonably regulated advance of the economy. This time of completely unheard-of physical strain, of hunger, and of the shameless subordination of working humanity to the law of mass murder drove the hitherto sleeping women to an awakening: They had to work—and this work taught them how to think! The iron brooms of revolution have once again swept away the old, strict, and stiff forms of fashion. And again, a revolutionary fashion emerged in its wake, even if it took its cue (as always) from the fashion mavens of Paris and London. Whether it wanted to or not, this new fashion had to adapt itself to the altered social roles of the female sex and create the clothing of the working woman. Gone was the restrictive bodice, along with constricting necklines. Skirts were shortened and long hair cut short. Is this not merely an instant of revolutionary inspiration of the fickle fashion goddess? Certainly, the capitalist economy drives social tastes to extremes in short order to artificially boost sales. But short skirts, free necklines, loose waistlines, and bobbed hair— these four essential external characteristics of the modern woman’s appearance go far beyond the usual fashion creations. For the first time, the desire for beauty links up with true practicality. It is symptomatic of the rootedness of current women’s clothing in the social process of revolution—processes that have particularly affected women—that today’s men are less advanced in the field of clothing. They still don the heavy, dark, and dull “suit” whose vest, a senseless remnant, only serves the purpose of preventing even a single breath of air from inadvertently touching the skin. [. . .] Women are more progressive in their manner of dress. The current fashion truly corresponds to the demands of the times. How splendid it is that our young women can run and jump in their short skirts! How beautiful it is when their loose hair flutters naturally in the breeze! How much easier it is when they can clean and care for their hair more thoroughly! How practical it is to have a bobbed haircut on the sports field, at work, and in the kitchen! How pleasant it is for the working woman to bend and turn without strings and hoops pressing into her stomach! Yet modern women’s clothing loses none of its gracefulness with all of these great practical benefits. Modern fashion is beautiful because it is rational. No whims of fashion, no interests of ready-made capital shall erase

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these progressive fashion elements from women’s clothing. And no forces of reaction wanting to force women back into the church, the kitchen, and the corset will rob us of this freedom of the human body!

4. Stefan Zweig Confidence in the Future First published as “Zutrauen zur Zukunft,” in Die Frau von morgen und wie wir sie wünschen, ed. Friedrich M. Huebner (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1929), 7–17. Translated by Franz Hofer. Numerous publications of the 1920s and 1930s discussed both the New Woman and the changed social conditions in which women took up and promoted their new roles. Die Frau von morgen und wie wir sie wünschen (The woman of tomorrow and how we want her to be) is a collection of texts contributed by male writers, among them Stefan Zweig and Robert Musil, on the topic of the “new, liberated, and self-assured” woman. In the foreword, the editor announced the future publication of a work on the same topic written exclusively by women. That work, however, was never published. Viewed from a conservative perspective, the crisis of masculinity was responsible for the “unnatural” emancipation of women.9 Zweig’s optimistic attitude contrasted with that conservative point of view. Not unlike the Social Democratic viewpoint, Zweig saw the camaraderie between women and men as a model of partnership. Significantly, he linked the liberation of women to their necessary sexual independence. She will be different, this woman of tomorrow, very different. That much is certain. On her path forward, she will pay little heed to how people of yesterday and today desire and demand she be. She will be altogether different, for she has a tremendous arc to complete: the decisive liberation from a one-sided male morality. [. . .] But how will she be, this new woman? The positive question appears much too bold to me. We can only speculate at first and ascertain how the woman of tomorrow will not be. The first typology to disappear will be the “lady” characterized by a haughty passivity and a certain social reserve, the “lady” whose femininity is contained within a class-based codex of customs. This circumscribed woman who was and is nothing but an empty vessel; this woman who still engages men in an artificial sexual/unsexual game and expects a kind of Spanish court ceremony, a dim echo of troubadours practicing forms of received gallantry: this type of woman will disappear. And just as the typology of the “lady” will disappear among the upper classes, the typology of the “housewife” will also fade away among the middle class—the “housewife” in the sense of a domestic animal constantly suckling children, in the sense of the folding, sweeping, cooking, scrubbing, mending, and caring housekeeper for her children and the husband who provides her housing. Gone, too, will be the typology of the “Miss” [Fräulein], the 9 See, for example, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, “Die Frau aller Zeiten,” in Die Frau von morgen und wie wir sie wünschen, ed. Friedrich M. Huebner (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1929), 103–8. For an abbreviated version, see “Die Frau von gestern, die Frau von heute, die Frau von morgen?” Die Bühne 9, no. 326 (1932): 4–5.

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woman who, in contrast to the conjugal spouse, chooses to remain unmarried. Instead, we will call women girls before they reach sexual maturity, and every other woman just that: a woman, whether or not her motherhood is certified by the church, whether or not her cohabitation with a man is bourgeois or unconventional. All of these arrogant and class-based boundaries will be erased in favor of a strengthened and more unified camaraderie among women. The word “woman” will draw together one sex from all classes and levels of society in a more sisterly fashion than our European world has hitherto known. Camaraderie: this word is already the sense underpinning all relationships and will be even more so in the future. Camaraderie: it will be worth more than familial relations, worth more even than erotic relations. No longer will a woman fall from one servitude into another, handed over like a possession from the custody and command of her parents to the custody and command of her husband. She will stand next to her husband and no longer beneath him. Equal in education, independent through her own career, and no longer hemmed in by anxiety in the face of a strict bourgeois morality, she will enter into a permanent or nonpermanent union with a man of her own free will—first, to confront these difficult times united with one another, and second, to ease the difficulties of life by joining together in sports, play, and friendly intellectual competition. Of this I am certain: In this new realm of freedom, the new woman and the man of tomorrow will stand as equals. No longer will she need to wait around humbly to be chosen for marriage like she did in prehistoric times. As a result, women will and must effect a complete transformation of sexual life. Women will move away from passivity in matters of sex and from waiting around to be chosen by men. Instead, they will choose freely, even to the point of engaging in sexual activity when they please. Unlike the inexperienced women of yesterday whose families still chose their spouses for them, she will make her own choice. This is how a new and better freedom must begin, a new freedom marked by camaraderie between man and woman. Who can fail to recognize this transformation? Even the person who deplores this state of affairs might not deny that women are becoming more independent, smarter, more active, and freer in sexual matters with each passing day. That person might also acknowledge that a woman’s uninhibited free choice would be rapidly enhanced if we could eliminate both of the instances inhibiting a woman’s sexual freedom and freedom of choice: the fear of sexual diseases and the fear of unwanted pregnancy. Should medical science, which surpasses itself with miracles from one month to next, manage to develop a safe and relatively inexpensive means of protection or abortion, only then would the risks and hazards that attend love’s choices be completely equal between man and woman. If it were further possible for medical science to develop preventative measures or effective cures for sexual diseases, it would succeed in casting aside these terrible shadows that have for hundreds of years darkened the countenance of Eros in our world. Only then would a complete parity between man and woman arise in matters of sexual relations and the choice of sexual partners. [. . .] The new woman, the woman of tomorrow, will be all the more responsible in her choices and decisions. As a result, the new eroticism will be substantially more honest and unforced, precisely because it is freighted with fewer prohibitions and denials, and because it is controlled from within and not externally. Above all, sexuality will be more equally balanced and convivial. By no means will this new eroticism infect women with raving sexual madness. Instead, it will accord the new woman a new security in terms of giving herself, even of satisfying herself—a security emanating from the inner

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consciousness of her rights, of her honestly considered aspirations in life, of her human as well as her professional accomplishments. And so, I see the new woman as significantly brighter and more cheerful, less oppressed and less weighed down than the woman of the past. She will know a natural and uninhibited grace that was foreign to all previous members of her sex. [. . .]. As much as work uplifts women, and as much as work has freed her, excessive work can still deprive her of her mental and moral achievements, for excessive work debases pleasure while leaving little time for sex. Excessive work also runs directly counter to precisely what we want most from women: that she brings relief and lightness to our all-too-heavy world and enhances our own capacities through her uplifting and motivating presence. But worry not, for each generation creates itself anew out of its own unique dangers while generating the energy to combat these dangers. Standing on an equal footing with men, the new woman will no longer have to concern herself with the previous generation’s struggle for women’s rights; instead she will take up the struggle for human rights in a spirit of camaraderie. And precisely because women have been oppressed and deprived of rights for so long—for decades and for centuries—they should and hopefully will be the pioneers in the struggle against every form of oppression and privation on earth, the best advocate for every movement under the banner of moral freedom.

5. Bettina Hirsch The Housewife and the Single-kitchen Building: Experiences Living on Pilgerimgasse First published as “Die Hausfrau im Einküchenhaus. Selbsterlebtes aus der Pilgerimgasse,” Das Kleine Blatt, August 20, 1927, 11–12. Translated by Franz Hofer. Under the banner of the rationalization and centralization of the domestic economy, women activists within the women’s and workers’ movements engaged with alternative forms of living and working. The main issue revolved around how to ease the reproductive work of already overburdened women. The communal household, so the argument went, represented the most efficient and rational form of domestic economy.10 The journalist Bettina Hirsch wrote several articles about life in the Heimhof on Pilgerimgasse. Built between 1921 and 1923 as a new kind of living cooperative, the Heimhof was designed as a single-kitchen building (Einküchenhaus).11 When the project began to run into financial difficulties, the municipality of Vienna took over ownership and expanded the building from 1925 to 1926. In the end, the single-kitchen building model did not prevail. With the establishment of Austrofascism in 1934 the experiment was gradually dismantled and when the National Socialists seized power in Austria, the central kitchen and dining halls were closed.

10

See Therese Schlesinger, “Frauenarbeit und proletarische Lebenshaltung,” Arbeiter Zeitung, February 8, 1925, 8. 11 See Bettina H., “Hausfrau und Einküchenhaus: Schlussbetrachtung,” Das Kleine Blatt, September 24, 1927, 11. See also Bettina H., “Die Hausgehilfin und das Einküchenhaus,” Die Unzufriedene, January 7, 1928, 4.

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As the name already reveals, one large kitchen has replaced over two hundred small kitchens in our apartment building, which offers lunch and dinner at cost. Any tenant can cancel a meal at any time or add as many portions as desired so that guests do not cause more work for the housewife. Every housewife knows from her own experience how much time and energy she consumes preparing meals and will understand how significant this accomplishment is. For the working woman not in a position to retain domestic help, only these innovations can make it possible for her to enjoy a warm meal in her own home without having to use up her short periods of rest. At the same time, this system of mass cooking saves a considerable amount of time and money. For instead of each housewife going to the market herself to procure a small quantity of foodstuffs at fluctuating retail prices and varying quality, the kitchen orders in bulk and the food is delivered to the apartment complex. Since the kitchen purchases large quantities, it can obtain betterquality goods at lower prices than those who shop in small quantities. We have an attractive dining hall stocked with an array of daily newspapers, weeklies, and monthlies. A delivery service brings food to those who prefer to eat in their own apartments. Let us envision the following difference. In a private household, the rushed housewife—who often cannot find enough time to make herself look nice for lunch—cannot even enjoy her own meal because she is running back and forth serving food to her family. In a single-kitchen building [Einküchenhaus], the composed and unhurried woman sits down to her meal in complete peace, informing herself of the day’s events while eating. Clearly, this woman is a more calming presence at home than the overly fatigued woman of the single-unit household chased here and there by a thousand small chores. But the communal kitchen is not the only advantage of our system. The property management arranges the daily cleaning of our apartments and the regular, thorough cleaning of the grounds. Indeed, a set proportion of tenants is allocated a housemaid to carry out all of the household tasks. This setup is a true blessing, primarily for those women who work all day. Through this arrangement, working women are spared from a workday considerably longer than eight hours. None of these women would have been able to afford their own domestic help but can bear these expenses together with others. Our house is also outfitted with many other communal facilities, including roof terraces that are available from the early morning hours for regular exercise under expert guidance. Equipped with attached showers, these terraces also offer refreshing sunbathing. A state-of-the-art laundry facility washes clothes at cost and has banished that singularly frightful specter—laundry day!—from our house for once and for all. Lounges and common spaces, which especially during the winter months will unite the inhabitants in common conversation, are currently being built. As valuable as these latter facilities are, they have already been realized in many municipal housing complexes in Vienna. However, our housing complex is particularly unique in its attempt to transform the “dwarf-scale” single household into a modern large-scale single-kitchen building. For as any working woman surely knows, all of the modern household aids such as vacuum cleaners, electric floor scrubbers, electric potato slicers and washers, dough mixers, and many other gadgets are practically unavailable to the working woman of the single-unit household. It is substantially easier for our community of roughly two hundred tenants to procure these goods for our single-kitchen building. [. . .] Each year, a number of women and men are elected by all the tenants to take responsibility for administering the apartment block. A manager sees to the administrative tasks in constant consultation and agreement with this in-house commission. Regular assemblies give all the tenants the opportunity to air concerns, express wishes, or even lodge

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complaints. If the in-house commission does its job well, it maintains the confidence of the tenants; if not, other women and men will replace the commission. It would probably interest many readers to learn how much it costs to live in our single-kitchen building. We pay 32 schillings per month for an apartment that consists of two rooms, a kitchenette, and a small closet and entryway. Included in this sum is interest, the cost of a housekeeper, and the use of household gadgets, the cost of a janitor and cleaning supplies, and a portion of the general administrative costs. If you consider that the salary of a housekeeper alone costs a private household at least 40 schillings per month, you will soon understand how living in a large-scale household brings down costs considerably. Lunch—which consists of soup, meat with condiments, vegetables, and dessert— costs 1.40 schillings on workdays and 1.60 schillings on Sundays. At 90 groschen, dinner includes meat and side dishes with a choice of compote or dessert. Laundry comes to 1.20 schillings per kilogram washed and pressed. Those who want to do their own ironing pay 90 groschen for folded laundry. [. . .] Our apartment complex is still in its infancy; understandably, it will still have to endure a few hiccups along the way. But these trifling ailments will soon be overcome, and it is probably safe to say that the experiment will succeed. But we certainly will not rest content with the fact that our apartment complex is functioning well. Rather, we will have to strive to interest as many women as possible and convince them of the merits of our project. Surely, then, many women will desire this new kind of household.

6. Liesl Zerner The Young Working Woman First published as “Die jugendliche Arbeiterin,” in Handbuch der Frauenarbeit in Österreich, ed. Käthe Leichter and Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte (Vienna: Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte, 1930), 145–48. Translated by Franz Hofer. Elisabeth (Liesl) Zerner (1905–1986), editorial secretary for the Arbeiter Zeitung, thematized the education and professional life of young working women and criticized genderspecific discrimination in the workplace. Her article was published by the Female Labor Unit of the Chamber of Labor (Referat für Frauenarbeit der Arbeiterkammer), which discussed sociological, social, and cultural aspects of women’s work and depicted the variety of women’s work in Austria. Alongside well-known Social Democratic women such as Luise Kautsky, women functionaries, activists, employees, and workers alike reported on their experiences. The Handbuch der Frauenarbeit in Österreich (Handbook of women’s work in Austria) was published on the occasion of the International Women’s Congress, which took place in Vienna in 1930. At the same time, the National Council of Women—Austria (Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine) also released a publication on the women’s movement and on women’s education and work.12 Zerner’s contribution singled out a generation that was shaped by the measures of Red Vienna. An example of this influence is the Career Counseling Office of the City of Vienna and the Chamber of Labor (Berufsberatungsamt der Stadt Wien 12 Frauenbewegung,

Frauenbildung und Frauenarbeit in Österreich, ed. Martha Stephanie Braun et al. (Vienna: Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine, 1930).

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und der Arbeiterkammer), which Zerner highlighted as a significant institution engaged in the consciousness-raising of young women. Career choice and attitudes toward careers. Where does this come from, this disproportionately large number of young working women engaged in unskilled labor and their over-representation in the garment industry? Even today, “domestic factors” largely determine the career choice of young working women. For ages, woman’s occupations—garment-making and housekeeping—have been regarded as “natural” occupations, as good preparation for marriage. These careers have been understood as mere way stations, which also helps account for the large proportion of unskilled workers who are women. Unskilled labor offers women awaiting marriage the opportunity to earn money right after leaving secondary school [Bürgerschule] without the need for any career education. This lack of career education corresponds to the completely deficient school education that a young woman brings to her working life as well. Attitudes toward careers begin during childhood. Playtime instills in boys a predilection for a particular career. [. . .] For the most part, only once the young woman leaves school does she realize that she, too, has to take up a career, to say nothing of which one. From there, the first difficulties immediately arise with respect to her choice of career. Sometimes with reluctance, sometimes with exaggerated hopes, and often with no idea what the working and professional conditions of a particular career are, young women come to the Career Counseling Office—if they stop by at all! Three in four male graduates looked for and found gainful employment through the Career Counseling Office compared to only three in seven female graduates. That amounts to three quarters of boys who graduate, but not even half of the girls who graduate. The remainder leave this important life decision to chance. Particularly popular among this group is the newspaper advertisement, which is no longer so uncommon. And for young women who are utterly unknowledgeable about a particular career and its work conditions, this manner of seeking a career is just about as bad as searching for a marriage partner in the same manner. It took a long time for young women and their parents to adapt themselves in some small way to these altered economic conditions. In 1927—and while the major crisis in women’s trades was still ongoing—1077 young women applied through the Career Counseling Office for an apprentice position as a seamstress. The office made arrangements for 205 apprenticeships, but only 305 were available at all. However, the transformation in the nature of women’s work is already showing signs of shaping the career choices of fourteen-year-olds. Not only do we see an increase in young, unskilled working women, but also a migration toward commercial occupations and, at a further remove, an influx of women into the hairdressing trade. [. . .] If we take a closer look, we see that most of the well-paid trades demanding highly qualified workers are completely—and not just partially—closed off to women. According to the report released by the Career Counseling Office in January 1930 (one half of a year after the end of the school year), some young women were slated for apprenticeships as photographers or ceramists. The ratios for the jewelry, clockmaking, and bookbinding trades are similar. But leaving aside the question of physically demanding “unladylike” work, the only ones who obtained an apprenticeship were relatives of the master craftsman. Such barriers are contractually fixed in particular trades or are the subject of tacit negotiation. Nowhere in the trade ordinances themselves is there any provision that forbids or

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limits the entry of women into the skilled ranks of a profession. The fact alone that only the relatives of the master craftsman can gain entry into an apprenticeship shows clearly that it has nothing to do with any social measures designed to protect female physiology. This becomes all the clearer when we consider that only the “domestic” occupations grant entry to unskilled women workers. [. . .] Nevertheless, the Career Counseling Office reports that 513 girls were aiming to enroll in further schooling in 1928 (compared to 121 girls in previous years). Schools for kindergarten teachers, nurses, and welfare workers were the most popular, with commercial, household, and women’s trade schools occupying a position only of secondary importance. With the expansion of public welfare, a new and attractive field of employment has been created for working women. But here too the desire to work in this field— especially among serious and industrious young women of the working class—is much greater than the current capacity of the public welfare system to absorb these workers. The municipality has limited the number of students admitted to schools so that graduates can actually find jobs. To be sure, the result of such trends is that a number of young women today have chosen their lifelong career after careful deliberation. Through schooling, they aspire to achieve both fulfillment and pleasure in their chosen career. Matters are somewhat different with young, unskilled women workers. The demand for young woman workers is great. [. . .] But if the young working woman is increasingly drawn in the direction of factory work, the prospect of unemployment is so terrible that she is forced to continually change jobs. Even if she happens to find a less mechanical job that is more acceptable to her, she will surely become disenchanted by the next round of job changes and by the perpetual uprooting from one field to the next. If we have just noted the apprehension on the part of employers who avoid admitting young women into new skilled occupations, it is striking that this apprehensiveness is much lower when it comes to completely unskilled work. (It is different in the case of semiskilled workers.) We find women lifting heavy loads, we find them in the metalworking industry and in the chemical industry, and we find them performing many other tasks besides—not always the healthiest activities for young women.

7. Käthe Leichter Epilog (from This Is How We Live: 1320 Women Workers in Industry Report about Their Lives) First published as “Schlußwort” in So leben wir . . . 1320 Industriearbeiterinnen berichten über ihr Leben (Vienna: Verlag Arbeit und Wirtschaft, 1932), 145–48. Translated by Franz Hofer. Red Vienna is striking for the relationship that crystallized within the broader milieu of Social Democracy of feminist and socialist researchers who were active in the union, workers’, and women’s movements. The network of women followed developments in economics, politics, and gender, discussing political strategies as well as economic analyses. What characterized their approach as feminist was an integral understanding of production and reproduction, the economy, the state, and politics. As a consequence, they viewed the economy as encompassing both paid and unpaid (re)productive work ranging from housework, child rearing, and education to provisioning and caring for the family. The Female Labor Unit of the Chamber of Labor (Referat für Frauenarbeit der Arbeiterkammer) came to play a significant role

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in such matters. Käthe Leichter (1895–1942), the Unit’s director, together with her team, conducted fundamental research on the working and living conditions of (female) workers and employees, domestic servants and homeworkers working and living under precarious conditions in particular. Published in 1932, Leichter’s study of the relationship between the life and work of women in industry is based on the analysis of 1320 survey interviews and supplemented by written narratives of women working in various branches of industry. Thirteen hundred and twenty women workers describe their lives here. But it is not only their lives. It is the lives of one hundred thousand proletarian women at work in Vienna’s industries, lives enriched by work and effort, by obligations and worries. [. . .] Should we content ourselves with the portrayal of the destinies of these 1320 working women? Should we not also hear of their demands that emanate from the surveys, demands that ought to lead to the transformation of the lives of these working women? [. . .] For not everything needs to be like it has been portrayed in the survey, nor must it be so in the case of the contemporary economy. Even in the capitalist economy, women can create something from this world by rebelling against the injustice traditionally accepted as part of their fate. It is a fact but not inevitable that young women’s choice of a career path attracts little attention, or that their occupation is regarded as a mere transitional stage. It is a fact but not inevitable that an increasing number of the women’s workforce is not provided with any vocational training at all—simply because the rapid trend toward unskilled labor affects women disproportionately or because women are often deliberately barred from skilled work and confronted with prejudice regarding career advancement. [. . .] It is a fact but not inevitable that women end up employed on the lowest level of production, or that the division of labor between the sexes forces women to engage in the dirtiest and worst-valued work, the most difficult work, and almost always the most monotonous work. We must protect the female workforce and expand inspections tasked with implementing these protections [. . .]. In a time when thousands of men celebrate at the end of a long workday, it is a fact but not inevitable that a woman works overtime and nightshifts with still more work awaiting her at home, or even takes work home with her. [. . .] Shortening the work week to forty hours and not exceeding the statutory forty-four-hour work week in the meantime: this is a simultaneous struggle against unemployment and against the excessive amount of work performed by women, a struggle likely to succeed when we implement equal pay for low-paid women workers. It is a fact but not inevitable that women workers are paid far less than men for the same work. These low wages force women to work exceedingly hard to make ends meet, endangering men’s jobs and wages and straining the performance of women’s work to extremes. Equal pay for equal work—this is precisely what will protect women from excessive exploitation in times of crisis and protect men from wage pressure and unemployment. It is also the sole guarantee of a more just division of labor between the sexes. It is a fact but not inevitable that women who fear unemployment must also face aggravated fears of stricter treatment than men when attempting to obtain unemployment support. Nor should they fear being deprived of this support or cut off from it prematurely. Equal treatment in the procurement of unemployment

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support is a vital quality-of-life question for women who are so often affected by unemployment. It is a fact but not inevitable that a woman who works hard the entire day has no proper home or comes home from work to an overcrowded apartment where there is no space to relax, no bedroom, and often no bed she can call her own. Only the design configurations of Vienna’s municipal housing complexes and the creation of single-room dwellings can provide women workers with a dignified home, especially for single women workers who live alone. It is a fact but not inevitable that the woman worker shoulders the entire and relentless burden of her housework, that one thousand women side by side perform the same laborious work to the point of exhaustion. [. . .] The rationalization of housework through communal facilities for cooking and laundry, the cost reductions resulting from the common procurement of labor-saving household devices, the easing of a woman’s burden through the help of all family members—all of these can free her from being worked to exhaustion. It is a fact but not inevitable that motherhood—a heavy enough burden in any case—becomes a daily worry for the working woman well aware that her children are left unprovided for while she works. We need to provide more measures geared toward helping the working mother: more kindergartens and daycare centers; an adaptation of these facilities’ opening hours to the needs of working women; nurseries created for the youngest children and activities provided for the oldest; and mothers who babysit several children while other mothers are at work. It is a fact but not inevitable that the concept of “free time” does not exist for so many working women. We must reduce working hours and ease housework as the first step in making free time possible. From there, the unions must help develop cultural organizations and sports organizations. It is a fact but not inevitable that the working woman, whom we increasingly see not only as self-supporting but also supporting her family, is still not officially accepted as a supporter of her family from the outset. We must stop viewing her earnings only as supplemental income or consider her work less vital and essential. In these times, we will certainly enhance her workplace status with a correct assessment of the working woman’s tremendous social contributions. It is a fact but not inevitable that the beleaguered and torn working woman still suffers under the misconception that the married woman does not belong in the working world. An economic system that leaves women absolutely no choice between a career and housework, that often forces them into difficult and joyless work against their will, and that leaves working women to their fate when they lose a breadwinner: this economic system must not be allowed to deny them the right to earn a living with their own hands. And the working class should certainly not engage in practices that prevent women from working, especially since they still need to earn a living. Every reduction in the number of working women increases housework and pressure on household incomes, deprives further proletarian families of any opportunity to lead a happy existence, and substitutes discord in place of the necessary workplace solidarity. And finally, it is a fact but not inevitable that working women face their career with enmity. [. . .] The survey results pass judgment not so much on a woman’s career but rather on its form within the capitalist economy. No more cries of “Back to the household!” No more attempts to stem the tide of historical developments. Instead, let us work toward the development of other forms of women’s work and toward a lightening of her

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workload outside the workplace: These are the conclusions to be drawn from the results of our survey. [. . .] The lives of working women demonstrate the contradictions and unsustainability of the capitalist economic order. The demands and struggles of working women will help burst the bounds of this economic order.

“A cry for help,” representing women’s powerlessness vis-à-vis the infamous anti-abortion paragraph 144 in the Austrian penal code, Bettauers Wochenschrift: Probleme des Lebens, no. 11 (1926). (Courtesy of University of Vienna.)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SEXUALITY Katrin Pilz

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an outsized reputation as a metropolis known for its pioneering attitudes about sexual practices and sexual health. This reputation was accentuated by the theories of Sigmund Freud, who did not back away from his sexual models even when his disciples—most famously Alfred Adler—vehemently abandoned them. In the 1920s the city served as a destination for sexually forward-thinking individuals and institutions. International sexual reform associations, many of them connected to Vienna in some way, called for “victory of sexual truth over sexual superstition” and “victory of sexual justice over sexual injustice.”1 Progressive sex researchers called for a fundamental change in attitudes and regulations having to do with sexual practices, hoping to overcome “prudery” and reactionary ideas of morality and sexual repression as proscribed by the hypocritical bourgeoisie and by those political and social institutions still dominated by the Catholic Church. Sexuality should no longer be a private matter but considered with its social hygienic, medical, and political aspects. The researchers, leaders, and institutions of Red Vienna promoted the viewpoint that sexuality is both a matter of gender and a matter of class. As early as 1906, Felix Salten’s anonymously published erotic novel Josephine Mutzenbacher, known for its explicit depiction of sexual practices, thoroughly connects sexual experiences, child abuse, and prostitution with housing and living conditions of the poor. The increasing spread of sexually transmitted diseases during World War I and their disastrous effects led doctors, psychoanalysts, and Social Democratic politicians to turn their attention to the sexual lives of workers. Already during the war, they discussed social policy programs and state regulation of sexual health.2 A network of public counseling centers within the Municipal Health Office was gradually established in Red Vienna beginning in 1919 to provide counseling on marriage, family, maternity, and sexual matters from a very strict social hygienic perspective. There was a large selection of popular scientific talks, films, and books aimed above all at educationally deprived working women, mothers, and adolescents. The workers’ press also reported regularly on the modern-day “sexual problem,” “sexual emergency,” and “sexual emotional disorders.” ienna has earned

1

Motto of the World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR), “Einführungswort des Vorsitzenden (Magnus Hirschfeld),” in Sexualnot und Sexualreform: Verhandlungen der Weltliga für Sexualreform, IV Kongress, ed. Josef K. Friedjung, Sidonie Fürst, Ludwig Chiavacci, and Herbert Steiner (Vienna: Elbemühl, 1931), xliii. 2 See, for example, Julius Tandler, “Krieg und Bevölkerung,” Wiener klinische Wochenschrift, no. 29 (1916): 450.

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An interest in notions of love and happiness appeared to be subordinate in the city administration’s program to the dominant themes of health and population policy. More radical ideas of sexuality were formulated by a new generation of FreudoMarxist authors and therapists. Together with the dermatologist and psychoanalyst Marie Frischauf(- Pappenheim) (1882–1966), the physician and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) founded the Socialist Society for Sex Counseling and Research (Sozialistische Gesellschaft für Sexualberatung und Sexualforschung) and their Sex Counseling Centers for Workers and Employees (Sexualberatungsstellen für Arbeiter und Angestellte), which were devoted to psychoanalysis-based emotional and physical counseling, therapy, and research on sexual problems and needs. Women’s rights activists such as Therese Schlesinger (1863–1940) or Marianne Pollak (1891–1963) introduced a gendered perspective on sexuality and combined a feminist critique of the male monopoly over the female body with enlightenment and sexual freedom. Social Democrats grappled with dangers of outlawed abortion, fought out in the efforts to abolish the anti-abortion Articles 144 to 148 in the Austrian legal code.3 The dissociation of sexuality and procreation paved the way for concepts that were only marginally discussed until the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. Theorists saw emancipated sexuality as an expression of a truly liberated society, as in the writings of the dissident socialist author Ernst Fischer (1899–1972) in his book Krise der Jugend (Crisis of youth, 1931). While some of the advancements made in Red Vienna were progressive and led to a modern, tolerant view of different forms of sexual expression, the stance toward homosexuality remained ambivalent. Austrian democratic law retained the controversial paragraph 129 of the imperial penal code which, since 1852, had outlawed “perversions against nature” (Unzucht wider die Natur) including homosexuality and bestiality. Even though thinkers such as Freud and Reich were opposed to the legal prosecution of homosexuals, they considered homosexuality as the expression of a pathological neurosis that should be treated by means of psychoanalytic therapy.4 Red Vienna’s gay, lesbian, and transgender populations thus found themselves outlawed and morally decried by the conservative religious right and pathologized by the Social Democratic Left. The city was nevertheless the home, in today’s parlance, of a rich and thriving queer culture. The enticements and fears of Vienna’s queer residents were portrayed in literary works such as Grete von Urbanitzky’s (1891–1974) 1927 novel Der Wilde Garten (The wild garden) and in scientific works such as Sofie Lazarsfeld’s (1882–1976) Wie die Frau den Mann erlebt (How a woman experiences a man). Vienna boasted a branch of the scientific humanitarian World League for Sexual Reform founded by the German Sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), dedicated to the study and ethical protection of sexual minorities. The underground gay scene not only existed in private circles—such as the salons of the education reformer Eugenie Schwarzwald (1872–1940)— but also in clubs and dance venues, in the women’s auto racing scene at the Prater, and even in the discreet private rooms of iconic cafés and confectionary establishments such as Demel, where the upper classes mixed with artists and other bohèmes.  

Further reading Byer 1987 Förster, Natter, and Rieder 2001 3 See

chapter 12. Wilhelm Reich, Der sexuelle Kampf der Jugend (Berlin, Vienna, and Leipzig: Verlag für Sexualpolitik, 1932), 72–77.

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Gruber 1987 McEwen 2012 Mesner 2010 Pilz 2018 Pirhofer and Sieder 1982

1. Josef Karl Friedjung Sex Education: A Guide for Parents, Teachers, and Doctors Published as Die geschlechtliche Aufklärung im Erziehungswerke: Ein Wegweiser für Eltern, Erzieher und Ärzte (3rd revised ed., Vienna, Leipzig: Verlag Josef Šafář, 1924), 6–10. Translated by Nick Somers. The pediatrician, psychoanalyst, and Social Democratic member of the Vienna Municipal Council Josef Karl Friedjung (1871–1946) called for sex education for young persons as an important step toward the creation of a healthy new generation. In this brochure, he describes the most important objectives of sex education. He starts off, however, with a description of the morality of the Viennese proletariat and the epidemic venereal diseases that had become even more widespread on account of the war. 1. The prevailing sexual morality and its consequences. Just as a doctor cannot cure anyone until he has identified the full nature of the pathogen, we can do little to counter social ills before we have recognized their full significance. If we are to seek new approaches to sex education, we must first be aware of the prevailing situation. The depressing pictures of our culture that I am obliged to describe here are probably well-known, even if people refuse to believe them. They are hidden under the mantle not of Christian charity but of a complicit awareness of shared guilt. Let us take a look at the wretched home of a member of the proletariat. In a small and dirty apartment, the life of the adults, and also of subtenants, plays out shamelessly before the eyes of children of all ages. Obscene language, caresses, sexual intercourse, and births all take place openly in this squalid dwelling; children sleep with their parents, brothers, and sisters share the same bed, the prostitution in the neighborhood seems to be a profitable way of earning a living, even if it is frowned upon. – [. . .] In school, there is nothing more entertaining, even for young children, than to talk about sex, which their parents deliberately keep secret from them, and about conception and birth, even if the ideas that circulate about them are sometimes far-fetched. These lewd conversations and the many available opportunities tempt both boys and girls to experiment with sex at an early age. While still barely out of childhood, they contract venereal diseases, and the girls get pregnant. Adolescent girls and boys, even those from “good” families, often entertain themselves in ways that arouse their sensuality without gratifying it. – A few years later, prostitution becomes a necessity for men and an attraction or object of envy for girls. Dirty jokes have always been appreciated in “better” society; men roar with laughter at them and women giggle as they retell them. Marital fidelity is mocked by men, and for women marriage becomes a convenient institution for concealing other “relationships.” At the same time, the sexual needs of old maids and widows are more sneered at than pitied. Smutty books and plays are bestsellers. – Priests, if they are honest, can only

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look on perplexed at this need. It cannot be exorcized with speeches about morality. The Catholic clergy themselves are entrusted with dealing with this sexual misery, which they are unprepared to address. When they do attempt to address the problem, they rely on the same well-worn strategies. Hand in hand with this morality is a terrible epidemic of venereal disease in all civilizations. Increasing industrialization, the rapid growth of the cities, compulsory military service, and most recently the terrible war have had a frightful impact in this regard. There are two main diseases: syphilis, which can have serious consequences for the sufferer, his family, and surroundings; and gonorrhea, or the “clap,” which in view of its usually chronic course and prolonged transmissibility is less well-known but no less calamitous. Men get off relatively easily, despite occasional local afflictions, joint inflammation, heart complications, or dangerous eye infections. But the poor women! The socalled “women’s diseases” in all their forms, going as far as fatal peritonitis, are mostly caused by gonorrhea. Both men and women can become infertile, newborn children can easily lose their sight, and girls of all ages are infected in their mother’s bed or through other forms of inattention. And these evils are widespread. Both older and more recent statistics from various countries show that on average every thirty-year-old man will have had two bouts of gonorrhea and that one in four or five will also have been infected with syphilis. Looking at specific samples, it turns out that even before the war, a considerable number of patients were adolescents under the age of eighteen—ten out of one hundred in Prague, for example—not to mention the fact that most youths fail to consult a doctor, because they are ashamed, afraid, or irresponsible. During the war, the numbers increased alarmingly as adolescents were conscripted into the army or engaged in responsible, well-paid work. In 1919 twenty-eight out of one hundred patients with venereal diseases treated free of charge in Berlin were still boys. The situation in other cities is not much different. And the next victims are women. Zieler in Würzburg, for example, reports that the number of men with venereal diseases is three times higher than it was before the war, and the number of women has increased eightfold. And young girls! In Vienna in 1918 there were around 1,800 girls aged between thirteen and fifteen suffering from venereal diseases. Of the 2,374 women arrested in 1919 by the vice squad in Vienna for illegal prostitution, 804 were underage and 373 children, all inevitably exposed to venereal infection.

2. Karl Kautsky Jr. Marriage Counseling as a Welfare Service First published as Karl Kautsky, “Die Eheberatung im Dienste der Wohlfahrtspflege,” Blätter für das Wohlfahrtswesen der Stadt Wien 24, no. 248 (March/April 1925): 26–27. Translated by Nick Somers. In 1922 the Vienna Municipal Council decided to establish a Marriage Counseling Center (Eheberatungsstelle), which opened on June 1 that year at Vienna City Hall. The Social Democratic city government saw marriage as a welfare and health-related question. This is demonstrated by the counseling service’s affiliation with the Municipal Welfare Office and its official name, Health Counseling Center for Engaged Couples (Gesundheitliche Beratungs­stelle für Ehewerber). It also reflects the tendency to link sexuality primarily with reproduction and to regard it from the point of view of genetic health. The gynecologist Karl

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Kautsky Jr. (1892–1978), son of the prominent German Social Democratic politician Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), was the head of the Marriage Counseling Center. He frames its function in a discourse on reproductive hygiene. Although this article links reproductive hygiene with maintaining the workforce in a biopolitical manner, Kautsky’s underlying aim was to combat poverty and misery. However, his text also reveals the role that preventive demographic policies played in the discourses of Social Democratic thought. A feature of our modern era is that the vast majority of the population are economically and spiritually uprooted. In a revolutionary process over centuries, the old ownership situation has been discarded, and all that is left for the mass of workers in the cities, and to a large extent in the countryside as well, is their labor. If this becomes impaired, unusable, or unmarketable, the individual, be he sick, invalid, old, or unemployed, is completely reliant on others, as is his family if its members do not work. These others, who are now responsible for the family’s welfare, cannot act as individuals but only as members of a society constructed for that purpose and the only structure with the necessary resources to provide large-scale and appropriate aid. This support is needed on account of the great political, moral, and health-related dangers posed by the existence of a significant section of society with no welfare benefits. The larger their number becomes, and the less adequate a charity-based welfare system may be, the more imperative the need for large communities, such as municipalities or the state, to take charge of the welfare system themselves. War and the inflation caused a huge growth in the number of dispossessed people but also hugely strengthened their political power, thereby increasing the need—but also the possibility—for developing the welfare system. Welfare was extended to many new areas. Not only did it now cover the sick (tuberculosis, venereal disease and alcoholism), but efforts to prevent healthy people from becoming sick also gained in significance. All social relations became objects of welfare, and every step in a person’s life was to be monitored. The care was ultimately expanded to those who were not yet born or even conceived. The large army of those who have naturally fallen victim to the social diseases of our time should not be supplemented by those who bear the stigma of disease or retardedness from birth and are condemned to a life of torment and invalidity. Our efforts in this respect must be backed not just by sentimental considerations but also by sober realistic political ones, not least because the blind, crippled, and mentally ill—who are for the most part the children of sick parents—represent a huge financial burden for every community. With this in mind, the Marriage Counseling Center was established in the Vienna Municipal Health Office by City Councillor Prof. Tandler (June 1, 1922). Since then it has grown considerably and has become a counseling service for all health-related marriage and sexual hygiene questions. It is not only engaged and married couples who want counseling but also people seeking enlightenment on normal or pathological manifestations in the area of sexuality. This is a good thing, because the Marriage Counseling Center should not be just a place for monitoring health. The service should also teach people about health. It is all too little recognized that marriage demands not only different kinds of social, emotional, and financial preparations but also health-related preparations. Countless marriages are unhappy because they are dogged by the sickness of one or the other spouse or their children. The economic structure of a marriage is threatened, along with the health, happiness, honor, and social status of the spouses. The sick themselves are endangered—above all women!—if the marriage imposes new burdens or demands sacrifices. The ability of women to reproduce is particularly

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threatened if they do not enter into the marriage with completely healthy organs, especially if they have heart, kidney, or pulmonary diseases, or deformed or misshapen reproductive organs and pelvis bones. The health of the husband is endangered above all through infectious diseases by his partner (tuberculosis, syphilis, gonorrhea). His enjoyment of life is also jeopardized by impotence, perversity (homosexuality!) or the infertility of his partner, and his economic and social prospects are marred by alcoholism or mental disorders. The children are primarily threatened, of course, by infectious diseases from their parents. Tuberculosis is normally passed on to the child by cohabitation with tuberculous parents. Syphilis is contracted in the womb, often resulting in the child’s early death. Gonorrhea in the mother is one of the most frequent causes of child blindness. It is not only diseases that can be passed on to children, however. They can also inherit a poor genetic disposition, which often manifests itself only in later life or in the next generation. There are a number of these hereditary or family diseases and dispositions (eye and ear problems, metabolic diseases, mental and nervous diseases), which often take on different forms in different family members. They can include epilepsy, feeble-mindedness, alcoholism, a tendency to prostitution, as well as diabetes, gout, obesity, or kidney stones. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure!” We no longer wish to place our fate in the hands of higher powers, but we ask all individuals to take responsibility for important steps in life. If they are not capable of seeing the full nature of this responsibility, it must be suggested to them that they have an obligation to seek professional help. It is not the task of a counseling service to allow or forbid marriages—it can only give advice. What others do with this advice is their affair. Marriage counseling cannot replace their responsibility, but it can help them to bear it to the best of their ability and, if something untoward happens despite the counseling, it can at least spare them the torment of self-reproach: “Why didn’t I seek help?” Marriage counseling always tends to seek a realistic and feasible approach and spurns dogma of any kind. It can often find solutions more easily than individuals can find for themselves in their desperate circumstances, because it is objective, nonpartisan, and calculated, while those seeking advice are driven by their emotions. The counselor must objectively reconcile the demands of the community with those of the individual, and he can make compromises by waiving a societal demand in return for the renunciation of a personal one. For example, a mentally ill person can be allowed to marry if he agrees to a small intervention to make him infertile. He does not have to sacrifice his individual happiness, and society is protected from his retarded children. What he does as an adult with his adult wife is their joint responsibility alone. But children do not ask to be born and would have to carry the burden imposed on them by their progenitor. It would be senseless to forbid these people from marrying, because no one can prevent two people from uniting even without marrying. Similar information must be given to syphilis sufferers, although in this case it is often extremely difficult to determine whether the disease has been completely cured. At all events, the entire social and emotional situation of those seeking counsel must be taken into account. Marriage counseling is not pure medicine but applied medicine in the truest sense of the word. And like politics, this is always the art of the possible. The welfare system of a city such as Vienna has many points of contact with marriage counseling. The city and the counseling community have long worked together on venereal disease and tuberculosis care with the clinic for alcoholics and with prenatal care. The task of the welfare workers, who visit all the families in a district and are often very well informed about their health situations, is to send all of those in their district who

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want to get married or have health-related questions about their marriageability to the Marriage Counseling Center. They must also provide counseling for marriages that are unhappy for health reasons or because the parents are dealing with sick or retarded children. Marriage counseling is offered twice a week (Tuesdays and Fridays from 5 to 6 pm) in the Municipal Health Office, I. Rathausstrasse 9.

3. Therese Schlesinger On the Evolution of Sexuality First published as “Zur Evolution der Erotik,” Der Kampf 16, no. 11 (1923): 368–71. Translated by Nick Somers. In this essay, the Social Democratic politician and feminist Therese Schlesinger writes about the work of the bourgeois feminist Rosa Mayreder (1858–1938) on the sexual and cultural battle of the sexes. She also addresses sexual equality between men and women and the nature of female sexuality. In her reading of Mayreder’s work, Schlesinger highlights the independence of the sex drive from the desire to reproduce, and of reproduction from marriage. She presents her vision of sexuality and sexual attraction on the basis of gender equality between comrades. A free development of proletarian sexuality will, however, only be possible after exploitative capitalism has been defeated. In her discussion of reproduction and hereditary diseases, Schlesinger rejects eugenics as a viable course of action. Rosa Mayreder emphatically rejects the claim that while male sexuality has to go through a protracted development process that leads from an uncontrolled basic instinct to a sexuality directed exclusively toward a single individual, the emotional and physical drives in female sexuality have always been so balanced that in a normal woman this sexuality can only be aroused by loving a particular man.5 She argues that this claim, originally made as a result of the male desire to restrict women’s sexual freedom, stands in sharp contrast to the supposedly less developed female intellect otherwise so eagerly asserted by most men. In reality, the evolution from primitive sex drive to strictly individualized sexuality has been no less protracted in women than in men, even if the requisite phases have been modified by the social position of the two sexes. At the lowest level of development, a woman feels unilaterally committed to the man. At the second stage she recognizes only a mutual commitment based on legal norms. Only at the highest level of development can men and women feel the kind of love between them that has been glorified by the poets. Only on this level can love function as a passionate spiritual urge that can break the self out of its solitude, overcoming personal barriers to unite the self with another person. The price for the feeling of inner liberation produced by such a union is a mutual dependence, which Goethe considers to be the best state of a relationship. The author defines love as “a change in the perception of the self, enabling an individual to form an emotional and organic unity with an object existing outside of itself.” The relationship between sex and reproduction has also changed during the course of this development. At no time and at no level of development has the sex drive been 5 Original

note: See Rosa Mayreder, Geschlecht und Kultur: Essays (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1923); and Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit: Essays (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1922 [1905]).

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connected with the desire to reproduce. For eons, primitive people were unaware of the causal link between sexual intercourse and birth. Because of its opposition to carnal desire, marriage is the only state morally condoned by Christianity except, of course, for complete abstinence. Marriage is condoned for the purpose of reproduction, but the survival of a marriage is not in any way linked to successful reproduction. There are, however, still some philosophers, sociologists, and legal scholars today who refuse to see marriage as anything but the proclaimed and socially recognized desire to reproduce the species. “Not only onward shalt thou propagate thyself, but upward!” said Nietzsche,6 attributing to marriage the task of creating a “superman.” Rosa Mayreder rightly replies to him and other racial breeders by pointing out that we have no control over the laws of heredity. Neither physical nor intellectual qualities are transferred in a straight line from parents to children. The characteristics of grandparents or even distant relatives are very often determinant. If all of these possibilities were to be taken into account, hardly any couple could be pronounced with a good conscience as fit for marriage. So much the worse if you consider the individual dispositions involved, both that of the chosen partner and also those of the relatives on both sides, three or four steps back from the original couple. But although it is often said that sexual attraction is an expression of the natural desire for children, this claim is not well founded. When it comes to love, the faults and defects in the chosen person are not only regularly overlooked but even transfigured, which is hardly consistent with the presence of an unwavering instinct for selection. [. . .] It would, of course, be foolish to deny that powerful emotional forces have always been at work both in the evolution from the primitive sex drive to the sexual cultures of our civilized society and in the feminist movement. But these forces can only have been nourished in suitable economic surroundings. Rosa Mayreder clearly points out how little space the capitalist order still allows for the higher development of sexuality and how, up to this point in history, sexual development has only been available to a small group of people. But what applies to sexuality also applies to every other moral and aesthetic refinement and improvement. They have, up to now, all remained confined to a small minority, while the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the majority from all classes have for the most part remained firmly rooted in a state of barbarity. The war and its aftermath have made this situation significantly worse in all countries. More than ever before, some people have been brutalized and insensitized by surplus, others by lack and worry, and both by the most uncompromising struggle, be it for wealth or for the means of survival. How few are those who find the time for self-reflection and for consideration of what we need to grow and flourish, not only intellectually but also emotionally. It will take an economy that creates insurmountable barriers to the tendency toward greed, an economy that banishes the fear of becoming poor, it will take a socialist order to make people realize how much their most serious interests have been neglected in the past. It is only under socialist rule that most people will be in a position to harness the newly liberated powers and use them to develop themselves into nobler beings.

6

See Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen“ (Chemnitz: Ernst Schmeitzner, 1883), 99.

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4. Marianne Pollak Women’s Issues at the Sexual Reform Congress First published as “Frauenfragen auf dem Kongreß für Sexualreform,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, September 29, 1930, 3. Translated by Nick Somers. The Fourth Sexual Reform Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform took place in Vienna at the Konzerthaus from September 16 to 23, 1930. The city’s newspapers reported daily on the lectures and other events of the congress, including speakers like Julius Tandler, Rudolf Goldscheid, Adelheid Popp, and Wilhelm Reich. Magnus Hirschfeld gave the opening speech and praised the success of the city’s housing and welfare policies and its positive effect on sexual reform.7 In her essay, the Social Democratic journalist Marianne Pollak (1891– 1963) discusses the changing sexual demands of the New Woman and shaken masculinity. Pollak also addresses the contradictions in bourgeois sexual morality, which bans abortion but stigmatizes single mothers. Vienna has been host to a week-long congress of men and women seeking to reform our ideas of morality and our entire attitude toward sexuality. With the hypocrisy and stultification that still persist, a good deal of courage is needed to address this most sensitive area of public life. We should be all the more grateful that the participants have dared to do so, since we women will benefit more than anyone else from the work of the congress. Male morality. Rudolf Goldscheid, who discussed the problem of sexuality at the congress from a sociological point of view, spoke of the morality of the ruling class. Outside of the ruling class, morality is still oriented toward the sexual needs and the sexual dominance of men. An increasing number of women are now beginning to oppose this. Experience has shown that there is barely any issue which unites the participants more vociferously than the subjugation of the female sex. Timid mothers, unaccustomed to speaking in public, stand up to be heard and to accuse their oppressors. Young, barely mature girls have the courage to speak defiantly in spite of the large audience. They all sense, without perhaps realizing the full significance, that we are at a moment of change in the conception of morality, that we are heading toward an era of gender equality, in which the most intimate areas of life will no longer be a question of domination and subjugation. In this new era, the limits of personal freedom will be determined solely as a function of the welfare of the community. We are not there yet. Today, many women are no longer willing to suffer in silence, but they are not yet free enough to shake off accustomed habits. The first generations in this transition period will have to bear the brunt of the evolution toward this new, as-yetundefined sexual morality, uncertain as individuals, impatient as a sex, waiting in ambush to pounce. In these last years, our entire sex life has consisted of nothing more than an experiment repeated a million times. We have succeeded in shaking the established foundations, 7

See Sexualnot und Sexualreform: Verhandlungen der Weltliga für Sexualreform—IV Kongress, ed. Josef K. Friedjung, Sidonie Fürst, Ludwig Chiavacci, and Herbert Steiner (Vienna: Elbemühl, 1931).

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but the whole experience has remained confusing and contradictory, especially for progressive women. While consciously rebelling against sexual slavery and wishing to do away with it, these women are in conflict with their instinctive historical constitution. They constantly run up against existing social structures. They are confronted by a generation of men who, as the sexually dominant parties in the past, will only give up their sexual prerogatives under duress. The new feminist principles, hitherto unknown and impossible for women who were completely dependent economically, are uncomfortable. The easiest way to avoid them is to ignore their proponents. Thus the modern woman is often condemned to abstinence or to disappointment, because she now demands that men sublimate their sexual urges and because she can no longer be satisfied with an unsophisticated kind of eroticism. Very young people, however—those who are helplessly searching and changing—these young people have an even harder time finding a happy balance in this new sexual freedom. They are not yet able to come to terms with it. There is no doubt that male morality is declining. But for the generations that will have to live through it, the sexual twilight of the gods will initially be nothing more than a time of unease and questioning. Coercive childlessness and coercive childbearing. In a talk about the unmarried woman, Sidonie Fürst coined the term coercive childlessness. The society in which we live forces women to bear and bring up children, even if they do not wish to. At the same time, it brutally rejects hundreds of thousands of unmarried women and condemns them to childlessness, however much they yearn to become mothers. We all know that there are girls who are more attached to their child than to their husband. But our immoral economic order, which demands throngs of proletarian children as cheap machine fodder, still has the nerve to despise any woman who has a child without being able to give it a father. Today’s sexual hypocrisy manages to criminally prosecute the termination of a pregnancy while at the same time branding every pregnancy by an unmarried woman as immoral. Are these not intolerable contradictions? It will become increasingly difficult to demand of women that they should be child-bearing slaves on the one hand and demand that they be denied the opportunity to be a mother on the other hand; that they should be coerced into pregnancy on the one hand and coerced into childlessness on the other hand. It is inhumane to deny the joy of motherhood to a woman who desires it. It is just as inhumane to force a woman to become a mother if she does not wish to. Only an era in which motherhood is recognized as a contribution to society will show appreciation for the mother by safeguarding the child’s welfare. Only in an era that recognizes the economic equality of men and women will unmarried women be able to satisfy their yearning for motherhood. Then, however, people will no doubt recognize as well that there is no greater nobility for a woman than to bring up a child on her own.

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5. Sofie Lazarsfeld Gynophobia (from How a Woman Experiences a Man: Thoughts from Others and My Own Observations) First published as “Angst vor der Frau,” in Wie die Frau den Mann erlebt: Fremde Bekenntnisse und eigene Betrachtungen (Leipzig, Vienna: Verlag für Sexualwissenschaft Schneider and Co., 1931), 217–19. Translated by Nick Somers. The individual psychologist Sofie Lazarsfeld (1882–1972), a student of Alfred Adler (1870– 1937), opened a marriage and sex counseling office in Vienna in 1925. She used the experience gained there for her research into sexuality. Her book deals with the role of sexuality in gender relations and the changes in it through the emergence of self-aware and independent women. With her guidebook she wants to counter the fact that previous material about sex education was written “by men, for men, from the standpoint of men.” In my counseling sessions I made the interesting discovery that only men who are very confident of their sexuality are attracted to independent women. In fact, it is almost possible to determine the sexual confidence or insecurity of a man from the degree to which he is erotically or otherwise attracted to independent women. In judging this confidence, we should not be misled by how confident he appears. Sexually competent men are often very reserved in their courtship, particularly when they also have other merits, while in many cases forwardness in men is nothing more than overcompensation and an attempt to hide their fear. This only works to a certain extent, however, and when the matter is put to the test in practice, women who have been deceived in this way find their sexual expectations most embarrassingly frustrated. Women who wish to determine the sexual confidence of a man are sincerely advised to find out whether he is attracted to independent women. His reaction is an easier way of discovering something about him than by other means. It is not so much what he says, however, but rather his attitude and how he acts. It seems that men frequently claim to be ardent supporters of women’s liberation but are themselves attracted more to unliberated or uninteresting women. In this area more than elsewhere, theory and practice very often diverge. If you want to know a man’s real views on this question, you should not believe what you hear (a good piece of advice, incidentally, in all circumstances) but rather consider the women he finds attractive. If he allows himself to be sexually attracted to interesting women, you can be fairly sure that he is confident of his own sexuality. This does not mean, of course, that he might not be attracted to uninteresting women, but rather that insecure men are put off by women with a strong personality and that only a confident man is unafraid of entering into an erotic adventure with a woman who is his equal or even superior to him. In my counseling sessions I have sometimes encountered men who complain that in spite of their desire to meet worthwhile women, they invariably end up with uninteresting ones. They ultimately come to the candid realization that in fact they only dare approach the latter and always end up backing off from the former, however often they appear to be attempting to get to know them.

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6. Grete von Urbanitzky The Wild Garden First published as Der wilde Garten (Leipzig: Hesse und Becker, 1927), 122–24. Translated by Rob McFarland. In her novel The Wild Garden, writer and journalist Grete von Urbanitzky (1891–1974) creates an explicit representation of lesbian love. The literary form of the novel provided her a space to transgress the moral and legal constraints of her time. The author displays feminine desire and a lesbian awakening through the use of a relationship triangle between the selfconfident artist Alexandra, the shame-plagued high-school teacher Dr. Südekum, and the teenage pupil Gertrud. Urbanitzky was the cofounder and general secretary of the Austrian branch of the PEN Club, but her biography is tainted by her attitude toward National Socialism: in 1933 she spoke out against critics of the Nazi book burnings in Germany, although it did not take long for her own works to appear on the list of forbidden literature. “But I am—for the love of God!” The blood hammered so loudly in the small woman’s temples that her own voice seemed to come from a great distance. “I am a woman—I mean, a girl, yes, a girl who has grown old. And Gertrud? You are completely out of your mind, Frau Alexandra. This is all a tasteless joke!” “You big child,” smiled Alexandra. [. . .] “I do not know the path that led you to this love. [. . .] No, I do not know you well enough for that. But I do know that it is love, and I know that you desire this girl.” “Desire?” The tiny woman jumped to her feet, turning deathly pale. “No, I should not have opened my mouth. You have misunderstood me. You are thinking the most deplorable things! You must be insane!” [. . .] After a moment of silence, filled only with the sound of her own heaving breath, Frau Dr. Südekum continued quietly, with her face averted: “And you believe that this really exists, love between a woman and a woman?” “Does love not exist between a prophet and a disciple, between humans and stars, humans and animals, between humans and flowers? Is it not a current that connects all things?” Alexandra stepped up close to the little woman and leaned in over her so that the woman could see only her clear eyes in the darkness above her. “Don’t we humans love each other because everything—humans, animals, crystals—are all damned to the same fate because we all must die? And yet we are supposed to dither about the reasons why we love? And we should forbid ourselves from loving?” The small woman straightened herself and with an enormous amount of effort that nearly took away her breath, she asked a question, as if everything depended upon the answer: “Yes, humans and . . . but I mean this love that you were just describing, this desire—love between a woman and a woman—is that not an abomination?” Alexandra looked irritated at the febrile little person in front of her. Poor little moth, she thought. How scared she is, beating her little wings around her. “How sick is your way of thinking,” she said quietly. “In another sense, maybe you are right. For there is such a thing as vice. That is what happens when weary lust searches after new thrills, when the brain becomes the slave of the appetites and always

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has to find new titillating variations. That may very well be an abomination, I am not familiar with it. [. . .] But we are speaking about love. What pathway can possibly be forbidden, if it is truly love?” The answer was almost inaudible. “And what is love?” “Love is that thing that wants more than mere lust, that lust which only desires itself and those that provide it. The thing that forces us death-damned mortals to rise higher, the thing that makes all of our works here worth doing, worth living, that which makes us wildly happy.” And again the hesitant voice out of the dark: “And you really believe that . . .” Alexandra’s answer sounded impatient: “She who is afraid should crawl into the cracks and corners left to her by the law, the law that was created for for herds of human sheep. Those who love belong to God and stand above the law.”

7. Ernst Fischer Crisis of Sexuality (from Crisis of Youth) First published as “Krise der Sexualität,” in Krise der Jugend (Vienna, Leipzig: Hess and Co. 1931), 33–70. Translated by Nick Somers. Against the background of the social upheavals following the war, the sexuality of the young postwar generation was an issue of dispute within the Social Democratic youth movement. The writer and journalist Ernst Fischer (1899–1972) regularly published critical essays on the question of young people in society. He was part of the left wing of the party and criticized many of the party’s policies. He claimed that bourgeois society was in the throes of a chronic crisis of sexuality. Bourgeois hypocrisy, Fischer argues, is joined by a new kind of hypocrisy being perpetrated by the Social Democratic youth movement: even though the movement idealized the comradeship between the sexes, it sought to repress the free, open sexuality that was made possible by this comeradship. Has sexuality ever been spoken, written, fussed about so much as in this century? Have there ever been so many obvious problems with sexuality? Has the “question of sex” ever arisen so often in discussion? This generalized and persistent interest in discussing sex is worrying. It proves that something is not right. Few people unreservedly affirm an enjoyment of their sexuality; most grapple with their suffering and need. And young people fight with dogged passion for new forms of uncontrolled sexuality. Every culture has imposed laws and conventions about sexuality, attempting to curb and control the sex drive and to put it in the service of society. Every culture has therefore dealt with the problem of sex. But a genuine crisis of sexuality came about only when lifedenying religions such as Christianity linked sex with sin, condemned everything physical, overvalued everything spiritual, and thus divided love into diabolical and divine elements, into the evil lusts of the nether regions and the pure ideal of an unblemished community of the spirit. This crisis has never been overcome since then. It was exacerbated by the dilution and evaporation of all elemental passions in civilization, by the changing intellectualism, by the rejection by women and the revolt by the young against the double morality of male society. For a long time, no one spoke about sex, and it became a smoldering undercurrent. Now that sexuality is finally breaking through the crust of silence, it is precariously

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unraveling. Talking about a problem is not the same as solving it. It would seem at first as if talking about sex would allow us to focus upon the problem in all of its complexity, as if its completely catastrophic nature only manifests itself when we are made aware of it. The masses of young people find themselves at this stage of the sexual crisis; hundreds of thousands have been roused from their hazy uncertainty and stagger in wild confusion through the bright light of realization. They will have to accustom themselves to the light. They will have to see the difficulties in it. They will slowly learn to master the difficulties. After the war, the chronic crisis of sexuality in bourgeois society became acute. The incursion of the front generation into the fragile hinterland world, the independence forced on women and young persons owing to the absence of men, the uncertainty and abruptness of life, with death waiting closer and more threateningly in the wings than ever before, the collapse of petty bourgeois conventions, the cultural rise of the working class—all of this has destroyed the stability and permanence of human relations. And sexual relations have become as problematic and crisis-ridden as life as a whole. Since the war, all social crises have become acute; the crisis of sexuality is only a refined manifestation of a more general cultural and social crisis. It exists in people’s consciousness. There is no way of ridding ourselves of this knowledge. There is, however, a way forward: toward experimentation and an attempt at systematic restructuring. The situation before the war was different—better, according to all reactionaries. It was no doubt simpler, as the contours in a landscape are simpler in the mist than they are in a thunderstorm. Sexuality was not a problem for the proletariat; the proletariat youth had neither time nor inclination to regard it as such. The reaction to the opposite sex was strong and clear; there were terrible things going on in the small apartments, in the stuffy atmosphere created by people living on top of one another, but bourgeois society knew too little of it to abandon its bourgeois morality. Proletarian children learned the facts of life and were “enlightened” at an early age and quickly set about solving the problem of sex on their own. As they became women, the girls were taken by the boys and men, in most cases remaining unsatisfied, without knowing that they could experience gratification. Vague ideas about romantic love (the dream portrayed in kitsch novels, the dream of an elegant gentleman, an officer, or a prince charming) soon gave way to the sober reality (one pregnancy after another, one child after another), work, and rapid decay. Women are constantly heard to say: “Men want only one thing; it’s the only thing they enjoy!” Sexual pleasure is the prerogative of men; most women feel little and are condemned to physical indifference, pleasure machines, work machines, childbearing machines. No attention is paid to women’s sexual gratification, and the possibility of it is largely unknown. Many of these women become hysterical, seldom acknowledged and seldom allowed to express themselves clearly. This luxury is afforded to rich ladies; the proletarian woman has no time for such extravagances, no outlet for the deep-felt dissatisfaction that is her innermost essence. Only a dull instinct tells her that she is being denied all the pleasures of life; the external and internal needs use up her body incredibly quickly, but she accepts it meekly, submitting to her incomprehensible fate. For the proletarian man, women are colleagues at work, lovers in their free time, and objects to be exploited in marriage. These men yearn for a petty bourgeois existence: kitsch at home, kitsch morality, cheap art prints on the walls and cheap art prints in the heart, everything copied from the petty bourgeoisie, if it allows him to escape from the worst misery. In these proletarian families that mimic the petty bourgeois world, women and children have no say. The husband and father is an absolute tyrant, trifling prejudices inhibit private life. The girls’ virtue is closely guarded, extramarital intercourse

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disapproved of, sexuality forced into secrecy and dark corners. The young are rebelling against the petty bourgeois ideals of their parents, who manifest a superficial socialist identity in public but who wield excessive dominating power in the home. The youth movement is beginning. [. . .] After the war, the young rebelled against the hypocrisy of the old, revolting against the old bourgeois double standards. Both the youth movement and inflation’s hedonistic bohemians demanded a more casual, less formal interaction between the sexes. But the results to date have been disappointing. Too much was expected of the revolution, the speed of change was overestimated, and a provisional solution rather than a new harmonious life has been discovered. The reaction is now being clearly felt: countless young people have lost their way in the sexual maze and would prefer to turn their backs on freedom and return to the narrow confines of the old morality. “Free love is finished!,” the shady characters hiss in the background. But has there really ever been “free love,” not on an individual basis but as a social phenomenon? Is it true that the youth cannot bear this “freedom,” or is it just the illusion of freedom that has become unbearable? Youth suffers from an apparent freedom in sexual relations. This apparent freedom, this pretense at a way of life, which exists as a possibility but not in reality, is unnerving and dispiriting. The young are no longer watched and shut in as they were; young boys and girls go swimming or hiking together, play sports, attend discussion events, work in schools, offices, and organizations, have hundreds of opportunities every day to see, talk, and touch one another—but the imagined freedom does not exist. The major problems of housing, pregnancy, membership in a peer group, and the economic and psychological inhibitions that they feel are stronger than the so-called freedom to meet and desire a partner. One lie should be exposed at the outset. Some people claim that the constant mingling of the sexes, the swimming, the hiking, the skiing, all of this extensive comradeship stifles rather than arouses sexuality. These people are simply afraid of the truth. Comradeship arouses sexuality, the naked beauty of young bodies in the water and the sunshine, the glowing skin, and the nearness of the flesh, the atmosphere in camps and youth colonies are erotically charged. The possibility for sexual gratification arouses the desire for it. Why deny this? Why conceal it? Not even in the twentieth century is humanity so impotent that it can regard the full-blooded contours of the human body with aesthetic distance rather than slight arousal. But humanity deceives itself, and many spokespersons for the youth movement play along with the deceit because sexual desire and sexuality are still regarded as inferior. The young wanted to show the moral hypocrites that it was possible to go hiking, swimming, and camping together without the “unspeakable” taking place. Their spokespersons even claim that mixed company suppresses sexuality and immunizes young people against its temptations. But by doing so they are merely replacing an old form of hypocrisy with a new one. The truth is that halfway decent, healthy young people desire one another, and that “pure” comradeship is possible only when the boy sees the girl as a comrade and nothing else. This does not mean that every young man would like to sleep with every young woman he encounters at work, in the organization, in a youth group or the youth movement, but it does mean that he might be attracted to her, or vice versa, at least for a moment, and that erotic stimuli are aroused, unless physical aversion or a pathological disposition prevents it. In many youth movement groups this has been disputed as foolishly as it has been exaggerated in others—neither to the advantage of the young. Today a generation is

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suffering from the consequences of the imbalance between the apparent freedom of mixed comradeship and the distance between the sexes in reality, which was and still is the fate of countless young people.

8. Wilhelm Reich Politicizing the Sexual Problem of Youth (from The Sexual Struggle of Youth) First published as “Politisierung der Sexualfrage der Jugend,” in Der sexuelle Kampf der Jugend (Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig: Verlag für Sexualpolitik, 1932), 123–50. Translated by Nick Somers. Together with the dermatologist Marie Frischauf (1882–1966), Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) ran several sex counseling and research centers in Vienna beginning in 1928. The six Sex Counseling Centers for Workers and Employees that they set up were part of the Socialist Society for Sex Counseling and Research and free of charge for clients. They provided empirical data for research on contraception, venereal diseases, and pregnancy termination, as well as “sexual conflicts and neuroses.” 8 In this excerpt, Reich describes how proletarian families are also tied to bourgeois sexual morality. Even Communist agitation, which Reich now openly supported, had not yet dared to counter the bourgeois morality with an “affirmative sexual ideology.” Reich published this work in Berlin, where he had moved in 1930 after being excluded from the SDAP. Where were we all brought up? Under what circumstances did we grow up? We were brought up in families and grew up in the capitalist system. It might be objected that there is a great difference between proletarian and bourgeois families. But it is not as simple as that. We must first ask in what way a proletarian family is proletarian and in what way it is bourgeois. We do not need to reflect long to come up with an answer. We only need to untangle and study the individual strands of the mindsets and lives of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Have we liberated ourselves from the bourgeois ideology of property ownership? Yes, extensively, because in terms of ownership there is a marked difference between bourgeois and working-class families. Have we liberated ourselves completely from religion? This is not so simple. There are thousands of religious proletarian families, and the more closely we observe the petty bourgeois proletariat, the more deep-seated this religion seems to be. And what about sexual morality? Is it not rooted in the nature of the family itself, which the proletariat is forced to recreate because of the conditions of life in a capitalist society? Are sexual repression and the implantation of bourgeois sexual morality, as we have already defined them, not components of bourgeois marriage and family? It is true that there are very great contradictions between the way of life of a worker and the bourgeois family morality to which he is subjected, contradictions that are absent in the middle and grand bourgeoisie. But this bourgeois sexual morality exists in the proletariat, and of all the bourgeois ideologies it is the one that is most firmly 8 See Wilhelm Reich, “Erfahrungen und Probleme der Sexualberatungsstellen für Arbeiter und Angestellte in Wien,” Der sozialistische Arzt 5, no. 3 (1929): 98–102; Marie Frischauf and Anni Reich, Ist Abtreibung schädlich? [Is abortion harmful?] Schriften der sozialistischen Gesellschaft für Sexualberatung, no. 2 (Vienna: Münster-Verlag, 1930).

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grounded, because it is implanted most firmly from earliest childhood. It is one of the most powerful pillars of the bourgeois ideology within the oppressed class. We see every day and every hour that even class-conscious young persons have the greatest difficulty shaking it off. Bourgeois sexual morality sits much deeper in our communist bones than we would like to believe, it leads us to see sex as something that is not natural, self-evident, or an integral component of the social order, but to deny it, to be afraid of and coy about it. We should not be deceived by sexual posturing, the opposite of coyness about sex, which is merely bourgeois sex life in reverse. Lenin was quite right when he described the “glass of water theory” as “bourgeois.”9 It is a question of the sexual inhibitions that we have all internalized because of the repression of sexuality. This repression is linked to unconsciously suppressed attitudes that have made us lose control over our own sex lives. And those are the deeper reasons why we have not officially and systematically addressed the question, why not one of us, even those with great insight, has dared to include the slogans of sexual freedom in our propaganda. We must learn to understand why even some communists begin to smile so strangely and make that particular face whenever the subject of sex is raised. We need to put an end to all this, however difficult it is for us to overcome our own inhibitions. The closer we study our unenlightened youth who have no class consciousness, the greater the inhibitions we will encounter in this regard. But experience will show, as it already has done in individual cases, that the more we are capable of overcoming the sexual inhibitions and moral prejudices of the young, the easier it will be for us to teach them the necessary political knowledge. We will only be successful in this project if we offer a clear, affirmative sexual ideology to counter the hypocritical and negative bourgeois ideology. Many reactionary beliefs will be destroyed in this battle, first, because the Christian and National Socialist youth have no solid argument to hold against us; and second, and more importantly, because they not only deny their own sexuality but also affirm it—in secret.

9

Reich refers to a verdict attributed to the radical Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai that free sexuality should be as natural as drinking a glass of water.

Part V Social Engineering

“Complete image of the frontal skeletal musculature,” depicting the average person as strong and active—perhaps a kind of workers’ athlete—who obligingly showcases his body for the benefit of science and the general public. Julius Tandler, Lehrbuch für systematische Anatomie, vol. 2 (Leipzig: C. W. Vogel 1923), plate 266.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

HEALTH CARE AND SOCIAL HYGIENE Birgit Nemec

A

person’s medical-biological condition,

health, and future development were central themes in Red Vienna. Guided by the assumption of a deep impact of external factors on the healthy development of people, scientists and scholars dealt with these issues not only in the biological and medical sciences but also in the fields of philosophy, politics, pedagogy, economics, and urban planning. Rather than being studied in isolation, Max Adler’s (1873–1937) New Human became the smallest component of a greater social and biological unit—made up of the family, the city, and the society of the future—and was approached with innovative and multidisciplinary methods. Projects such as Julius Tandler’s (1869–1936) textbook for anatomy were developed with the goal of understanding the structure and function of the New Human. These new insights formed the basis for improving both people’s bodies and the communal “body,” through hygiene, education, and democracy. Some of their achievements are still with us today: the construction of municipal kindergartens, measures to rehabilitate or resettle areas that pose a health risk, and the development of a medical infrastructure—all date back to that era; and some of the anatomical images conceived by Tandler can still be found in anatomy textbooks. This chapter highlights the theoretical foundations, practical manifestations, and dissenting voices surrounding the configurations of health and the body in Red Vienna. In the early twentieth century, social policy experts, doctors, and scientists in many cities were devoted to improving public health (then often referred to as “hygiene”) and called for proactive measures in environmental and social fields as well as in eugenics. Red Vienna intellectuals such as the anatomist and city councillor of welfare and public health Julius Tandler, the sociologist and political economist Otto Neurath (1882–1945), and the biologist Paul Kammerer (1880–1926) argued that the development of the individual and society is closely linked with its environment (i.e., the city), and that the key to human renewal lies in practical conclusions from experimental biological, epistemological, demographic, economic, and urban development research. This was similar to Ernst Mach’s (1838–1916) neutral monism and Rudolf Goldscheid’s (1870–1931) concept of human economy, and it also took its cues from Darwinian evolutionary theory as well as from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s (1744–1829) theories of evolution through the passing of acquired characteristics. Experimenting with innovative methods, researchers and progressive social reformers tried to determine the precise effects that changes in the environment had upon changes in the development of an organism, as well as the ratio of fixed to

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flexible factors in evolution. Another hallmark of public health care in Red Vienna was how it was promulgated and popularized throughout the city with the help of Otto Neurath, who used his influence and position as the director of the Social and Economic Museum (Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum) to develop an innovative, visual form of public health education, driven by science and philosophy. The practical manifestation of these concepts—of the body and of the health of the city’s inhabitants—was guided by, on the one hand, emancipative and class-militant ideas, as in the case of Neurath, and on the other hand, the paternalistic and utilitarian notions of health politics, meaning the attempt to achieve the greatest benefit to the majority of the population by means of extensive governance. These administrative approaches aroused criticism among contemporaries, especially (but not only) among political opponents.1 For example, critical commentaries appeared periodically in the right-wing newspaper Freiheit! (Freedom!). The commentaries took issue with the city’s regulation of the bodies of its citizens, such as in the 1928 caricature that showed Julius Tandler commanding the patients of the municipal nursing home: “If I hear any more complaints, I’ll lock you away in the closed-up welfare house.”2 The ambiguity between choice and coercion referred to here can be attributed to a large number of theories and practices relating to the transformation of the city’s inhabitants into New Humans. Tandler’s work in particular shows how radical, and at the same time inconsistent, the leading ideas in medicine and biology were. Only when the National Socialists came to power would a fatally negative form of eugenics—one that heavily discriminated against people who were perceived to be “inferior” by excluding them from reproduction, and potentially by sterilizing or even killing them—become enshrined in the law and stand at the center of a biopolitical state doctrine. The opinions collected in this chapter document the ways that health reform, everyday city life, and social togetherness remained controversial in spite of their inarguable effects in many areas. Further reading Baader, Hofer, and Mayer 2007 Exner 2004 Lipphardt 2008 Logan 2013 Mesner 2010 Sablik 2010 Taschwer 2016 Weindling 2009

1

See, for example, the critique of Rudolf Brunngraber, Social Democrat and author, in his novel Karl and the 20th Century (New York: W. Morrow, 1933), 310. See also chapter 25. 2 Anonymous, “Militärischer Rapport im städtischen Versorgungsheim,” Freiheit!, May 15, 1928.

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1. Adele Bruckner At the Tuberculosis Care Station First published as “In der Tuberkulosenfürsorgestelle,” Die Unzufriedene, December 12, 1925, 3–4. Translated by Peter Woods. One of the central concerns of the Social Democratic city government was the improvement of health care for as much of the population as possible. In the aftermath of World War I, the people of Vienna faced catastrophic health and sanitation conditions, including a tuberculosis outbreak so severe that it was dubbed the “Vienna disease.” This led welfare workers such as Adele Bruckner to promote the newly organized municipal facilities and provisions for combating this disease. References to political conflicts—as well as topics relating to Social Democratic reform, such as social housing construction—illustrate the broad spectrum of issues that were considered part of social hygiene at this time. Moreover, they demonstrate how biopolitical policy managed by the municipality—serving as the link between small-scale interventions geared toward individuals and large-scale, health-policy visions—shaped this phase of the successful development of a largely free health-care system for all citizens. Long before the doctor sees the first patient, the large waiting room is filled with people waiting for advice and, far more important, treatment. Men, women, and children of all ages sit on white chairs. A humming fills the room, making it difficult for the female welfare worker to make herself heard. There are patients who have been under observation at the care station for a long time, and there are “new” ones who are only now about to find out whether—and to what degree—their lungs are compromised. Patients here come from all walks of life, although the better part of them is, of course, working class. Women outnumber the men, like everywhere else. There are also plenty of children. The doctor gets to work. A few patients of the same sex step into the examination room. As long as the people are roaming around in gowns, you can hardly tell how much their bodies have deteriorated. Once those coverings are stripped off, however, their all-too-often emaciated and work-worn bodies are revealed. The doctor taps, listens, taps again, then listens once more. A result of “negative” is extremely rare; as a rule, significant defects of the respiratory system are found, brought on by a number of the adversities of life and magnified by daily abuses. Women are in considerably poorer health, although it is less noticeable in their cases because women are hard pressed to look after their own well-being. The men and the children come first, after which the women are only too happy to forget that they, too, are in need of rest. Unfortunately, children and adolescents represent a very large portion of patients with lung disease because they do not get enough light, air, sunshine, and good nutrition, all of which are known to promote good health. To the extent that it is at all possible, the sick are being sent to sanitoria and recovery facilities. The various statutory health insurances are involved in many of these kinds of shelters, as occasionally are the societies for the disabled. Men tend to glow with enthusiasm when they are told that they will be sent away for healing or recovery, and even the children are happy about it. The women are, by and large, the only exception. The full weight of household responsibilities falls on women, after all, along with caring for  

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the family and, often, the need for making household purchases. For this reason, women usually ask the doctor not to be sent away or to be sent away “later.” The doctor must often explain the situation multiple times in order to help these women understand that the illness is much easier to treat in the beginning stage than it would be if they tried to wait it out. Women are relieved of caring for small children, the little ones being housed safely by the youth offices [Jugendämter] while their mothers are away. But these women and mothers still have a thousand reservations before the doctor can successfully convince them that they are of better and longer-lasting help to their families if they stay healthy. A stay at the sanitorium has such a beneficial impact, and it would be wonderful if everyone who visited the tuberculosis care station had access to such humane living conditions at home as well. Patient complaints always revolve around a central point: their miserable apartments. A woman comes to be examined: “How large is your apartment?” the doctor asks. “The size of a closet.” “How many people live there?” “Six: three adults and three children, sleeping in two beds.” Another woman explains that her apartment is so wet that the furniture is constantly rotting. (And the public enemies that call themselves the Christian Socials want the workers to “squeeze in” so that the landlords can make more money.) A female patient comes in, glowing, and it is clear that something especially nice must have happened to her. She reports that she has been assigned an apartment in a new municipal housing complex, and now the children can sunbathe. How fortunate! Many of those seeking help have already been examined, received their instructions, and been called back. With a three-month stay in a sanitorium, many will escape the murderous dust and smoke of the big city for a time. But even this is only a tiny fraction of the help. Humane working conditions naturally stoke the demand for better living conditions, and better living conditions can be of lasting assistance. When it is possible for children to live apart from their tuberculosis-stricken parents, then it is likely that the possibility of those children getting sick is very small. But as long as a large family has access to only one room for all of their needs, as long as light and sunshine remain life essentials that must first be prescribed, and as long as there is inadequate nutrition, we must be satisfied with the achievements of placing people in surroundings that encourage good health. The care facilities of the city of Vienna are exemplary in the fight against the Vienna disease. It would be wonderful if working people could finally reach a standard of living that would make all of these caregiving measures unnecessary.

2. Alois Jalkotzy The Children Accuse Us: Letters from Children on Corporal Punishment First published as Die Kinder klagen uns an! Kinderbriefe über die Prügelstrafe (Vienna: Jungbrunnen, 1925), 1–37, 47. Translated by Peter Woods. Child abuse was a grievance that was publicly discussed as part of the Social Democratic educational reform. At the same time, the psychic and physical damage suffered by children exposed to violence in their families was also an issue from a public health perspective. This source illustrates the world in which children lived, referencing contest submissions to the Social Democratic women’s weekly Die Unzufriedene (The dissatisfied woman), which

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was published by Max Winter (1870–1937), the chairman of the Free School Association— Children’s Friends (Verein Freie Schule-Kinderfreunde), and dedicated itself to feminist topics. The magazine encouraged children to report on their experiences with violence by offering them a book prize. The letters, published by the pedagogue and secretary of the Children’s Friends, Alois Jalkotzy (1892–1987), served as the basis for educational work with adults and was intended to deliver arguments for a violence-free family environment. They provide rare glimpses into children’s everyday and sociohistorical life and show how scientific fields—empirical social research and pedagogy—were connected to socialist ideology in the domain of health care. Grasp, above all, the inadequacy of this account and my own inexpressible incapacity, for I want to be heard and joined by people who, like me, can no longer bear it. —Gustav Landauer, Call to Socialism

[. . .] Dear children, Since its founding, Die Unzufriedene has often spoken to your parents about how they should treat you, and the magazine has noted again and again that corporal punishment is not an appropriate form of punishment. Now, we would like to know what you all think about this. Write to us and speak your minds: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Have you ever been beaten? By whom? Do you think that this sort of punishment is proper? How do you feel that you should be punished, if you decline to be beaten.

[. . .] We have opted not to draw any conclusions in this book and not to evaluate the letters. Perhaps we will have the opportunity to do this one day in [our journal] Sozialistische Erziehung. We want to let the children speak and let their voices go undisturbed. The impact of their accusations should be felt with full force. Who has the audacity to contradict them? [. . .] M. K. F. in V[ienna]., 7 years old, Grade 1a 1. I’ve been smacked before 2. By my mother, but they weren’t hard ones. 3. I’m learning at school that you are not supposed to hit animals, so why do they hit us kids? 4. When I Dear Unzufriedene: By coincidence, I came across this letter from my little girl, who was probably unable to finish writing it because she got sick and is now in a convalescent home. You wouldn’t believe, dear Unzufriedene, what a shameful effect my child’s last lines had on me, that our children are the ones who have to tell us not to treat them worse than animals. Many mothers will feel the same way that I do. Thank you, dear Unzufriedene, for being such a kind advocate for our child and for your appeal, as many children will be spared beatings going forward. Friendship M. F. in V[ienna]. X[th district].

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[. . .] A. W. in L. 9 years old, 3rd grade I have been beaten. By my mother, my father already died. I do not think that this punishment is proper. Getting hit just makes you angry. My mother telling me that she’ll send me to the orphanage helps a lot more. [. . .] G. H. in W. 13 years old. 2nd grade high school [. . .] Dear Unzufriedene: 1. It did happen in the past that I got hit, but only very rarely. My father cannot help it because he has a very violent temper. He doesn’t hit me at all anymore, however. At most he will yell a bit, but he does not even do that anymore. He is getting kinder and sweeter all the time. 2. I was only hit by my father. 3. I think that corporal punishment is a very bad way to punish someone. It is so course, and I do not think that it can make a person better. Once, when my father wanted to raise his hand to strike me, I yelled at him: “Father, are you a Social Democrat? Social Democrats don’t hit their children!” I think I was a bit too sassy back then.— 4. I think that you can accomplish a lot more with kindness and love than you can with corporal punishment. There are many better ways to punish someone, like my mother does, for example. If I am disobedient or am bad in some other way, she reprimands me with a few stern words and then does not speak to me for a long time. This hurts me much more than being beaten. Or if I do something bad, she explains to me how to do it right and why it is right to do it this way, and then she does not punish me at all. I have made up my mind about it, and I am never going to hit my children. I am just going to raise them with kindness and love. Best wishes! from G. H. [. . .] To all of our parents: I. Often we need reprimand, But beatings, harsh or mild? Punishment, by belt or hand: Who’d do this to a child? II. When will you understand it? A smack goes to the core. We really cannot stand it, don’t beat us anymore! Now you have your answers, and I will close this with a hearty “friendship.” An avid reader: St. W. 13 years old, 2nd grade secondary [school] in V[ienna]. [. . .]

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Afterword. If a reader has made it to the end of these letters, having actually read all of them, without being disturbed by their telling uniformity, then we ask that reader to linger a moment and contemplate. We were only able to let a very few children speak here. Their accusation, however, is irrefutable. What are these few voices compared to the immeasurable indictment of all children! Truly immensurable! [. . .] And one more important statement: not one of these children is speaking after having just been beaten. What must children be thinking and feeling while they are being beaten . . . Reader! Consider these two facts. And if reading these simple children’s letters has made an impression on you at all, then you must know that the reality is surely even more appallingly grim, infinitely more horrible. And adults dare to speak of beneficial beatings, some making corporal punishment a priority of child rearing. Truly, they know not what they do. And the children have neither the right nor the intention to forgive them. Human society cannot forgive them. There is a lot here, in fact, almost everything, that must be made right. Hurry, for the sake of your children before it is too late. We have much to do. So do you!

3. Philipp Frankowski and Rosa Liederer The City of Vienna’s Kindergartens First published as Philipp Frankowski and Rosa Liederer, Die Kindergärten der Stadt Wien, ed. Jugendamt der Stadt Wien (Vienna: Deutscher Verlag für Jugend und Volk, 1932), 7–16. Translated by Peter Woods. Alongside hospitals, the municipal kindergarten represented a core area of Vienna’s social hygienic infrastructure. In this informational brochure for the kindergarten, the city of Vienna promoted the idea of developing the smallest city dwellers on the basis of biological, medical, bacteriological-immunological, pedagogical, dietary, urban planning, and architectural concepts that are of great significance for an understanding of contemporary approaches to social hygiene. Using metaphors from the field of biology, the kindergarten is described as a place of physical transformation, and this characterization can be transferred to other places and institutions as well. The idea was that a child would leave the kindergarten having improved physically and mentally but would also trigger improvements at home and in the community at large. This assumption illustrates the importance that people placed in the public health–related concepts of generational transfer and the idea that external influences shape development. The text reflects contemporary debates that surrounded environmental and behavioral hygiene. Moreover, it demonstrates that science and social policy were considered to be closely linked in Red Vienna. One example of this is the implementation of the NEM (nutritive elements in milk) system,3 developed by Vienna professor for pediatrics Clemens Pirquet. The goal of this system was to nourish starving children after the war, and it became a leading concept internationally as well, such as in the League of Nations’ Committee for Infant Welfare. 3 The

unit “NEM” stands for Nähreinheit Milch (literally, “nutritional unit of milk”). One NEM is the nutritional equivalent of one gram of milk.

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The 100th kindergarten. If you want to see the most beautiful garden in Vienna, you have to go to the outskirts of the city where its reaches fade into the hills of the Vienna Woods.4 The streetcar conductor on the J 2 line calls out the final stop: “Sandleiten.” We are right on the border of the Ottakring and Dornbach districts. In front of us is a new residential area which not that long ago was but a desolate, sandy area to which the region owes its name, “Sandleiten.” A big, wonderful housing complex was developed here by the city of Vienna, and in the middle lies the resplendent garden that we want to visit. The street that leads the way is called “Rosenackerstraße.” This might lead you to believe that we will soon come across a field of roses, but there are no radiant flowers waiting for us, only buds: budding humans in the garden of life. Just a few more steps and we are standing at the entrance to the most beautiful kindergarten in the city of Vienna. It is the 100th in the long line of these exemplary facilities. (Vienna now has 111 kindergartens). The architect, Erich Leischner of the Municipal Planning and Building Office, approached his work with particular diligence and zeal, and his superior achievements in architectural design and sanitation distinguish this exceptional creation. [. . .] At the entrance we are greeted with the words of Professor Julius Tandler, head of the Municipal Welfare Office of the City of Vienna, who has made lasting contributions not only to this kindergarten but to the entire city’s public welfare infrastructure: “Give the child beauty and happiness. The experiences of childhood can never be erased.”

[. . .] And beauty and happiness truly are waiting beyond the glass doors that separate the outside world from this blissful island that the city of Vienna has given to its children. Those who accompany the little ones may go no further into the building than those doors. Those who enter through the glass doors must first slip into the provided overshoes. This and other sanitary measures have helped to keep the children of this facility healthy. [. . .] Once a child is accepted, they join in the bright, sunny life of the kindergarten. In the morning, the children say goodbye to their escorts and first enter the atrium of the building, which looks like an enormous picture book. The well-known painter Professor Arthur Brusenbauch brought all of his art to bear in service of the children. [. . .] The great frescoes on the walls, pillars, and ceiling show us colorful flowers and cheerful scenes from every season of the life of a child. Life and happiness are welcome everywhere! Then it is off to the coat rack in the wide, bright hallway that divides each of the two floors into two parts: The south-facing section is full of sunlit rooms, each of which opens out onto a large terrace, and the north-facing section includes several adjoining rooms equipped with state-of-the-art furnishing, fixtures, and appliances. [. . .] Now the children are standing in front of the coat racks (four per floor for the same number of divisions), where hooks and lockers are all lined up in orderly rows so that the children’s clothes, coats, and shoes can all have their regular spots. Hygiene is the 4

Located on the western edge of Vienna, the Vienna Woods comprise a large network of forested hills that serves as a popular recreation spot for many Viennese.

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keyword here as well. Street clothes and street shoes carry street dust, and so they remain outside, along with all of the harmful germs that accompany them. The children adapt easily to changing in and out of their streetwear in cheerful company. After all, a child’s personal hygiene gets more attention at home when a mother knows that her child will have to change their shoes and clothes at kindergarten. [. . .] Now the children enter the washroom where it is time to wash up and brush their teeth. [. . .] Being able to wash their hands in the wall-mounted sinks with hot and cold running water is certainly a great pleasure, especially when they get to dry off again with their own, “bunny-brand” hand towels. They use the pretty cups in the gleaming cabinet, and the accompanying toothbrushes, to learn how to gargle and brush their teeth. Finally, the children visit the impeccably clean and well-equipped restrooms. Now there is nothing else keeping them from entering the day room. [. . .] After completing these necessary first tasks, it is time to line up for morning gymnastics. Clip-clop go the children in pairs to the great hall, which can be made larger or smaller by sliding a wooden screen. [. . .] Yet again a veritable flood of light pours in from the large, wide windows that look out onto a garden where an obelisk, decorated with images of children making music, waves at the children inside. The brilliant sculpture was created by the sculptor Wilhelm Fraß. The gaggle of children is soon keenly involved in their morning gymnastics. The athletic pants fit loose and light on the body, are always clean since they are laundered on-site, and keep the children comfortable in the thoroughly aired-out rooms, which are kept cozy and warm through a central heating unit and thoroughly ventilated. The children learn on their own to decline the overly warm and burdensome underclothes that anxious mothers like to press on them in winter. The morning calisthenics follow all the rules of modern gymnastics for children. They consist of marching practice, exercises to strengthen the various muscle groups, as well as jumping, balance, and breathing exercises. Alongside these physical exercises, the children also use this hall for exercises designed to strengthen their rhythmic and auditory senses. The little ones earnestly nod their small blond and brown heads to the beat of a song or a piece of music that the kindergarten teacher plays for them. They clap along, march or skip in alternating steps, and after a surprisingly short time they have learned how to keep rhythm. [. . .] This is how it goes until lunch, which is delivered ready to eat by the Vienna Public Kitchen Service [Wiener öffentlicher Küchenbetrieb, WÖK]. In the kindergarten’s big, bright, spick-and-span kitchens, the food is served out for the individual portions and placed in big bowls. First, however, they return to the washroom to clean up again. Even the comb, located in the little bag decorated with pictures, has its chance to shine. The little blond and brown heads have gotten a bit tousled while the children were playing, and the small personal combs help with that. Now the tables are set with white tablecloths, and plates, utensils, and napkins (again, each one to be found in a little pouch decorated with the child’s mark) are distributed. Then the little boys and girls are sitting happily, filled with expectations at the lunch table. [. . .]

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After merrily reciting a proverb together and wishing one another “bon appétit,” the meal can begin. The meal itself is not only delicious but also prepared in strict accordance to Professor Clemens Pirquet’s famous “NEM” system, to ensure the children get the calories and nutritional value they need from their meals. Once the last plate is empty, it is time to clear the table. The tablecloths and napkins are folded and stored. [. . .] All that work calls for a break, so it’s off to the midday rest period! Soon the children are all stretched out on low sleeping cots that were set up in the great hall ahead of time. There are no blankets or pillows here. Not only are they unnecessary in the temperaturecontrolled hall, they are also carriers of harmful dust and germs. Before long, everything is as quiet as a mouse. After work and play, the children can enjoy a lovely nap. In summer this is especially true, as the sleeping cots are set up on the large terrace, with the light, air, and sunshine wafting around the little sleepers. [. . .] A fresh, clean breeze blows from the Vienna Woods across Dornbach, and radiant sunlight shines down on the gleaming building, its windows and verandas decorated with climbing plants. In the lush garden, however, it is children who grow and flourish so that they might one day blossom, to the joy and pride of all, for their beautiful home town [Vaterstadt] of Vienna, the city that can be seen from the rooftop of that very house, stretching out far and wide. This kindergarten is ideal for encouraging the natural development of these young ones. Here they will become healthy and robust, for “with a healthy body comes a healthy mind.” School, with its new and greater demands, will come after the carefree time of kindergarten, and they will be well prepared to meet those challenges. The needs of our time surely mean that, in many cases, the home is not a place where our youth can receive the education they vitally need and deserve. The kindergarten provides these children with the things that they must do without at home. It arouses a sense of order, social feeling, independence, and joy in both work and play. The little ones return home to often-gloomy surroundings, but they do so with joyful hearts, sharing what they have learned and passing on what has become a matter of course for them. In this way, the blessings of this most wonderful of gardens shines into the bleakest and most meager apartments. It should be both calming and comforting for everyone in these dismal times to know that our growing children are safe in such places of happiness and love. It is to the even greater credit of the municipality of Vienna that it has summoned the courage, the will, and the means—in spite of the difficult situation in which we find ourselves—to create opportunities for protecting our children from the looming dangers of a large city.

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4. Paul Kammerer Organic and Social Technology First published as “Organische und Soziale Technik,” Monistische Monatshefte 6, no. 5 (May 1921): 165–67. Translated by Peter Woods. Active research in the field of life sciences in Red Vienna shaped visions of the New Human and helped to develop new biopolitical strategies. Biologist Paul Kammerer (1880–1926) is best known for research on organic plasticity in early twentieth-century evolutionism and for experiments supporting the inheritance of acquired characteristics. These experiments were conducted using hundreds of species in the aquariums and terrariums at the Biological Experiment Station known as Vivarium. One of his claims was that forcing midwife toads to mate in water induced the males to develop “nuptial pads” for grasping the females. This adaptation was then passed on. The following epistemological essay provides an enlightening picture of how he sought to translate results from experimental biological research into progressive social reform. Kammerer—who spread his ideas in popular science, pacifism and sociopolitical studies—warned against the deterministic view of heredity promulgated by radical neo-Darwinians (who went so far as to suggest the discrimination or even killing of undesirable individuals). In contrast, he urged eugenic action with respect to the neoLamarckian premise of a flexible, pliable body, the aim being the evolutionary improvement of human beings and society through adaptive changes induced by external drivers (in the environment and in the city).5 However, the text leaves open the question of how improvements to organic development could be achieved in practice. Long ago, before an era that we can classify as the beginning of modern technology, people saw a puppeteer behind every natural phenomenon. They saw God or a spirit staging everything, and they populated the trees with dryads and the waters with nymphs. They imagined Aeolus blowing the winds and Zeus wielding thunder and lightning. But the more that human beings themselves assume control of nature, the more control they wrench from the hands of the gods. We all know that priests once decried lightning rods and steam engines as sinful, and they now call rejuvenation surgery a sin, because all of these things take away their own power. [. . .] Technologies that subvert the power of nature may render it godless, but they do not, as we might fear, demystify nature or disenchant us humans. Coincidentally, we can safely make a comparison between an engineer and a magician. One is an astounding master of props who inspires the illusion of supernatural forces; the other rejects deception, yet in explaining the nature of the forces that he exploits to accomplish his enormous feats, he surpasses all the magic tricks of the West and the East. All of this mastery applies to the control over dead material, to inorganic forces. When it comes to living material and its forces, however—especially when it concerns their own flesh and blood—people continue to see a demon, a divine spark, before whose apparent omnipotence they lie on their knees, powerless. [. . .] The result is that our control over nature essentially stopped with the control over inorganic nature. We have mastered metal and stone, water and steam, gas and electricity, 5 Lamarckism

is the theory that an organism can pass on characteristics acquired during its lifetime to its offspring. It is named after the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829).

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but we have not mastered life and living beings. Our technology remains mechanical; in the broadest sense it is machine technology. The inventor’s achievements are many: they allow him to move the weight of mountains with the press of a finger, to speed to the depths of the sea and the heights of the air, and to transform dark night into day. And yet, the inventor remains baffled by the machinery of his own body and mind. He has a fair knowledge of the mechanism of his organism in terms of its appearance and function, but he is unable to start it up, and he can neither slow its course nor change its direction. Of course, the art of medicine offers a certain approach to a kind of organic technology, as do games and sports. Medicine and hygiene, however, are limited to curing illnesses. They do not even extend to methods that might improve upon the healthy condition that humanity’s current level of development has already made possible. An engineer can look over his machine, patch it up, and improve upon it dependably. By comparison, the doctor must content himself with uncertain searching and fumbling. And if the goal is to one day put organic technology on an equal level with the inorganic technology of today, relying on physical exercises alone to accomplish this is like expecting an herbalist to suddenly be able to perform surgery. Nevertheless, medicine and hygiene (especially eugenics) are producing methods that could one day put us in control of both the individual body and the social body, just as we can already control inanimate, natural bodies. We are now testing cures and interventions on animals that we hope will one day heal the suffering of human beings. Nothing speaks more highly in favor of the view represented here than the relationship that the inorganic and organic sciences have developed. Sooner or later, every science goes through certain stages. The first of these is conception (speculation), followed by description, then comparison, explanation, and finally control. If we include the explanation stage, as long as it involves an understanding of the causes, then the last two stages—the highest ones—are methodically linked to systematic experiments. At a time when the organic sciences (anatomy, zoology, botany) knew only of description and comparison, the inorganic sciences (physics and chemistry) became experimental, able to explain the causes and thereby control the effects. Only since around 1894 (when Wilhelm Roux founded the Archive for Developmental Biology6) and 1903 (the opening of the Biological Experiment Station, at the initiative of Hans Przibram and Portheim7) have we been able to experiment in the area of life research, which has already done a victory lap in America after its success at American universities. Meanwhile, in Europe it is primarily limited to individual research institutions outside of the university system. Only the application of experimental biology can lead to the development of organic technology, just as the application of physics and chemistry led to the development of inorganic technology. I recall several examples: the grafting of ductless glands offsets dwarfism and mental degeneration (cretinism), and the transplantation of reproductive glands offsets hermaphroditism and sexual degeneration (homosexuality). Mild radiation treatment of the ovaries increases the ability to nurse and eases the aches and pains of old age, and ligation of the genital pathways even leads to rejuvenation. Breeding 6 Wilhelm

Roux (1850–1924), a German anatomist and embryologist, specialized in developmental biology. 7 The Biological Experiment Station (1902–1945) in the Vienna Prater was a center for innovative biological research. Hans Leo Przibram (1874–1944) was an Austrian zoologist and experimental biologist. He bought the building of the old Vivarium in the Vienna Prater together with his friend Leopold Portheim (1869–1947), a wealthy botanist.

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experiments in genetics reinforce our knowledge of how to have children who are truly “wellborn,” and in the future perhaps even “most nobly born.”8 By continuing along this promising path, we will expand the reach of organic technology for the betterment of the individual and expand the reach of social technology for the betterment of the generation. As I said before, the beginnings of organic technology that exist today are rooted in experimental biology. Even social technology has its roots and origin, which can be found in the science of sociology. However, this technology still has a long way to go before it reaches the conditioning experimental stage, for it has barely reached even the descriptive or comparative stages. It mostly remains in the speculative, preparatory stage; put differently, it has yet to undergo even the necessary shift from the humanities to the sciences. The “experiments” that sociology carries out with people are based on measures whose assumed or prescribed practicality is made up or has yet to overcome the most ancient formalities. In this way, sociology is just as far from being a true social technology as the alchemy of the bygone era was from our modern agricultural chemistry and chemistry of coloring. After the World War, peace has brought a new-found joy for work and a renewed sense of security in terms of our lives and in the things that we possess. They will help cultivate those barren wastelands of human development which are so crucial for the development of humankind. What unimagined blossoms and fruit will they now produce?

5. Otto Neurath The Viennese Method of Social Enlightenment First published as “Soziale Aufklärung nach Wiener Methode,” Mitteilungen der Gemeinde Wien–Städtische Versicherungsanstalt 9, no. 100 (1933): 25–33. Translated by Peter Woods. We cannot talk about health care in Red Vienna without also thematizing the remarkable ways in which it was popularized and promulgated. The chief protagonist was Otto Neurath (1882–1945), director of the Social and Economic Museum. He designed a Vienna Method of hygiene education, as part of his Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, that categorized the bodies and the health of the city’s inhabitants in the context of political development, demography, statistics, economization, infrastructure, and urban planning. Beginning in the 1920s, Neurath’s small and large exhibitions were on display throughout the city, in various municipal buildings as well as at the city hall, with the goal of convincing residents of all social and educational backgrounds to take a proactive role in their hygiene. While the health of the individual was depicted as primarily dependent on larger social—and particularly economic—conditions, there was a conscious attempt to differentiate Red Vienna’s hygiene education efforts from what were seen as bourgeois forms of adult education, such as the wellknown German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. Popular education evolves gradually, as part of the modern economy. [. . .] 8 Original note: See my: Lebensbeherrschung, Grundsteinlegung zur organischen Technik (Hamburg: Paul Hartung, 1919, 2nd ed. 1921) and Das biologische Zeitalter, Fortschritte der organischen Technik (Vienna: W. Müller, 1920).

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Hygiene education developed out of the technical education movement at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The big hygiene exhibitions gave rise to the development of hygiene museums and a growing literature on hygiene, all of which contributed to public enlightenment. Just as the technical museums demonstrated how machines and other technical tools function, the hygiene museums shed light on how the human body functions, as well as on the methods that individuals can use to protect themselves against diseases. However, this sort of enlightenment does not touch upon the general question of how we can integrate technology and hygiene into society. Nor does it address the social conditions surrounding the questions of technology and hygiene, or their effect on social and economic life overall. It is not only important that people know how fast a train can transport its load; it is even more important to know how many more people are using public transportation than before and how large-scale development of transportation will impact their lives. A large part of all hygiene improvements depends upon increasing nutrition, improving housing, and other social measures. If we build a lot of baths, we do not need a specific propaganda campaign for bathing. Building baths, however, is a social phenomenon. Simply investigating the effect that bathing has on an individual will not help people understand the social phenomenon. Above all, most people are interested to learn why scarcity and misery come about in times of the greatest technological progress. They are less concerned with the precise functions of a technical tool that a particular engineer happens to invent. When we burn our coffee or throw it into the sea, when we destroy the cotton and scrap the machinery and millions of unemployed people starve, then we will have lost more in terms of health and happiness than the application of technological and hygienic methods can ever replace. [. . .] If we are to be able to spread this kind of social enlightenment, we will need special tools. In this highly visual era, consideration should be given first and foremost to museums, exhibitions, images, and films. But while we can successfully illustrate technological and hygienic relationships through photography, models, and profiles, our evolving society demands specific and innovative methods. We have to try to show the fluctuating nature of production and consumption, and we must illustrate how cuts to the workforce are connected to efforts to economize. Social engineers have to teach us how birth and death rates and immigration and emigration cause a population to grow or diminish. They have to teach us how infant mortality rates and tuberculosis death rates of entire cities can be reduced by improving our living conditions. In nearly ten years of work, the Social and Economic Museum in Vienna has developed a system of pictorial education that is particularly significant for social enlightenment, but it is also relevant for many different disciplines. [. . .] People walking down the street should be able to familiarize themselves in passing with the newest social and economic data, as well as have a look at the available postings, such as the weather chart that will inform them about their prospects for taking a trip. [. . .] We want to achieve an “Esperanto of images”—to use an American expression—not a collection of confusing, Babylonian-style pictographs. In order to do this, we must cultivate and develop the methods of pictorial statistics in a centralized manner. Vienna has become a leader in this area, just as it is in many others. The city of Vienna— along with its affiliated institutions, the Vienna Chamber of Labor and the social security institutes—has initiated this movement in a caring manner, and the movement is now taking a victory lap worldwide. The movement has brought about major innovations in

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schooling and popular education, especially in providing information to the illiterate. It is only a question of time before pictorial statistics becomes a tool of education that is used widely and is familiar to all.

6. Margarete Hilferding Motherhood First published as “Mutterschaft,” Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung 31, no. 1 (1922): 6–7, and no. 2 (1922): 4–5. Translated by Peter Woods. Biological, social-hygienic, and eugenic theories were carried over into everyday practice in various ways. The Social Democratic doctor Margarete Hilferding (1871–1942) developed a family planning program for working women which she promoted through articles in the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung (Working women’s newspaper), through health education courses for women, and through municipal hospitals. She also promoted her family planning ideas through the Education Counseling Center, building upon the work of Alfred Adler and his Individual Psychology movement (see chapter 7). While Hilferding campaigned via scientific discourse for a liberalization of abortion, she recommended birth control to women as a method of improving the health of their children. Thus, we see the appeal to family planning as a way of increasing earning capacity and economic profitability, even framing it as a political duty. This reflects the paternalistic and utilitarian features of Red Vienna’s health reform debates. Living beings are endowed with the ability to reproduce. Individuals are able to transform a part of their body mass in such a way that they are capable of leading an independent life and becoming capable of reproduction once again. Among lower animals, such as corals, reproduction occurs asexually by shedding a gemmule from the body. Reproduction among the higher animals occurs sexually, in other words through the union of the female reproductive cells (eggs) with the male reproductive cells (sperm). [. . .] When it comes to birds, which incubate their eggs, we differentiate between nidicolous and nidifugous birds. The young nidifugous bird is able to find food for itself as soon as it hatches from the egg. It is well developed, already has its plumage, and the role adopted by the parent birds after hatching is closer to that of an educator than a caregiver. [. . .] Human children are born at a stage of development that leaves them dependent upon their parents for many years after birth. This goes even beyond their need for sustenance by means of their mothers’ milk. The inability of human children to provide for themselves—and the resultant need that they have for their parents to care for them—lasts until they are able to work, which at its earliest begins when they are fourteen years old. Thus, we see among all living things that the young require special protection to ensure their development. This protection takes many forms. It can involve the production of such a large number of embryos that—out of the whole constellation of embryos sent out into the world—enough of them will survive in order to ensure reproduction. Another means of preserving life is to leave the young in an area with good conditions (in places where hatchlings can find food), or parental care may serve to protect the newborn. The fewer embryos, the more protective measures must be taken to maintain them. The more embryos, the more their development can be left up to chance.

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We may ask ourselves now how reproduction is ensured among human beings. [. . .] When a woman reaches sexual maturity, between the ages of ten and fifteen, the possibility of becoming pregnant exists with each episode of sexual intercourse. [. . .] The following, unusual formula [. . .] holds: the more pregnancies a woman experiences, the fewer children she has. This formula holds, in a certain sense, for raising our children in general. After all, the more children there are, the more unfavorable and difficult the living conditions in the family become, and the more devastating are the results of malnutrition, illness, insufficient care, and a mother’s inability to nurse. If, after twenty to twenty-five pregnancies, only three or four children reach sexual maturity, then all of the other pregnancies were for nothing. They constitute a ruthless exploitation of the woman, a ruthless exploitation of her body and soul. In economic terms, however, they also constitute a wasted capital investment. Yes, wasted in terms of human capital—the mother—as well as in terms of material value that was pointlessly wasted. Raising even a small number of children is hard work, sufficient for filling up a woman’s life. The woman of today has a double burden—forced as she is by current circumstances into paid employment as well—and this makes her life difficult to endure: the job will not be fully completed, the raising of the children will suffer, or the woman, in striving to do right by both of her duties, will collapse. The instinct for self-preservation demands that, of these three possibilities, the raising of the children will suffer the most. Women are refusing to take on the role of motherhood, and not only superficial women who want a comfortable life and are incapable of self-sacrifice. No, it is precisely the best and most capable women, the ones who are imbued with a mother’s love and a mother’s care, who are increasingly recognizing that they will not be able to fully enjoy their motherhood. Instead, they are choosing to remain childless. This flight from motherhood that we have experienced in recent decades presents demographers with a serious concern. But not even our party can be indifferent to the fact that a socialist future is being robbed from the very people who are carrying it forward. The key issue of today is to create the best possible child-raising conditions for the next generation. The most important demands are: 1. We must limit the instance of inherited diseases, as well as the transmission of illness from parents to young children, by selecting stronger and healthier parents. 2. Conception should not take place under the influence of alcohol, as this has a demonstrably detrimental effect on the progeny. 3. Parents should raise their children in those years that are optimal for producing the strongest and most resilient offspring. 4. Individuals, as well as the community (the state) must take appropriate measures to ensure the health and material well-being of our offspring. Meeting these demands will result in fewer deaths (lower mortality rate) and fewer incidences of illness (lower morbidity rate) among children. But there will be indirect effects as well. When parents, and particularly mothers, realize that they can raise children with less work, concern, suffering, and expense than before, then the desire to have children will return. But unlike before, they will no longer be willing to leave to chance the number of pregnancies they must endure in order to raise one or two children. Instead, they will make conscious arrangements for the coming of their offspring. So we see that the flight from motherhood carries its own cure within itself: the desire for a wanted child, rather than the accidental motherhood that was the norm in previous generations.

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7. Julius Tandler Dangers of Inferiority Published as “Gefahren der Minderwertigkeit,” in Jahrbuch des Wiener Jugendhilfswerks (Vienna: Verlag des Wiener Jugendhilfswerks, 1929, Sonderdruck), 3–22. Trans. P. Woods. Julius Tandler was not only an anatomist, a socialist eugenicist, and a powerful politician in the city government, he was also Red Vienna’s most public proponent of health care and hygiene. His eclectic interests (including the theories of Ernst Mach9 and Rudolf Goldscheid10) may help us understand the strong link between heredity, economic reasoning, societal reform, and urban renewal in Red Vienna’s health-care system. In this speech, given at the Austrian League for Regeneration and Heredity on February 13, 1929, eugenics—the idea of improving the population “qualitatively” through intervention in natural genetic transmission—takes center stage. Tandler takes stock of ten years of public health policy. He also addresses the move from individual hygiene to social hygiene and its practical manifestations, such as how it related to marriage counseling and the strengthening of health insurance. In the context of the international eugenics movement—active since 1900—Tandler’s ambiguous positioning lies between a Lamarckian belief in the inheritance of acquired traits (this could imply a “regeneration” through hygiene, equal opportunities, education, and welfare) and a social-hygienic interpretation of Darwin’s concept of fixed genetic material (by exclusion from reproduction, and potentially by sterilization or even killing). Equally ambi­ valent are the conclusions that come from his projections. The task of any demographic policy is to manage human capital, in other words the people living in a community. Fulfilling this management duty requires not only maintaining and boosting the amount of capital that has been entrusted, but also improving the quality of the individual person, and thereby the quality of the whole. Therefore, we can rightly speak of qualitative and quantitative demographic policies. Quantitative demographic policies are always a means of ruthlessly increasing the population of a community. This functions above all to benefit the interests of state control and imperialist tendencies, the goal of this policy being to increase defense capabilities. A quantitative demographic approach has always placed the defender, the destroyer at the center of the state’s interests, though whether he leads a dignified life has been of very little concern. Qualitative demographic policies also postulate a certain number of individuals, of course, if only because of natural selection. Above all, however, such policies require an improvement in the quality of the individual and the whole in the interest of human dignity and culture. Quantitative demographic policies focus on the relationship between birth rates and death rates in an attempt to determine the successes and failures of the policies and prepare for the future. Qualitative demographic policies focus on the capacity of the individual to bear the cultural load, but particular attention is paid to the quality of the offspring. Quantitative demographic policies demand indiscriminate mass procreation as a means of increasing quality 9

Ernst Mach (1838–1916)—Austrian physicist, physiologist, and Vienna’s first professor for history and philosophy of science—advocated an atomistic theory and a theory of elements. 10 Rudolf Goldscheid (1870–1931)—Austrian private scholar in the field of sociology, founder of the Vienna Sociological Society, pacifist, and Monist—rejected Neo-Darwinism (the assumption to transfer Darwin’s evolutionary theory on culture and society) and instead developed the scientific conception of an economy of human beings (Menschenökonomie) as a way to control population.

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[. . .]. The methods of this policy are very simple, but they have failed time and again, as history has shown. Ancient cultures did not fall; the bearers of those cultures died out. At the same time that ancient quantitative demographic policies have been failing, however, the essentials of qualitative demographic policies have always persisted. Nevertheless, the cries in favor of imperialist mass procreation have always drowned out the voices of qualitative demographic policies, even until very recently. Before the war, after all, people still cared first and foremost about increasing the population. They saw the future in reproduction, whereas refining the people and racial improvement were not matters of particular interest. It was only with the hopelessness of the quantitative demographers—brought about by the unalterable decline in the birth rate—that the value of an individual person was elevated. When the quality of the individual became more significant, qualitative demographic policies were pushed to the forefront of demographic interests. Now we are becoming more and more concerned with racial hygiene: eugenics. [. . .] This turn toward eugenics involves the spread of a most uncomfortable truth, one that we must confront without trepidation. If we are to satisfy the demands of biological reasoning, we must disregard our prejudices and our deeply rooted feelings. It is understandable that the implementation of eugenic principles will run into opposition. When it serves their own purposes, those opposed to eugenics will use the foolishness of the past as a guiding principle for the future, pointing out history’s failed eugenic experiments with great satisfaction. It is true, of course, that eugenic experiments seeking utopian human breeding—as some individuals had in mind or carried out—have no scientific basis, nor are they feasible. [. . .] We cannot breed for quality, beauty, nobleness, or intellect. Regardless of this, however, we can achieve an increase in average physical and mental capacity by making a reasonable selection in terms of reproduction. It must be said, of course, that our current knowledge of how certain traits are transmitted remains limited, and our understanding of inheritance and the inevitability of passing on particular characteristics is insufficient. But it must also be said that the experience that we already possess is calling upon us to ensure, with the utmost rigor, that we embrace selection in cases in which pairing inferior or deviant genes with one another can only produce more of the same. The aim of eugenics boils down to two factors: those individuals who are healthy and fully capable should be encouraged to reproduce, and those who are inferior should be barred from reproducing. [. . .] The state’s interference in marriage—as well as the outlook of various religious confessions on this institution—prove that marriage and procreation are not only a private affair but also a public one. The idea of replacing the long-lost process of natural selection with an artificial process is very old, and there are myriad ways of administering this selection. The most natural, without a doubt, is to shut out those who are unfit to reproduce. That raises the question: Who are the ones who are unfit? [. . .] The results that we have secured from our study of heredity provide a sufficient basis for a modest push toward eugenics. It is in this very modesty, however, that we are likely to find success. Radical eugenics, as preached by some, is harmful to eugenics itself, and it is compromised by the unscientific practice of selective abortion. Even today, we know of an admittedly modest range of hereditary diseases and abnormalities. Wisdom demands that we, first and foremost, put a stop to further transmission of such things. Among them is a long list of mental illnesses with extensive inferiorities. The first task of eugenics is to prevent the carriers of these defects from reproducing. It is a difficult problem to solve, particularly as modern civilization and humanitarianism cherish the products that

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come from the coupling of such individuals. The inferior, the feeble-minded, the idiots—in short, those who are born mental and physical cripples—have the whole of our medical knowledge at their disposal. We devote huge sums in order to keep these people alive and allow them to live as long as possible. Capable humans are disappearing and the geniuses are dying, but we are saving the inferior ones. Preventing their appearance, preventing them from ever being born, would not only save [the city] money but also benefit the valuable representatives of the current generation and the breeding ability for the future generation. [. . .] I would like to point out just one small example of the unproductive expenses that we can see by consulting demographic studies. Around 300 idiotic or feeble-minded children are housed in institutions by the city of Vienna. Each one costs 4 shillings per day. Even if we calculate this to be 1,000 shillings, that makes it 365,000 shillings per year. Around 5,000 people are inmates in the city of Vienna’s mental asylums. That is an expense of 30,000 shillings per day, or around 11,000,000 shillings a year. [.  .  .] The number of pregnant women who come into the pregnancy consultation centers worried about the fate of their future children is growing daily. Feelings of responsibility and reproductive ethics bring them there and motivate them to overcome their shame and timidity. It is only one step from the responsibility for an embryo to the responsibility for raising a child. We simply have to make it clear to the people that it is a crime to produce children that will be sick from the very beginning of their lives. It is a crime against the child, which is the product of parental love, and it is a crime against human society. We must insist on consultation, education, and the awakening of a feeling of responsibility. Then the community—in contrast to those inferior people and the damage that they have done—will be hard pressed not to avail itself of the means of self-preservation that are offered to them. [. . .] The field of medicine has now advanced from a treatment of the individual to social medicine. The healing of the individual alone can no longer be the sole order of business for medicine. It must now heal the wounds and diseases of the collective body of the population. It must go from individual protection to collective protection. [. . .] It is possible that Mozart would have lived longer had he been a member of the statutory health insurance. Perhaps many other spiritual heroes would likewise have lived longer. This does not mean, however, that social security as it exists today—as if it were built into the framework of humanitarianism—is already an effective instrument of demographic policies. Social security did not arise out of humanitarian considerations, either. In fact, social security is a collectivistic guarantee of help in cases where individualistic help has failed. Played out according to the dictates of demographic policy, the health plans will be able to render incredible services to eugenics as well. [. . .] A parent’s condition affects the constitution of the children. Thus, the hygienic condition of the parent becomes the hygienic constitution of the child. The hygienic condition may influence and improve the well-being, capacity, and health of one and all. But if qualitative demographic policy remains an imperfect work, in spite of all of its accomplishments, then these accomplishments will never have an effect on our children. We humans who have learned to master the forces of nature—albeit in a limited way—are unwilling and unable to believe that the characteristics that we may have inherited may not be passed on further in our germ plasma. We cannot, in the deep shadow of resignation, leave our children’s fate up to the potential combinations of chromosomes alone. We must be able to influence these forces of nature as well. Human beings fled from nature into domestication and feel they owe this domestication all that is considered human. Our attempts to overcome the danger of domestication—the destruction—by means of conditional and constitutional hygiene reveals our drive for survival.

“No Viennese child should be born on a newspaper.” Article promoting the city’s “Operation Layette.” Der Kuckuck, March 27, 1932. (Courtesy of VGA.)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

WELFARE Katrin Pilz

I

1917, when the Austrian Empire was still at war, rising rates of infant and child mortality and the spreading of socially determined infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and syphilis inspired the creation of offices for public health and social welfare. The urgency of the social situation in Vienna paved the way for recognizing welfare as the responsibility of public services, replacing ecclesiastical as well as private institutional charity care which depended on the donations and volunteer help of citizens. In the new Republic of German Austria, the anatomist and university professor Julius Tandler (1869–1936) was nominated as the head of the office of public health in 1919. During his period of service, a new law for the funding of health care facilities was passed. This new law provided a new financial foundation for Austrian hospitals. Instead of relying on private funds, the hospitals now received support from the federal government, the states, and the municipalities. In 1920, after the end of the coalition government, Tandler was appointed city councillor of welfare and public health. Red Vienna became the test ground for a publicly funded welfare and health program. The goal was to improve the social living conditions of destitute working-class families with many children through the establishment and expansion of welfare organizations and institutions. Following the principle that “constructive welfare care is preventive care,”1 all of the newly created institutions were overseen by the new centralized and networked welfare structure: the city’s Intake Center for Children (Kinderübernahmsstelle), the Marriage Counseling Center (Eheberatungsstelle), Counseling Centers for Mothers, the Career Counseling Office (Berufsberatungsamt), the Youth Office, and children’s homes. The structure also oversaw approved schools, kindergartens, hospitals, school dental clinics, and sanatoriums for tuberculosis and STD patients, as well as sports and recreational facilities such as public baths, recreational retreats, and vacation homes. Furthermore, numerous Social Democratic organizations and associations, such as the Children’s Friends (Kinderfreunde) and the Red Falcons (Rote Falken), offered a comprehensive program of recreational and sports activities. The goal was a “healthier” society where the generation of New Humans embodied political and cultural progress. Preventative measures were meant to implement demographic guiding principles and convey visions of happiness meant for a new society. These principles included the ideal of a socialist nuclear family. n

1 Franz

Karner, ed., Aufbau der Wohlfahrtspflege der Stadt Wien (Vienna: E. Kainz, 1926), 5.

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The expansion of communal welfare was secured as a part of the municipal budget. In 1923 one-third of social expenses of the city of Vienna was earmarked for this purpose.2 In addition to the ambitious housing construction program and reforms in the educational sector, the Social Democratic welfare program was expanded through tax policies. Time and again, this expansion was met with criticism from the political opposition, which targeted unkept promises and the problems of welfare and public health care in Red Vienna. Politicians frequently debated the question of welfare, who was entitled to it, and in which form it should be implemented. While the Social Democrats called for the “fulfillment of welfare duties” and aimed at strengthening a socialistically oriented middle class with the centralization and networking of the city’s welfare institutions,3 the Christian Socials continued to make the case for charitable volunteer services and private individual charity to be sustained by church organizations. The Intake Center for Children, put into operation in 1925 as their administrative main office, became one of the prestige projects of Viennese welfare. As the reception, observation center, and hub of the Viennese welfare distribution for ill, homeless, orphaned, and so-called neglected infants, children, and youth, it was to become the prototype and flagship organization of the Social Democratic welfare system. Social Democratic media used effective advertising to report the activities of the Intake Center for Children and other institutions that were important for the health and welfare agenda of the city administration, such as the maternity clinic known as the Brigittaspital, the Lainz Municipal Hospital, as well as the construction of a tuberculosis pavilion and a nursing home. Social Democrats tried to gain voters through the promotion of their numerous successes in the area of welfare politics, such as the clear decrease in infant and child mortality and infectious diseases. In Red Vienna, a certain ideal of happiness seemed to be well within reach, if the public would only adopt the prescribed social welfare measures including a new Social Democratic self-image, a new set of social taxes (Fürsorgeabgaben) and a new set of social mores and rules. However, some of these measures and ideas went against the emancipatory efforts of the Social Democratic women’s movement. This disjointed approach to gender practices sometimes lead to an ossification of a traditional image of femininity, although under different, supposedly more progressive labels: the new Social Democratic woman was still responsible for caring for the health of the family, submitting to regimes of pregnancy hygiene, caring for and raising infants and children, and hygienic housekeeping, and she was also expected to let herself be willingly monitored by the communal welfare apparatus. Red Vienna’s version of welfare was always accompanied by manifestations of social control, which has drawn criticism from a progressive point of view. Thus, Red Vienna’s gift of a new baby’s layette was a step toward hygienic primary care of the population. However, it often also came with a visit from female municipal welfare workers, bringing with them an intrusion by the city administration into the private sphere of the family. Even with the best of intentions, some of the homes for children and youth became implicated in practices that today would be labeled as physically and psychologically abusive. Later, after Red Vienna’s welfare institutions were forcibly integrated into the National Socialist system, some of these homes became organizational centers for the systematic euthanasia and murder of disabled children, youth, and adults. 2

Das neue Wien, ed. Städtewerk unter offizieller Mitwirkung der Gemeinde Wien (Vienna: Elbemühl, 1926–1928), 2:457. 3 Die Wohlfahrtspflege der Stadt Wien: Ein kurzer Abriß als Hand- und Nachschlagebuch für die ehrenamtlichen Fürsorgeräte Wiens, ed. Gemeinde Wien (Vienna: Thalia, 1928), 6.

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Further reading Byer 1987 Dworschak 2014 Pilz 2019 Schwarz 2017 Sieder and Smioski 2012 Weindling 2009 Wolfgruber 2013

1. Adele Bruckner Welfare Services First published as “Fürsorgearbeit,” Die Mutter: Halbmonatsschrift für alle Fragen der Schwangerschaft, Säuglingshygiene und Kindererziehung, August 1, 1925, 5–6. Translated by Brigitte Morales-Würz. The welfare politics of the city administration presented itself as “Magna Mater,” as a motherlike, caring figure that promised to catch the destitute society and take it into her arms. Paradoxically, the professional female welfare worker was not allowed to be a mother herself at first,4 since this profession was thought to be incompatible with her own motherhood. Based on this discrepancy, welfare workers faced considerable problems in their workday. The contradictory position of the welfare worker often led to rancorous relationships between the educated, usually middle-class and childless welfare worker and the so-called proletarian mother to be cared for. In the following text excerpt, welfare worker Adele Bruckner (1879–?) reports in detail about the social misery and the difficult experiences social workers had to confront on a daily basis. Since the end of the war, welfare work has really taken root in Vienna; the humble beginnings from before have grown exponentially, new branches have been added, and welfare services—meaning public welfare—grow stronger day by day. Outsiders, laymen, yes—even those who have voluntarily worked in private care programs in one way or another or still do—rarely have an accurate picture of welfare services. The following text is an attempt to illustrate the kind of services offered with the help of a few examples. I. Mrs. N. N. is ill with tuberculosis; the first stage was detected during her medical examination. She needs to be admitted to a sanatorium. A survey of her household gives us the following picture: the husband is unemployed; he receives unemployment benefits of 12.60 schillings weekly. There are four children ages six, four and a half, three, and one and a half. The two smaller ones have rickets and cannot walk; all of the children are malnourished. The apartment consists of one room and a kitchen. It opens onto a courtyard, a dark, damp abode with the humblest of furnishings. Everything that was not needed, and in part also that which was essential, has been pawned or sold. In order to hospitalize the sick mother, the children have to be cared for; all children were transferred to homes within two days, the husband is left to fend for himself. 4 Hilda

Lunzer, “Mutter oder Fürsorgerin?,” Die Unzufriedene, August 7, 1926, 2.

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II. A box-like room without windows receives its scanty light from a hall window opposite the door; it contains nothing more than a bed and a baby carriage with a missing wheel; yes, and a washbasin perched on a wobbly stool. Four people live in this dungeon-like room: husband, wife, a four-year-old boy, and a four-month-old infant. As almost everywhere else, with very few exceptions, the husband is without work; what aggravates the situation is that they do not have the right of residence in Vienna. This complicates any social work and renders the available services completely inadequate. The meager support received by an unemployed person cannot feed one person, let alone four. It is not easy for the uninitiated to even remotely visualize how these people live. III. War widows and orphans with their meager income are in a class of their own. It is all too natural that the affected people vent their feelings and worries, even if in the wrong place; it is not uncommon to hear a troubled and tormented widow give a whole lecture about the pointless dying and killing off of men and fathers when she goes to inquire about her case. If all women had spoken in similar fashion in 1914, maybe there would not be any war widows today. One of these widows lives in a scrupulously clean, small apartment with two children: talented boys, one of whom attends high school [Mittelschule], the other is still in elementary school. Both children are suspected to have TB and have been sent away until cured. The Association of the Disabled [Invalidenverband], a charity that covers disability expenses, pays part of the treatment and also provides partial payment for the lodging of ill people. The pension meant for the woman and both of her children amounts to seventy-two schillings a month; there is no doubt that even the most frugal cannot make ends meet with that! The woman works odd jobs; she washes, scrubs, irons, takes on anything that looks like work and brings in a most modest wage. This is one of the milder cases. IV. That the “blessing” of children is abundant for the poor and the poorest is well-known, too well-known to even bring it up. What does need to be brought up, however, so that as many people as possible are conscious of them, are the tragedies taking place in proletarian homes on a daily basis. From time to time, newspapers report that somewhere a woman died as a result of an intervention. Nobody suspects the utter misery that these worn-down women, aged before their time, suffer every hour, unless they can see and hear them for themselves. The numerous pregnancies severely undermine the health of the already malnourished, neglected women who are intimately acquainted with the struggles of life. While affluent people can easily raise and provide for a large family (but the wealthy rarely have a lot of children), each additional child and its need for nourishment is a catastrophe for the poor, struggling people who fight for their daily bread. And when such a poor woman comes crying and lamenting and calls for help and there is no help to give—with the poor, a pregnancy is only terminated in the rarest cases and only when illness is present and well-advanced—all of the misery of humanity shows its face. It is often said that “they should not have so many children.” That is certainly easy to say without much thought, especially for women without any financial worries. Does anyone have an inkling how these poor creatures live and that the new growing life results from

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a man’s and a woman’s true longing to embrace? When people live in small spaces, close together, when father, mother, and children sleep in two beds, it is actually unimaginable that there are not any more miserable creatures being born; the housing shortage with all its consequences in many cases leads to a terrible lack of restraint. And since we are addressing the horrifying living conditions, we must also talk about their influence on the children themselves. V. Every time you read that young people stray from the straight and narrow path, you also see the wise old men shaking their heads, repeating the well-known refrain “it wasn’t like that in my times” or “that didn’t exist in the past.” In the past, there were also many youngsters who took a wrong turn (you just heard about it less, because we did not get involved as much with our fellow men in the first place), and so the judgment of the layperson, people who only go by hearsay and have not really seen much, is quite heartless. Those who had the opportunity to get to the causes of why children go astray will be more compassionate when dealing with the consequences. There is certainly no skill in protecting sheltered children in a good economic position from the dangers of life for as long as possible; even though there also have been cases that started in a nicely furnished nursery. We must be aware of what children get to see and hear early on in humble homes where people are crowded together. It is simply impossible to keep secrets from children in such conditions. Here, children—in a sadly practical way—become acquainted with all those affairs that sheltered children learn about slowly over time, depending on their age. When a child knows about all the worries of their parents and participates in everything, then it is obvious that the carefree times of childhood and youth vanish before they have a chance to start. If these little ones have guardian angels, they must be well protected, for most children of poor parents live in conditions that constantly harm body and soul. The many welfare institutions, those already in existence and those yet to be created, will never completely be able to help those who need them. The streets in the suburbs are still full of children of all ages, children who continue to look for the bare essentials with hungry stomachs and hungry eyes. In conclusion, let us mention the various social institutions created by the city of Vienna in the area of welfare services: the city’s welfare programs cover all stages of life, from newborns to the elderly, in exemplary ways; but that is not enough to combat the existing misery, most of it is the consequence of war. This text only mentions a few and in no way the most extreme examples, because the writer finds it important that even those who rarely have opportunity to be informed should become aware of the diverse misery and suffering and the kind of measures taken. Perhaps these explanations will help us to stop mistaking effects for the causes of social problems where their effects are found.

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2. Heinrich Holek The Schmelz Neighborhood First published as “Die Schmelz,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, September 2, 1926, 9. Translated by Brigitte Morales-Würz. The Social Democratic journalist and “proletarian poet” Heinrich Holek (1885–1934) describes the Viennese neighborhood known as the Schmelz (literally: the melting place) as a complex social hotspot and implicit place of modern welfare. The former drill ground, with its adjoining barracks settlement derisively termed as the “Negerdörfel” (“Negro-village”) is characterized as a dark, unmonitored space where gangs, criminals, and residents are neglected by society. This darkness of the Schmelz is contrasted with the brightness and safety of the newly erected municipal housing complexes nearby and images of Viennese families, and especially youth, using the Schmelz as a sports and recreation area. Holek’s essay illustrates the housing and welfare politics of the new Vienna and contrasts it with the untenable social situation of the oft-romanticized “Old Vienna.” The “Negerdörfel” is mentioned in passing as belonging to the shameful heritage of failed Christian Social welfare efforts. [The Schmelz.] This name conjures up many ideas: a training ground for soldiers—jarring commands—“up!” and “down!”—the crackling of machine guns. The Schmelz has been a drill ground for more than eighty years. It still is today. The few soldiers doing their drills there now, however, disappear on the large lawn like little sausages in a pile of sauerkraut. Another chain of thoughts is evoked by the name “Schmelz”: A police report—a brawl—men with knives—severely injured people being admitted to the hospital. .  .  . This too is still happening, sadly. Because in the Schmelz, something is always going down. Especially when it is dark, in the late hours between Saturday and Sunday. And at other times too, even in broad daylight. But then it is not dangerous to go for a walk there. When the soldiers’ drill session is over and the servicemen retire to their barracks, the open grass with wide paths leading into the grayish green offers a peaceful, even idyllic picture. Women and children lounge around in groups, sunbathing; vacationers, retirees, and the unemployed let “the sun shine into their stomachs” in order to get something “warm in their tummy.” Goats solemnly strut around and nibble on the grass. Here and there, men gather in groups, read, play cards, or chat. From the fenced soccer fields, which significantly reduced the size of the drill grounds, the dull sound of bouncing balls echo over the field. And on the lawn, boys practice their soccer game with lots of skill and even more shouting. A watchman on horseback lets his horse leisurely trot around the lawn while his eyes survey the lively scene. It keeps on melting, the Schmelz. About thirty years ago, it was an area of more than fifty hectares; today, it is barely half of that. The sea of houses relentlessly advances on the open area, new blocks of houses and roads appear, and in front of them a sizeable collection of garden plots. And recently, on the opposite end to the west, the Schmelz settlement was built: a respectable complex of handsome homes enclosing ample courtyards with lawns and flower gardens, and tree-lined streets winding their way in between. Cleanliness and order everywhere. The workers and employees who settled here apparently spare no expense in order to make their environment as beautiful and pleasing as possible. The city of Vienna built these homes; as well as the nearby Rohrauer-Hof.

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The view from its park, which steeply descends toward the north, opens onto the Negerdörfel at the bottom, and above those roofs, you can overlook the massive settlement of Ottakring, and at the end you can see the red walls of the Schuhmeier-Hof. The Negerdörfel consists of flat, barrack-like houses with one floor. They were built under the direction of the late Christian Social mayor Dr. Weiskirchner to alleviate the housing shortage that was already pressing at that time. The “walls” of these houses are made of wood and covered with asbestos and plaster panels. About one hundred families live here, not many with fewer than six children. When the Christian Social Party in their anger speak dismissively of the building activity of the Social Democratic majority and ironically call it “Social Democratic housing culture,” they seem to have forgotten that this Negerdörfel is their creation and only dishonors them. A walk through this Christian Social creation suffices to feel the contrast between these barracks and the friendly, cozy buildings of the Schmelz settlement. These new houses are surrounded by beautifully manicured lawns and contain lovely gardens and meadows, and in the Rohrauer-Hof, happy children romp about in the concrete wading pool, while their mothers sit on the benches around it and sew, crochet, read, and enjoy the sunshine and fresh air. At the same time the children in the Negerdörfel crawl around the meager, miserable turf. The Schmelz settlement houses around seven hundred and ninety families, or about three thousand people. Over sixteen hundred of them are members of the Social Democratic Party, just over five hundred of them women. The premises available for member meetings are rather nice, but they hold one hundred people at most; they are totally inadequate. The settlers were promised at the time that the municipality of Vienna would build a welfare house. This still has not happened and is sorely missed by the comrades. They procured the furnishings of the currently available facility themselves; unemployed comrades built the furniture, painted the doors and walls and decorated them with a lovely trim with Dutch girls and boys on it. And the bookshelf holds more than five hundred volumes of good books donated by the comrades of the organization. Idealism has always been the driving force of our movement! The air circulating here is purer than in the city. The wind gently blowing from the nearby slopes of the Vienna Woods carries the pungent fragrance of the woods to this elevation, from whence a magnificent view opens onto the lower parts of town to the west. The massive dome of the Steinhof reflects the sunlight, and the soft outline of the blue mountains of the Vienna Woods enchants the onlooker. And wherever you look into the distance, there are lovely views near and far: the tower of St. Stephan’s Cathedral rises from the sea of houses in the east, a little farther north the two spires of the Altlerchenfeld church and the Vienna City Hall tower, then the bright towers of the Votive church appear like a delicate filigree. Up close, the Schmelz is not as charming, however. Tenements with empty spaces in between, permitting a look into the distance, and unsightly wooden planks frame the square whose lowest spots rise only 200 meters above sea level and the highest, the Rudolfshöhe, a mere 232 meters. [. . .] Thus, the Schmelz evokes many a memory from the distant and more recent past. This training ground was often a battlefield. The battles of recent days have gotten a bit friendlier: usually, they are—soccer matches.

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3. Julius Tandler Social Democratic Welfare Services First published as “Sozialdemokratische Wohlfahrtspflege,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, May 20, 1924, 9. Translated by Brigitte Morales-Würz. In this speech of May 17, 1924, Julius Tandler defines Social Democratic welfare through the right to welfare care. Similar texts were published between 1917 and 1934 in numerous versions for various target groups in the trade and worker press. The Viennese welfare system developed by Tandler significantly shaped the city administration as well as the public self-portrayal of Red Vienna.5 In program publications, newspaper articles, public lectures, speeches, brochures, and films, as well as on signs posted on the buildings of newly created welfare institutions, one could repeatedly hear and read the slogans coined by Tandler: “Constructive welfare care is preventive care,” “Children have a right to care, and society is their trustee,” and “Those who build palaces for children, break down prison walls.”6 Social Democratic welfare services differ significantly from bourgeois welfare programs. Bourgeois welfare has remained a charitable work until today; it is of the opinion that it accomplishes more than is its obligation. For us Social Democrats on the other hand, welfare is the fulfillment of a basic responsibility. Therefore, welfare providers and recipients have a relationship like the relationship that exists between rights and responsibility. Bourgeois welfare providers only assume responsibility for those who give them the means. It is completely different for us. Total welfare is one of the many expressions of collectivism. In the moment, we were charged with the responsibility to reform the welfare programs of the city of Vienna. There has been hunger and hardship, not suitable to spark a feeling of responsibility. If the war already had a demoralizing effect, the times after the war and the foreign aid demoralized our people even more and made them beggars. Over time, the national character changed back, however. We Social Democrats can report with pride that it has fundamentally changed here in Vienna. This becomes evident in the relationship between welfare providers and recipients. One example are the Counseling Centers for Mothers. During the war and afterward, women only went to such places in order to receive something. When the foreign missions left and mothers stopped receiving donations, they stayed away from the centers. Today, mothers come as frequently as during the times of donations. But now, they come out of a sense of responsibility toward their children. The city of Vienna is a leader among cultural nations when it comes to welfare. Thirty percent of all expenses go to welfare programs. The following illustrates individual examples of the tremendous scope of our welfare programs: Our predecessors in city hall took special pride in their elderly care. The elderly care program of the city was nothing more than a miserable stagnation of the lack of laws regarding 5 Karl Kautsky [Jr], Der Kampf gegen den Geburtenrückgang (Vienna: Wiener sozialdemokratische Bücherei, 1924), 31. 6 Julius Tandler, Wohltätigkeit oder Fürsorge? (Vienna: Verlag der Organisation Wien der Sozialdemokratischen Partei, 1925), 15–16. Die Kinderübernahmsstelle der Gemeinde Wien, ed. Gemeinde Wien, foreword and text by Julius Tandler (Vienna: Thalia, 1927), 26.

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elderly care. The city must take over, because those who are taking advantage of the added value are throwing out the instrument they have plundered for decades. Open elderly care concerns the so-called Pfründner.7 Of course, we have given back the political rights they were robbed of before. We converted the counsels for the poor into welfare counsels. This is not a mere change in title, but the expression of a change in operations. The counsel of the poor, with its small responsibility, could provide “welfare” for a large number of people. That is impossible for us. We had to exponentially increase the number of welfare workers—to five thousand—and educate them to be welfare workers by sending them to school. Closed elderly care was the object of much advertisement for the Christian Socials. The construction of the geriatric center in Lainz was the cornerstone of this welfare program. The majority party of the day drew political power from this creation for a long time. Yet is there anything more brutish and base than packing over six thousand unfortunate people into one place? I do not want to address the administrative scandal we discovered in Lainz, just the closed welfare program. People were put in beds in the order of their arrival. A blind person, an idiot, a tuberculosis patient, an epileptic and a healthy person could all be put up in the same room. This misery was all covered up by palacelike buildings to boast about. It was our task to bring order to this chaos, to put people with similar conditions together, to separate the sick from the old. And we managed to make some real changes. There is now an actual infirmary in Lainz, not an ideal situation but a big step toward the perfection we envision. We have made the residents at least halfway happy, as far as that is possible in their situation. Today, we have a department with three hundred beds for elderly tuberculosis patients in Lainz. This way, we have stopped the source of infection for their families, and it is possible to give them decent end-of-life care. We also have the largest neurology ward in all of Central Europe, maybe in the whole continent. It holds 450 beds, modern equipment, and is led by an excellent specialist. The culmination of our welfare services is the youth welfare program. Taking care of a human being starts before he or she is conceived. Wherever we are capable of influencing the qualities inherited from the parents in a positive way, we should do so. I have never thought much of permission to marry, but in my opinion, parents need to be educated on the importance of marriage. For this reason, I have created the Marriage Counseling Center, which has since been emulated in Austria, Germany, and England. Next, welfare services need to support the pregnant woman. A socialistically led society must do infinitely more for pregnant women then we see today. That not only requires more money, but especially education. First and foremost, the unborn child must be protected from contagion with syphilis. Syphilis costs us billions every year. At least one fifth of our expenses could be saved if syphilis were adequately controlled. Therefore, it is extremely important for us to cure people from syphilis or to prevent them from getting it in the first place. In the Counseling Centers for Mothers, the fight against syphilis is carried out programmatically; in this way, the unborn child is protected from contagion. Once children are born, they are under the care of the Youth Office, whose female welfare workers refer them to the Counseling Center for Mothers. The same happens to children born in the maternity clinics, no matter whether they are legitimate or illegitimate. For this reason, Vienna is the only large city on the continent without a foundling home. In the baby nursery, all children are admitted, legitimate as well as illegitimate. 7 Residents

in a nursing home (also homeless shelter).

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Before, the children of the working population stayed home alone or on the streets. Now we have built public kindergartens, where working women can drop off their children. Today, we have forty-six school doctors and seven school dental clinics, requiring enormous amounts of funding. We also have the lunch program for children: the city feeds twenty thousand children each day in schools and daycare centers. If at all possible, we offer each child the opportunity to go to summer camp [Ferialerholung] through the Vienna Youth Relief Organization [Jugendhilfswerk]. It is my opinion that we must now turn our attention to the creation of a new extension of the youth welfare program, one that provides services for apprentices. This sector has within it a great amount of suffering. The situation of apprentices is even more critical, since apprentices are at that critical age of adolescence. Welfare services for tuberculosis patients. Tuberculosis is better controlled with a great housing plan and good wage policies instead of sanatoriums; it requires discipline as much as medicine. Through enormous efforts, the city of Vienna has succeeded in providing over two thousand beds. This is not quite enough, but the organization is the meaningful part. None of the beds are given to people who are not enrolled in welfare services for tuberculosis patients. This may seem cruel at first sight, but it is tremendously important. This way, people are forced to get care from welfare service offices for tuberculosis patients, so they are under constant observation. In the last months, we even had to double the number of welfare offices for tuberculosis patients. The working people have a right to have access to welfare workers from their own ranks. It is the responsibility of our party to ensure that these welfare workers are available. (Vivid applause.)

4. Karl Honay The New Vienna for Its Youth First published as “Das neue Wien für seine Jugend,” Moderne Welt 13, no. 7 (April 1932): 19–23. Translated by Brigitte Morales-Würz. Many publicity texts such as this one were supposed to promote the housing and social politics of the new Vienna by illustrating the achievements and successes of the city administration. The reports—illustrated with high-quality photos—had been published since the late 1920s, and not only in media for the working population but also increasingly in the middle-class press. The authors were mostly municipal workers or writers who held other political positions in the city administration. City councillors such as Karl Honay (1891–1959), imparted an official air to the advertisements as their authors. The “points of interest” of Vienna included children’s homes, reformatories, youth organizations, kindergartens, and last but not least, the Intake Center for Children. Visitors from other Austrian states and other countries were carefully guided through the welfare institutions of “Mother Vienna.”8 8

Franz X. Friedrich, “Mutter Wien,” Bettauers Wochenschrift 4, no. 33 (1927): 4–5. See also Anonymous, “Sonntagsfahrten durchs Neue Wien,” Das kleine Blatt, May 14, 1927, 3.

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Before the war, private welfare programs were very well developed in Vienna. There was a large number of associations actively taking children from impoverished families under their wings. The city administration’s load was eased by the blessed work of these organizations. After the war, a complete change occurred. The devaluation of our currency forced those who out of a social commitment took care of child welfare to stop or to drastically decrease their activity. Many an association with a decades-long record of service applied to the city for monetary support, for without it, they could not have maintained their facilities. Private means for social purposes became scarcer and scarcer. In 1919 the city administration began to organize youth welfare programs in their own sphere of influence, in accordance with the trends of the times. Today, it can boast a youth welfare infrastructure with a progressive administration. The successes of this welfare program are even recognized by the opponents of today’s majority in the Vienna Municipal Council. In 1931 the city spent no less than twenty-nine million schillings on youth welfare, and it has budgeted the same amount for 1932. The city’s welfare programs already care for the child in the womb. Thirty-four Coun­ seling Centers for Mothers help destitute pregnant women who, in an emergency, can count on the support of the city. The city’s female welfare workers are available to help infants and mothers in need at all maternity wards and birth clinics in Vienna. But all other births are observed by the city as well. No child is born in Vienna without access to the city’s support net. Since 1927, the city provides a full baby layette at no cost for the babies of all women registered and residing in Vienna. This birthday present is not restricted to families in need. Women must apply for it themselves, however. Those unfamiliar with the conditions of the poor call the city wasteful, because they give the bank manager’s wife a layette as well as the wife of the unemployed. This is not accurate. Between January 1 and October 31, 1931, there were 13,786 births in Vienna. For all of these births, 9,005 layettes were distributed; 2,197 of these went to births in homes, 6,111 to births in clinics and hospitals, and 480 to births in middle-class sanatoriums. In the actual sanatoriums, only 217 packages were given away in this time period; yet 87 of these recipients were covered by health insurance, so only 130 packages were given to women in those circles that could have afforded the purchase themselves. The exact assessment of need would have incurred higher administrative costs than the amount the city spent on the 130 layettes. Once a week, a specialized physician and an educational therapist provide free consultations in fourteen Youth District Offices. Nursery schoolteachers with an excellent education are employed by the city to care for over 10,000 small children in 103 kindergartens. At the parents’ request, these children are fed breakfast and lunch for the amount of 3.12 schillings a week, and for 64 percent of these children, this cost is waived completely! Educators from all over the world covet these kindergartens. These are magnificent buildings, like the kindergarten in the Sandleiten settlement in Ottakring (opened in 1930), the kindergarten in the Favoritener Waldmüllerpark, and the Montessori Kindergarten on Rudolfsplatz in the inner city that opened last year. The care of neglected and abandoned children was completely reorganized. In 1924 a separate Intake Center for Children was built in the Alsergrund, and it takes care of all children in need. The children only stay in this glass palace until the appropriate home or foster family is found. The city now pays up to 45 schillings a month for the stipends of 14,892 children. The newest children’s home was installed in a Habsburg castle on the Wilhelminenberg that was purchased by the city in 1927. Sick children are sent to sanatoriums. There is a separate institution for children with venereal disease. Children who cannot be put in foster homes—and especially children at risk—are taken to the city’s orphanages. In [the cities of] Eggenburg and Weinzierl, we have special institutions for neglected

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children and those with behavioral problems, where adolescents are raised according to the results of the latest research. These institutions have their own schools, workshops for a number of vocations, and a farm. The children are released when they reach the age of eighteen, and even then they receive help in finding employment in the private sector. The city’s Youth Office executes a most blessed work. It has general custody of 22,647 wards of the state. The Youth Office is also the supervising foster care agency, and anyone wanting to care for someone else’s children under the age of fourteen has to be approved by this agency. At the end of December 1931, 23,044 children were placed in families and over 3,000 in private protectories. The tremendous workload of the city’s female welfare workers is best reflected in the number of home visits, which amounted to over 240,000 visits in 1931 alone. The number of the city’s after school and day care centers grew to thirty-four; here, childcare workers employed by the city keep the children occupied when school is out. [. . .] Furthermore, the city runs thirty-one playgrounds, thirteen ice skating rinks, and has twenty-two public baths for children, where all children can go at no cost. These institutions did not exist before the war. The stadium, inaugurated in 1931, also provides physical exercise for the youth. All city schools provide learning materials at no cost. It is inappropriate to speak of monetary gifts to the rich in this case. According to the budget for 1931, the city will spend over 1.1 million schillings for educational materials. It is obvious that there cannot be any significant savings, since with the current economic needs, the majority of school children would surely receive assistance with learning materials [Armenlernmittel]. Textbooks for the disadvantaged rob the recipients of their dignity and would cause them to feel ashamed, while the rest would feel socially superior. Since only 9.58 schillings are spent for learning materials per child, the high moral cost caused by the distribution of learning materials to only the poor does not compare to the few thousand schillings that could be saved each year. In 1913 the city of Vienna spent 42.7 million schillings on schools, and the approved budget for 1930 amounts to over 77.6 million schillings [. . .]. For the graduating youth, the city has provided their own Career Counseling Office, modernized the advanced training for apprentices, and built its own central vocational school with workshops for the woodworking trades. Although many facets of the great work of the Vienna youth welfare program and school reform may be controversial, the objective observer has to note that foundational and useful work has been accomplished in these important areas, regardless of one’s worldview.

5. Anonymous Who Is Smarter, a Monkey or an Infant? 700 Children “Tested”—Significant Advances at the Research Center for Child Psychology in Vienna First published as “Wer ist klüger: Affe oder Kleinkind? 700 Kinder ‘getestet’—gewaltige Leistungen der Wiener Kinderpsychologischen Untersuchungsstelle,” Der Abend, September 22, 1930, 4. Translated by Brigitte Morales-Würz. As an administrative control center, the Intake Center for Children, tied to the Karolinen Children’s Hospital, was mostly in charge of admitting, evaluating, treating, and

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transferring ill and neglected children. The children admitted to the facility were also the subjects of psychological and clinical research because of the close collaboration of childcare workers with the child psychologists Charlotte Bühler (1893–1974) and Hildegard Hetzer (1899–1991). The welfare institution, referred to as the “glass palace,” had glass walls and enclosures in order to provide the children with sufficient light, which was seen as the ultimate virtue in social hygiene. But all of the glass also provided researchers with unlimited access to the young subjects of their research.9 The Intake Center for Children thus served not only as a refuge for helpless children, as was always advertised, but also as a space for control, observation, and experiments. In retrospect, the use of physical control and the practice of experiments on children have given rise to a debate about the questionable aspects of the Intake Center and the welfare program in general. Thanks to Freud and Adler, psychology has made great strides in the last decades. The beginnings of human development, however, have still been a mystery. But now, the Vienna school of child psychology led by Bühler and Hetzer has acquired great merit through the “baby test.” The first attempts to measure the intelligence of infants and toddlers were made by the Swiss [sic] researcher Binet, who tested the abilities of a group of toddlers. When the toddlers were able to carry out certain tasks, he declared them to be normal, if they were not, he declared them mentally deficient without further ado. This did not yield any relevant results. Moreover, it only provided limited insight into the intellect of these smallest of people and showed nothing about their behavior toward their environment, nothing about their skilled performance, and even less about their development. German and American researchers expanded the system started by Binet, and it was up to the Vienna school to create the actual Baby Test. This is how it works: a number of children—the infants and toddlers in the care of the city of Vienna’s Intake Center for Children—were observed constantly for a certain amount of time. This determined their behavior in normal living situations, while awake and asleep. The observations began four years ago, in 1926—the “Abend” newspaper provided an extensive report at the time—and covered sixty-nine children, from the first days after their birth until their first birthday. Based on these records, a so-called “inventory” was created. In other words, we now knew how these sixty-nine children behaved, what tasks they were capable of carrying out, and how they interacted with their environment. This data provided the basis to test the different behaviors of children and note deviations from the established norm.10 The first test series. Now we knew what could be expected of a normal infant, and the “first test series” for twomonth-old babies was established. If, at this age, the infant is able to lift his head when on his belly, if he turns his head toward a sound, if he resists his nose being cleaned, if a silver bell makes his eyes shine, if he can look the caretaker in the eyes and respond to finger games beyond the senseless groping of an infant, then the child can be considered normal. 9 See

the image for chapter 7. See Charlotte Bühler and Hildegard Hetzer, Kleinkindertests: Entwicklungstests vom 1. bis 6. Lebensjahr (Leipzig: Barth, 1932); Hildegard Hetzer, Kindheit und Armut: Psychologische Methoden in Armutsforschung und Armutsbekämpfung, vol. 1 of Psychologie der Fürsorge (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1929). 10

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At ten months, much more is required of the infant. He must remove a cloth covering his face, he must be able to grab an object being hidden from him, he must listen with wonder when an adult blows a whistle or tries to get his attention in another way, he must want to imitate the action of a bell being rung, and he must be able to remember—after only thirty seconds—when a toy is taken away. The older the child, the longer the memory lasts. In children that are twenty-one months old, the normal time frame for memories of this kind is nineteen minutes. Of course, the tasks get harder each time, but the test does not change anymore from month to month; now, in accordance with the slower development, new test series are created every three months. Then, the “tool tests” are added, a set of tests that were first given to chimpanzees. A child of about eleven months has an intelligence equivalent to that of a smart monkey, and he is able to pull an object toward himself with a string or stick, just like the animal can do. Play or not? This all looks like playtime, but there is a lot of practical meaning behind this careful observation of infants and toddlers. For example, we have found that the care given in institutions is completely inadequate for infants, which is extremely important for these care institutions to know. It proves the longstanding opinion of Professor Tandler without any doubt. Children entering the Intake Center for Children that come from a family or foster parents, reach a score of seventy-five or even up to eighty-five out of a hundred of the “normal tasks.” Children entering the Intake Center from situations of neglect still had a score of up to sixty or seventy out of a hundred. Only those who came from institutions, even very good institutions, reached an average of fifty out of a hundred. At most! Yet this is not the only conclusion drawn from the baby test. It becomes shockingly clear how much the development of the child depends on the environment. Children without proper care fall a whole month behind children who are properly cared for within the first year of life. Those who were fortunate enough to receive good care at the start of their lives quickly drop below the normal values when they end up in a bad environment. In the first year, the differences can still be made up for. Later, this is not possible any longer, and the child from proletarian circles, a child that spent its youth in unfavorable circumstances, ends up lacking body control and showing insecure behaviors. The accuracy of the predictions for the development of tested children speaks for the exactness with which the director of the child psychology test site, Dr. Hetzer, carries out the baby test. In order to ensure that the first evaluation was correct, the children are tested a second time after a year. And this is where it becomes apparent that the predictions were accurate in almost all cases. Changes could only be seen if the child was removed from the previous environment and placed in a new environment. An improved environment was always beneficial, a worse one was immediately reflected in the changing test scores. Up to now, about seven hundred children have been tested in Vienna. The Vienna School has received a certain notoriety abroad because of this, and the United States of America, for example, has produced the first big educational film on the subject inspired by Professor Bühler’s work, which will be shown sometime this year at the Urania [popular education center].

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It goes without saying that other countries know much more about the work at this new Vienna School of Child Psychology than Vienna itself. We intend to shed some light on the matter.

6. D. R. Visiting Young Mothers First published as “Wir besuchen junge Mütter,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, April 14, 1932, 7. Translated by Brigitte Morales-Würz. “Operation Layette,” which started before the state and municipal election in 1927, was advertised with the slogan “no Viennese child should be born on a newspaper,” and decreed by the Vienna City Senate on March 22, 1927. All women residing in Vienna who were close to giving birth were eligible to receive this layette for infants. Granted by the city as a first welfare measure, the layette was to be provided for mothers and their newborns of all social classes, not taking into account their status or need.11 The operation was derogatorily called “election diapers” and highly criticized by the opposition. Starting in 1933, the infant layette was only distributed in a limited way, until it was suspended completely in 1934. In light of the uncertain budget allowance for infant layettes in 1933, the article printed here is the last intent to emphasize the importance of its unlimited distribution, and it explicitly addresses the working and living conditions of the fathers as well. More than sixteen thousand children are born in Vienna each year. If you have a wide circle of acquaintances among the young couples in town, you will be reminded of that often enough. Time flies, and you become an “uncle” time and again. A real uncle mostly has the task to visit often. Therefore you go and meet the young person for the first time. I already knew Mitzi when she was a baby. That was twenty-four years ago. Her mother said about her that she was a child of good fortune because she brought money home on the first day of her life. Mitzi’s parents were not doing well at the time, so poorly in fact that Mitzi was not even born in a bed but on a mattress thrown on the dirt floor. The midwife brought the mother three guilders on the day of delivery; the good woman had wrestled them from a charitable organization. Oh, if the “wise woman” had not been there! She did not charge for her services and even brought some support. Now the “lucky kid” is a wife and mother herself, her husband is a hard worker. If he had a job, Mitzi would be doing pretty well, but he does not. Who takes care of the child? The young couple lives in a small apartment in a rental building in a working-class district. It is a rental building like so many others. The kitchen is dark, there is a courtyard, the toilet and water line are in the hallway. The whole house is painted in a dreary gray, how long has it been since these were the only apartment dwellings for the working class. The young mother is happy. “Look,” she says, “the lovely clothes our little one got.” She proudly spreads out the jumper and diaper in front of the visitor. I must not look 11 Hans

Paradeiser, “Die Säuglingswäscheaktion der Gemeinde Wien,” Blätter für Wohlfahrtswesen 26, no. 259 (1927): 38–39.

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excited enough, and she says with a bit of disappointment: “There is no point in showing something like this to a man. You don’t understand what it means, when a child receives such marvelous clothes. These are clothes from the community, it is really beautiful that somebody cares about my child.” The conductor’s wife I visited thought so too, after she got home from the institution. Her husband is a young, ambitious musician, and rumor has it that he is talented. He has already composed several pieces, and critics have noticed him, as they say. There are people who believe the man has a future. He would rather have a present. Especially now that a child has arrived. This child, a girl, was born with a lot of hair, and her mother is so proud of that. She eagerly accepted the layette. The young woman especially appreciated that the community made sure to wrap this layette in a tasteful way. The young musician wanted to find out exactly what the deal is with the infant layette. He never concerned himself with local political problems and did not know exactly which principles were followed in the distribution of layettes. It was not until he was convinced that the layettes were given to all mothers with the right of residence in Vienna, not just to needy families, that he decided to accept the package. “So, you say that you wouldn’t have accepted the package if it were support for the needy?” I asked him. “Certainly not,” he responded. “Look now,” I retorted, “it would have been difficult for you to replace the rejected layette with one of the same quality.” “You are absolutely right,” he admitted, “but I could still not have accepted it,” he explained, “I just can’t rid myself of certain prejudices.” However, if the community takes on the responsibility to provide a layette for all children, then it represents a principle that can be accepted without losing face; after all, everyone sends their children to public school nowadays too. The third child was a delightful boy. I cannot really tell one newborn from another, but I was assured so emphatically that the boy is incredibly cute that I couldn’t help but agree. The father of this cute boy is an engineer. He even has a job. But it is a job for later. He is allowed to fulfill rather complicated tasks. If you ask about his salary though, he just smiles. You do not always have to be cheerful when you smile. This young man’s situation is the same as with most young academics nowadays. And now he has a child. [. . .] His mother is a prudent woman. She still has part of the clothes he used when he was little. She dug them out for the new baby. Well, they are still in good condition, but the young woman felt badly about her child only having old clothes. Until the welfare worker brought the layette from the community. Now the new and the old lay side by side. The style for infant clothing has changed over the last thirty years as well. You can clearly see it. The mother of the engineer initially was against the community layette, at least until she saw the package. “How do you like the clothes?,” I ask and pretend that I do not know that she was full of mistrust at first. “Well,” she answers with a tone that says it all. Then the young ones laugh and the fun is over. “Do you know,” I say to the woman, “that the anti-Marxists distributed a flyer in 1930 that claimed that the municipality was distributing used diapers?”—“What a dirty trick,” the woman grumbled, “the gall!” A head full of worries. Yes, that is what the small merchant had. I also had to visit him, because a child was born into his home that will eventually call me “uncle” too. “How’s business?” I should not really ask the man, since his is doing really poorly. In his situation, the arrival of a child is not just a small burden. “Everything is so expensive,” he complains, “I really don’t know

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where to get the money. Having a child now is a big deal. If the community didn’t see to it that the children have diapers, many a family would be in dire straits.” “It is a beautiful thing that the community gives out layettes,” the merchant’s wife explains. “And the best of all is the natural manner in which the package is distributed.” The husband agreed. “You see,” he said, “we really need it, but even if I abandoned all prejudice, I could not apply for clothes for the needy. First of all, I wouldn’t get any, and secondly, I’d have to close shop the next day. Nobody would deliver a penny’s worth of merchandise to me anymore. I’d be done for.” A bit of statistics. As I made my rounds, my friends wanted to know how many infant layettes have been distributed so far, when the campaign started, and the merchant was even interested in the cost to the municipality. I will answer these questions here. The community prepares an infant layette for every newborn child whose mother has the right of residence in Vienna. Every woman who registers receives the package. The package is enclosed in a wooden box labeled on the outside with a picture of [Anton] Hanak’s sculpture “Mother Welfare” and the signature “Infant Layette of the city of Vienna.” The package weighs three and a half kilograms. It contains twenty-four baby diapers, two flannels, six shirts, six jackets, a towel, two umbilical bandages, a frock, a flannel blanket, two rubber inserts, and a set of toiletries (soap, ointment, and baby powder). The campaign started on March 15, 1927. Until the end of 1931, altogether 55,916 infant layettes were distributed. The city of Vienna spent 631,799 schillings for infant layettes in the year 1930. In 1931, 718,000 schillings were budgeted for this purpose. The estimated budget of the city of Vienna for 1932 is 500,000 schillings.

7. August Aichhorn The Training School (from Wayward Youth) First published as “Von der Fürsorgeerziehungsanstalt,” in Verwahrloste Jugend: Die Psychoanalyse in der Fürsorgeerziehung; Zehn Vorträge zur ersten Einführung (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1925), 190–92. Translated by N.  N. in Wayward Youth (Covent Garden-London: Putnam, 1936), 147–50. The educator and psychoanalyst August Aichhorn (1878–1949) was working as a youth educator before World War I; from 1918 to 1922 he led the training schools in Oberhollabrunn and St. Andrä an der Traisen.12 After the dissolution of these institutions, he was tasked with the organization of educational counseling of the Youth Office in Vienna, and he was responsible for the counseling centers in fourteen districts from 1923 until his retirement in 1930. In his publication, he addresses the question of how welfare and education can counteract the problem of “neglect” with psychoanalytical, sociopedagogical, and humanistic educational methods, as is illustrated in the following excerpt that describes a visit to one of his welfare institutions. 12

In 1918 the municipality of Vienna took charge of a former refugee camp in Oberhollabrunn, Lower Austria, which was transformed into a training school or rather reform school for neglected youth. In 1919 it became a municipal facility.

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If you had come to our training school on a particularly good day you would have found something like the following: Before you reached the grounds of the institution you might have met a local inhabitant complaining loudly that the delinquents, instead of being locked up and marched out in a line to go walking, were allowed to run around in the neighbourhood, that they could come and go at will through unlocked doors and gates. He is on his way to complain to the superintendent because some boys, who were scuffling on their way home, had broken one of his windows. You cannot see me at once because a policeman is waiting for me. From my office you hear the excited voice of a gardener complaining that he cannot have the boys coming into his orchard. I invite you to come in with the policeman and let you hear the account of what happened the day before. Two boys made a fire in the woods and cooked a trout that was obviously caught in a nearby brook, a thing forbidden by law. The policeman is no more than out of the room and we are in the point of making a round of the institution when the cook bursts in in great excitement to say that she had made just the right number of dumplings and five have disappeared. Maybe you will decide to forgo further inspection of the institution. Is it better to have such a state of affairs in a training school or should one really depend on lock and key? In the consultation room of the clinic the worker accepts the misconduct of the delinquent and in the beginning does not interfere with it but awaits the time when a change comes of itself. We can see no reason why the procedure should be different in the institution just because there are more cases and the difficulties are greater. It is characteristic of the delinquent that he possesses little capacity for repressing instinctual impulses and for directing energy away from primitive goals. He is thus unable to achieve what is considered by society a normal ethical code. The great majority of children in need of retraining come into conflict with society because of an unsatisfied need for tenderness and love in their childhood. We therefore find in them a proportionately increased thirst for pleasure and for primitive forms of instinctual gratification. They lack inhibitions and they have a strong, though distorted, craving for affection. If the delinquency is to be cured rather than repressed, we must meet these needs even though at first this seems futile to so-called “understanding people.” As a matter of fact, the work in our institution was misunderstood. Anxious, timid people were horrified, the neighbours were angry, and every time anything went wrong there was a great outcry. However, we did not let ourselves be misled. We utilized the daily conflict to achieve an educational purpose. We assured these youths of our interest and affection in an environment calculated to please them, made use of the love thus won from them to retrieve a neglected part of their development, i.e., the transition from their earlier unreal world of self-indulgence to one of reality. From the very beginning we felt intuitively that above all we must see that the boys and girls from fourteen to eighteen had a good time. We did not treat them as dissocial or criminal individuals from whom society needed protection; they were human beings who had found life too hard, whose antagonism to society was justified, and for whom an environment must be created in which they could feel comfortable. With this attitude as an impetus, the work carried itself along. The faces of the children and the personnel reflected happiness. I can still remember the tension with which we awaited the first admission and how delighted he was when we threw ourselves into the task of winning him over. Later, we modified our treatment in many ways, but I can assure you that even our first exaggerated efforts did no harm. That first boy is well adjusted and has been successfully earning his living for years.

“Who will loan me books?” Poster from the Central Office for Workers’ Education (Arbeiterbildungszentrale), showing the network of the Vienna Workers’ Libraries, 1929. (Courtesy of Wienbibliothek im Rathaus.)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

EDUCATION FOR EVERYONE Marie-Noëlle Yazdanpanah

W

ith revolutionary zeal, Josef Luitpold Stern—a key Social Democratic figure in the ranks of art and education, whose positions included head of the Central Office for Workers’ Education (Zentralstelle für das Bildungswesen, aka Arbeiterbildungszentrale) from 1918 to 1922 and again after 1932, as well as rector of the party’s Workers’ College (Arbeiterhochschule)—in 1930 gave expression to the demands of the Social Democratic education reformers. “The art of the new education is to fire mind, character, and sentiments in equal degrees with the illuminating idea of socialism.”1 At this time, some of the reforms (e.g., free schoolbooks) had already been implemented, and the range of options for workers’ education had been expanded. One of the most important demands was for a unified school system (Einheitsschule) for students up to the age of fourteen, so as to give everyone, including students from socially disadvantaged families, access to higher education, instead of sending them at the age of ten to different types of schools that would preordain their future career prospects.2 This concept, however, was already a dead letter in 1927, following the adoption of the Secondary Education Act (Mittelschulund Hauptschulgesetz) on the federal level. Alongside the housing construction program and comprehensive welfare and health policies, the fundamental reform of the education system was at the heart of the social renewal of Red Vienna. This reform was guided by the concept of lifelong learning, from kindergarten and school up to adult education. The idea was not only for a classical educational model, but above all to promote character building and political education. Workers, as the focus of the reforms, were to be educated in a way that would foster solidarity, independent thinking, and democratic action. The approaches differed considerably: popular educators such as Ludo Moritz Hartmann believed in the possibility of unprejudiced and nonjudgmental education, whereas Austro-Marxists such as Max Adler rejected neutral education as “self-deception.”3 And the educator and Social Democrat youth activist Otto Felix Kanitz called for a socialist education ideal that would overthrow the bourgeois education monopoly and abolish the classbound society. In reality, the actual measures were more pragmatic and less radical, and the Social Democratic education policy implemented many liberal ideas and approaches. The 1 Josef Luitpold Stern, Klassenkampf und Massenschulung (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1930), 29. 2 For this highly differentiated system see the texts by Otto Glöckel and Max Lederer. 3 Max Adler, Neue Menschen: Gedanken über sozialistische Erziehung (Berlin: Laub, 1924), 26.

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education reform was not part of a revolutionary idea to banish and overthrow the ruling classes, but an attempt to create a more egalitarian society through the extensive elimination of social inequality. It called for the development of adult education in cooperation with existing popular education centers (Volkshochschulen). These centers and a city-wide network of public libraries were designed to provide easy access to knowledge. The centerpiece of the education agenda, however, was the reform of the school system. Schools were to be demilitarized and the influence of the church reduced. In 1919 Otto Glöckel, undersecretary of state for education until the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) was ousted from the federal government in 1920, abolished compulsory religious education and school prayers. The Glöckel Decree, as it was called, met with fierce resistance from conservatives and was abolished with the elimination of Parliament in 1933. After the Social Democrats were forced out of federal politics in 1920, they focused their education and school reform movements on the city of Vienna. As the school agenda was basically a federal responsibility, the education policy measures were restricted to compulsory schooling and had no bearing on the curriculum of higher education or on the universities. In 1922, Glöckel became president of the newly established Vienna State School Council (Stadtschulrat für Wien) and gradually implemented parts of the program. He was assisted by Viktor Fadrus, who was responsible for elementary school reform, curricula, and advanced teacher training, despite resistance from the Christian Social Ministry of Education. Child-oriented work schools (Arbeitsschulen), which focused not on abstract subjects but on real-life situations and problems and which allowed students to work through the syllabus at their own speed, were to replace schools that promoted rote and mechanical learning techniques (Drillschulen and Lernschulen). A variety of progressive education approaches, in some cases based on existing reform models such as that of pedagogue Eugenie Schwarzwald, were implemented, developed, and combined. Private and municipal kindergartens were opened, and in some of them the children were not only taught according to the Montessori method but also encouraged to express themselves freely through drawing based on Franz Čižek’s ideas of art education. The Social Democratic association known as the Children’s Friends (Kinderfreunde) founded a children’s home and a school for teachers in the former imperial palace of Schönbrunn, which was considered too radical not only by conservatives but also by some Social Democrats. The reformers also established pilot schools to experiment with egalitarian teaching methods. Important points of reference were Alfred Adler’s individual psychology with the central concept of social feeling (Gemeinschaftsgefühl), psychoanalytical educational concepts—as employed and developed, for example, in Siegfried Bernfeld’s Baumgarten Children’s Home project or Elsa Köhler’s radical work school (Arbeitsschule)—and Charlotte und Karl Bühler’s developmental psychology.4 The latter had a great influence on teacher training at the new Pedagogical Institute of the City of Vienna. The importance of space was also emphasized: The hierarchical spatial arrangement was to be broken down, and architects and designers were commissioned to design kindergartens and schools with bright, functional rooms and furniture suitable for children. Some of the approaches and activities in the educational reform movement seem paternalistic and narrow-minded, others are surprisingly radical and adaptable. They extend from criticism of gender-specific early education and progressive educational ideas to attempts at socialist and adult education. The scope of (school) reforms was narrower, however, than contemporary texts would suggest, not only because significant aspects of education policy were outside the reach of the municipality and state of Vienna but 4

See chapter 7.

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also because the stagnating birthrate and the lack of jobs meant that only a few of the newly trained teachers actually taught and hardly any new schools were opened. Most of the educational reforms were cut back or prohibited in 1934 and abolished in 1938. After 1945, particularly in the wake of the education reforms by Bruno Kreisky’s Social Democratic federal governments in the 1970s, many of Red Vienna’s experimental concepts were revived. Glöckel’s unified school system has yet to be introduced in Austria and remains a controversial issue in educational policy discussions. Further reading Benetka 2004 Dewald 2019 Göttlicher 2019 Stifter 2005 Weidenholzer 1981 Zwieauer and Eichelberger 2001

1. Gina Kaus Sex and Character in the Nursery First published as “Geschlecht und Charakter in der Kinderstube,” Die Mutter: Halbmonatsschrift für alle Fragen der Schwangerschaft, Säuglingshygiene und Kindererziehung, August 1, 1925, 4–5. Translated by Nick Somers. Gina Kaus (1893–1985) criticizes the fact that in education girls and boys are assigned fixed, clearly distinguishable characteristics from the outset and that the self-assurance of girls and women is weakened in this way. The reference in the title to Sex and Character, Otto Weininger’s notorious misogynistic treastise from 1903, is a reflection of Kaus’s criticism of gender roles in education. Kaus, a novelist and a playwright, was also a supporter of the Social Democrats, ran an Education Counseling Center in Vienna and published the magazine Die Mutter (The mother) from 1924 to 1926. She wrote many articles in mostly Social Democratic media in Austria and Germany about psychological and sociological aspects of education. As in this text, she referred frequently to Alfred Adler, whose concepts exerted a great influence on her.5 When talking about their children, mothers often say, even when the children are still infants, “he’s a real boy” or “my baby is a typical girl.” Those in particular who have made the observation that there are lots of ill-behaved boyish girls and gentle girlish boys might wonder about the origins of this widely held view that, while still in their diapers, the two sexes demonstrate distinct characteristics and whether this point of view does not preclude the chance of any dispassionate observation; and second, whether this preconceived notion might lead to measures in education that may harm the child’s character development [Natur der Kinder]. Most educators are not only convinced that girls and boys are not just children, but miniature men and women, but they also see their task as educating children not to be 5

See Gina Kaus, “Die seelische Entwicklung des Kindes,” in Handbuch der Individualpsychologie, vol. 2, ed. Erwin Wexberg (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1926), 137–68. See also chapter 25.

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people, but to be men and women. It should be evident, however, that gender development is something that will take place of its own accord, whereas the point of education should be development as a member of society. The different treatment of the sexes starts at an early stage. Little girls are clothed in pretty dresses that have to be kept clean, while boys wear lederhosen that are meant to develop a well-worn patina. Girls are given dolls to look after to satisfy or arouse their innate maternal instinct. Boys, on the other hand, looking ahead to their future careers, are given building blocks, train sets or, if their parents are stupid or unprincipled enough, toy soldiers, swords, and guns. Later on, boys are encouraged to study and play games, whereas girls are trained in housework. The boys are given to understand early on that it will be their job to work and to earn money, whereas it is suggested to girls that they develop virtues—or at least characteristics believed to be such by their parents—that will be approved of by respectable men. The difficult living circumstances in recent years, however, have gradually extended the scope for women to work, so that the disparity in education has lessened somewhat in this regard. Even so, in most families, girls are urged to work merely as a temporary measure until the more preferable route of marriage, and their work is therefore deprived of any deeper significance. But this deliberate training for a future gender role is just a small part of education. Targeted drills are not necessary to influence children; the asides and comments that can be heard in practically every nursery are sufficient: “boys don’t cry,” “girls don’t do that,” or “boys shouldn’t be shy, girls shouldn’t be forward,” for example. These unthinking comments have one thing in common: they devalue girls, at least from the child’s point of view. That girls should be well-behaved and neat but are also allowed to be meek and whiney. Poor grades are preferable to black marks for bad behavior. These are things that cause a child to feel extremely degraded. This is at the root of a whole series of differences in character that can be observed between boys and girls. They don’t grow up under the same circumstances, and girls suffer from their earliest childhood from the pressure of being of lesser worth than boys. [. . .] This awareness, implanted in every girl from her earliest childhood, of being a member of the inferior sex, is a form of discouragement that is as inescapable as their gender itself and is thus more dangerous and damaging than any personal discouragement. Women whose belief in their personal capabilities should have been long confirmed by the excellence of their performance have to meet every new challenge by asking themselves: “Will I as a woman be able to manage this?” There is always something standing behind them watching: their own insecurity. An invisible and distrustful audience is always there, depriving every act of its spontaneity and originality. As a result of this widespread lower appreciation of girls, almost every small girl wishes nothing more than to be a boy. This wish, which adults only smile at, is a tragedy for the child, who basically knows that it can never come true. And this unfulfillable wish not to belong to the inferior sex produces in the girl what Alfred Adler calls the “male protest,” the repeated attempt in many different ways to compensate for the disadvantage of being a woman. This eternal latent protest is the source of countless hysterical conditions and the greatest obstacle to a good relationship with the other sex. We can see the first signs of this in the nursery: we see the small girl pretending to despise boys; we see the ambitious girl who tries to be more boyish than a boy (“she’s a tomboy ten times over”), or who chooses a particularly lofty career ambition that is thought to be reserved for men. Others seek to compensate for the superiority that boys enjoy by dominating everyone and everything smaller than they are and by

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exhibiting a maternal attitude toward younger siblings, animals, or dolls. This maternalism is the rarest form of protest today, however, and those who claim that it is a characteristic common to all little girls merely demonstrate that they do not know much about small children. And if the stricter form of upbringing in earlier years—one that offered fewer opportunities for girls to express themselves—resulted more frequently in the development of this characteristic, it merely demonstrates again that it is a product of nurture rather than nature. There might be natural differences in character between girls and boys, but we know little about them because the artificially created distinctions caused by misguided education make it more difficult to observe them. To avoid these mistakes, we must first liberate ourselves from all preconceptions. This is not always easy if we ourselves have suffered or benefitted from them.

2. Lili Roubiczek The Kinderhaus: Montessori Principles and Architecture First published as Lilli Roubiczek, “Das Kinderhaus: Montessori-Grundsätze und Architektur,” Der Aufbau: Österreichische Monatshefte für Siedlung und Städtebau 1, nos. 8–9 (1926): 140–44. Translated by Nick Somers. Roubiczek’s text combines new architecture, new education models, and the idea of the New Human. Space replaces play as the central category of child education and functions as a third teacher, with the focus on the interaction of the child with its surroundings. The psychoanalyst Lili (Lilli) Roubiczek(-Peller) (1898–1962), who worked closely with Anna Freud, came into contact with Maria Montessori during her psychology studies under Charlotte and Karl Bühler. She was one of the first advocates of Montessori teaching in Vienna, developed the concepts behind it, and built the Children’s House (Haus der Kinder).6 Roubiczek also advised the city of Vienna on the development of progressive education curricula in kindergartens. In 1930, for example, a kindergarten was opened in the Goethehof municipal housing complex based on plans by Friedl Dicker(-Brandeis) and Franz Singer which combined Montessori and Bauhaus principles.7 Like practically all progressive reform projects, it was no longer run according to Montessori principles from 1934 on, and closed in 1938. The “Anschluss” also brought an end to Roubiczek’s Children’s Houses; Roubiczek herself had already left Vienna for Palestine by 1934. When building, we take account of all the essential requirements of the different groups of people and build houses for the healthy and sick, for persons with lesser means, we build recreational facilities, and centers for intellectual work [Zentren geistiger Arbeit]. The special features of each of these building types is acknowledged, and every one of them today has its own special literature. The demand for architecture for children still appears utopian for many people today. Why is this? Because they don’t want to be “too artificial”? Not at all! Because it is so easy 6

There were two of them: The first was situated in a working-class district, the second in the city center. 7 The two former Bauhaus students founded the Werkstätten Bildender Kunst in Berlin in 1923 and from 1926 worked together in Vienna in the Singer-Dicker studio. Singer was an architect, Dicker (-Brandeis) an interior designer, painter, and art teacher.

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to deny and ride roughshod over the demands of children, the weakest and most defenseless members of our society. [. . .] Built environments are much more important for a young person than they are for an adult. This is a general and indisputable biological fact. If we seek to deny it, the only result will be that our children grow up in an unfavorable atmosphere that inhibits their development. What a senseless waste of the vitality of the coming generation! We do not deny the generally recognized physical hygiene demands (that the rooms be bright, well ventilated, and easy to clean). On the contrary, we make them the conditio sine qua non upon which we build the additional demands for “mental hygiene.” We know that every room we enter communicates its “atmosphere,” be it a concert auditorium or a beer hall. As a consequence, we adapt our entire behavior to it, our gestures and movements, the way we speak. The atmosphere of the room has a suggestive effect on us, albeit usually unconscious. Our aim is to make the most extensive and systematic use of this possibility in the design of rooms for children, in other words, to give the room psychological functions which until now have mostly been regarded as the responsibility of the teacher. This is the core principle. For us adults, it is sufficient to have a room that gives a framework and possibly a basic setting for our work and social activities; a room for children must also be a mental guide. And yet—it can only exude the kind of influence that has been endowed upon it. This gives rise to a new task that teachers must assume: the preparation of a room to provide mental stimulus, the use of the entire treasure trove of love and all of the spiritual richness they possess to “enhance” the room. Our aim is for the child to be active and self-motivated, and everything we do is geared toward that aim. We demand a pleasant room and pleasant objects—not primarily because we have aesthetic ideals but because pleasant things invite us to use them, whereas things that serve the same purpose but are ugly leave us indifferent. We demand order, not because order is a generally recognized virtue drummed into us at school, but because order makes it easier for the child to find the objects it needs for a specific activity. If the child feels like doing a certain activity, it should not have to waste its energy searching for the object it needs. We demand an environment that is stimulating and happy, but we are wary of a random superfluity of objects. Only in an environment that can be intellectually controlled can the child feel comfortable and devote itself fully to being a child. We demand a well-proportioned environment, so that the child will feel as naturally comfortable and free in its built environment as we do in ours. It is not sufficient that the essential furnishing and utensils are the right size for a child; everything must be proportional—for example, the height at which pictures are hung. [. . .] Room and furnishing. These are rooms in which a group of around thirty children aged three to seven years spend the whole day. Two rooms would be preferable, a playroom/workroom and a room where the children can eat and the little ones can have their afternoon nap. The children occupy themselves during the day on their own or in small groups. The teacher goes from one group to the other, offering advice, assistance, and encouragement. Only a few things, such as meals or music, are done together. Thus, the external connection between the individual members of this “children’s society” is quite

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loose. (The internal connection, for reasons that cannot be discussed here, is much stronger than it can be in any society organized along the same lines.) The room should therefore exert its influence. It should be designed so that it always leads the individual back to the center. For that reason we don’t choose an elongated or rectangular room. Octagonal rooms have proven very effective at creating a balanced and harmonious atmosphere. Children sometimes have a strong need to be alone and undisturbed. The room therefore has one or two separate niches with a couple of comfortable chairs and perhaps even a cot to rest in. Furnishing of the work room. All play and work materials are shared by the children. They should be kept on racks and shelves so that every item is easily visible. Cupboards are practically unnecessary, as there should not be any objects in the room that are not constantly in use; and things that are constantly in use should be easily accessible. A cabinet contains as many small pigeonholes as there are children. Here they can store their personal things: drawing books, crayons, etc. Chairs and tables of different shapes and sizes are provided. Most [of the tables] are rectangular, some are round, and some are square. The children can spread small raffia mats or rugs on the floor so that they can play comfortably on them. How big should the room be? It is difficult to give a precise answer. When all the furniture is in place, around half of the floor space should be free. The children should not be overwhelmed by the design of the room and should feel as if the room is there for them. It should not therefore be too high, the doors shouldn’t be too wide, and the windows, even if they are large so as to let in lots of light and air, should be in a reasonable proportion to the child’s height. This does not mean that the room should be like a doll’s house, but more like a workshop or studio with large windows opening onto a balcony or terrace, or else like a Japanese room. Even more importantly, a children’s room should avoid all sentimentality and romanticism and should not get in the way of the occupants and their activities, as we also demand for an adult room. We must abide here, too, by the basic principle that a house or apartment, rooms and furniture, are not ends in themselves but are created by us to ensure that our fear of “architecture and art” does not make us slaves of the building and interior design. Here, however, it is the child that is the measure. Although this sounds like common sense, it has been heeded very little in buildings and rooms for adults, and much less so for a children’s environment. Montessori education is designed here as well to make up for this lack of consideration for the world of the child.

3. Otto Felix Kanitz Class Pedagogy Part 1 First published as “Klassenpädagogik I,” Die sozialistische Erziehung: Reichsorgan des Arbeitervereins “Kinderfreunde” für Österreich 1, no. 3 (1921): 1–6. Translated by Nick Somers. According to the socialist educator and journalist Otto Felix Kanitz (1894–1940), “neutral education” is not possible in a class-bound society. At the center of his concept of socialist education

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is the promotion of independent thinking, experimentation, and mutual aid.8 This was to be implemented in the progressive education project of the Schönbrunn School (1919–1924), which Kanitz directed with the educator Anton Tesarek. The school was established by the Children’s Friends association in Schönbrunn Palace, appropriating a former imperial space for the purpose. Teachers included Max Adler, Emmy Freundlich, and Marianne Pollak. In view of the importance Kanitz attaches to individual initiative, his education theory may still be seen as relevant today. At the same time, the uncompromising nature of his writings allows only an either-or choice and illustrates how Red Vienna had to struggle to promote its education goals. The economic situation of a social class has a vital influence on its thinking. Nothing is therefore more natural than for distinct education goals to be developed for each class. It would be simply un-Marxist to speak of neutral education. Let us look at some specific examples. Which class encourages all children to be educated and to think independently and clearly, the suppressor or the suppressed class? Independent and clear thinking would make children realize that their misery, their need, their deprivations are not the result of some divine law, but the result of the bad way that today’s society is organized. Clear ideas and logical thinking would make children realize that rich and poor, exploiters and exploited, idlers and wage slaves are not things that have always existed and will continue to exist, but that change depends solely on the general triumph of reason within the human race. Clear thinking and logical judgment would enable children to recognize the right paths to be trodden in order to smash the present social order and replace it by one that brings greater happiness. Guidance toward a clear recognition of all the manifestations of nature and history, but above all of human relationships, is primarily in the interests of the exploited class. The educators of this class will therefore endeavor to encourage clear and independent thinking in their children. For the exploiting class the situation is completely different. Its power and domination are based on the ignorance of the masses. It clings to the authority of a divinity or tradition in order to assert its rule. It is unable to give the members of the exploited class any reasonable grounds for allowing themselves to be exploited. The hungry stomach is an extremely logical thinker. At least, it will not understand why it in particular has to be hungry while others are not. The exploiting class will not be able to persuade the exploited class of anything with rational arguments. It resorts to authority, to intellectual rape. The children of the masses should not know but simply believe, with the blind faith that this social order is the product of divine providence or a natural development. The educators of this exploting class will inhibit the desire for independent thinking and replace it by the demand for blind faith. A similar situation exists with the encouragement or inhibition of the urge for freedom. The exploited class wants its children to have a large and powerful urge for freedom. It is in the interests of its members to instill an independent morality in the hearts of their children and to free them from the constraints that they themselves suffered. They know that the social order that will help them obtain their rights is sustainable only on the basis of the freedom of every individual. By contrast, the exploting class—which can maintain its situation, one that scorns reason and humanity, only by force—is intent on instilling obedience and subservience in the hearts of the children of the proletariat. It also uses the state religion to further its purpose, a religion which teaches children submissiveness and denial. 8

The text is the first of a series of three; see Otto Felix Kanitz, Klassenpädagogik I to III, Die sozialistische Erziehung: Reichsorgan des Arbeitervereins “Kinderfreunde” für Österreich 1, nos. 3–5 (1921).

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And now to the third example: the suppressed class, threatened by the strong economic power of its suppressors, suffers from the laws of today’s society, which advocates the survival of the fittest. It is in the interest of its members to develop a strong and powerful social drive in their children, so that they feel an elemental attraction to all those who share their fate, but also recognize that today’s society is in stark conflict with the law of mutual aid. The idea of a collectivist approach, of the happiness of mankind through wellstructured cooperative activity, needs to be implanted in the minds of the children of the exploited class. Needless to say, all of this is not in the interests of the exploiting class. [. . .] Systematic education that promotes clarity, freedom, and mutual aid will provide the most necessary component in the current stage of development, namely the revolutionary fighting spirit. Young persons with a clear view of present-day society are bound to oppose what they see. If they want to be truly free, they must combat today’s subservient society, and if they have a passionate longing for a world of mutual aid and genuine community spirit, having been forced everywhere into today’s world of capitalist enslavement, they must inevitably revolt against this order. The education of the suppressed class is not only quite distinct from the education of the suppressors; by its very nature it is completely revolutionary. As it is a product of the class situation, this class education will take a similar form everywhere and at all times. In the proletarian masses in all countries today we are seeing powerful educational tendencies with similar aims to ours, and methods that do not differ significantly from one another. And now, let us compare our class education with that of the bourgeoisie when it was a suppressed class itself: I have often heard that what I understand by socialist education is nothing “new,” and that the bourgeoisie made similar demands a century ago. This is true, because one hundred years ago the bourgeoisie was in the same position as we are today, an exploited class rebelling against feudalism. Its intellectual approach is summed up by the slogan of the revolutionary bourgeoisie: “freedom, equality, fraternity.” Have these words not been proclaimed thousands of times by revolutionary workers? And yet they were “nothing new” either. Have we not adopted many ideas of the revolutionary bourgeoisie for ourselves? No wonder, since the economic conditions were similar if not identical. It is therefore little wonder that much of what we call “socialist education” today was the property of the revolutionary bourgeoisie when it was itself a suppressed class. The bourgeoisie then felt just as we do now; it faced the task of liberating humankind and creating a new and authentic concept of humanity. It demanded education in line with the bourgeois class, education for freedom, equality, and fraternity. The bourgeoisie did not fulfill its mission. Once victorious, it introduced a new system of exploitation. When we fight for socialism today, it is we who are demanding to be recognized as fighters for genuine humanity. For us, socialist education and education in humanity are one and the same thing. It is class education, which—just as the class struggle of the proletariat goes beyond its own class by wishing to abolish all classes—goes beyond class interests to pave the way for a new and comprehensive humanity. [. . .] The partial similarity in the educational ideas of the revolutionary bourgeoisie and the proletariat does not invalidate the socialist element in our education but emphatically confirms it. Just as the bourgeoisie in those days instilled the ideas of its class in their children and urged them to join the revolutionary struggle, we must do the same thing today. All of the examples cited above show that there are only two alternatives: either I develop clear thinking, or I inhibit its formation, either I encourage the urge for freedom or I suppress it, either I strongly develop the social sense in mankind or I crush it with formal phrases. There is no third option. We recognize the first alternative as socialist class education and the second as bourgeois.

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We are not therefore asked whether we want class education or not. The historical situation today presents us only with one question, “bourgeois or socialist class education?” As we are not of a mind to commit suicide, we choose the latter.

4. Otto Glöckel The Gateway to the Future First published as Das Tor der Zukunft (Vienna: Verlag des Vereines Freie Schule, n.d., 1917), 27–31. Translated by Nick Somers. In Das Tor der Zukunft, Otto Glöckel (1874–1935), who has become the figurehead of the Vienna school reform, set out his vision of a future education and school system. The text is based on a lecture with the same title given by him at a meeting of the Free School Association (Verein Freie Schule) on January 7, 1917,9 in the Konzerthaus in Vienna and then in several towns and cities in Austria. The main thrusts of the Red Vienna education reform were already touched upon here: greater autonomy for schools, free tuition and schoolbooks, the development of new teaching methods, the separation of school and church, and the establishment of a nonselective, unified school system (Einheitsschulen) so as to promote equal opportunity between social classes and between boys and girls. This excerpt discusses the reform of the school system and its central, but unheeded, demand for a unified school system. It is also noteworthy that Glöckel saw education as a process that starts at birth and continues after the age of eighteen, thereby already suggesting the concept of lifelong learning. The confusing differentiation of our school system. [. . .] There is a deep schism in our school system. Apart from the fact that the elementary school syllabus is more limited for girls than it is for boys and that it is extremely difficult for girls to progress in the education system, boys also suffer from the current organization of schools. After attending elementary school [Volksschule] until the age of ten, they are faced with their first school selection. Children from poor families remain in elementary school or, depending on the circumstances, attend secondary school [Bürgerschule]. Children from wealthier families start high school [Mittelschule].10 This makes the elementary school the school for the poor and clearly the poor stepchild of the nation, which entrusts the care of proletarian schools to the municipality, district, or state, saving its money for the schools for the privileged classes. [. . .] A student at a high school costs the state 393 times more than one at an elementary school and a university student costs 1,100 times more. Unfortunately, there is nothing good to say about our school system either. It is impractical and inhibits the intellectual development of the young generation. Those parents who are in the fortunate position of enabling their children to enjoy 9 Founded in 1905, the association—consisting of Social Democrats and liberals—was particularly opposed to the influence of the church on the school system. 10 Mittelschule was an alternative name for the Gymnasium, high schools for students from mostly ten to eighteen, although some schools accommodated fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds. Students graduated from the Mittelschule with a university entrance qualification, the Matura.

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a higher education find themselves facing a difficult decision. Even though their child is only ten years old, the parents are forced to judge which of the child’s latent capabilities are to be developed and which career the child will most likely choose. Their child’s future thus depends on which of the various high schools she or he will attend. This at least is true: there is a wide spectrum of schools available to choose from. There are Gymnasien, Realschulen, Real-Gymnasien, Gymnasien with a preparatory class, ReformRealgymnasien:11 what variety and diversity! All this sounds confusing and increases the difficulty in deciding, bearing in mind that the transfer from one type of school to another is highly disruptive. Where should I go? It is not the case that the different school types reflect the different capabilities of the students, which would be more in line with the purpose of the education. This organization inevitably leads to fateful wrong decisions. We might ask whether it is essential that this choice take place so early. Is there no way of avoiding the serious disadvantages that result? Looking more closely, we discover that the syllabus—with the exception of languages—is identical in the secondary school [Bürgerschule] and in the lower classes (up to fourteen years) of all types of high school [Mittelschule]. How can it be otherwise? There is a certain basic knowledge that every person should have. It is really incomprehensible that the choice has to be made at the age of nine when it could just as easily wait until the student is thirteen or fourteen. We need nonselective unified schools [Einheitsschulen]! The decision as to whether young persons are destined for higher education or whether they should learn a trade while finishing their compulsory schooling should be postponed until they are fourteen. Let us get rid of the old system, however pretty it is dressed up to be. Even the senior high school could be nonselective with a larger number of elective subjects, particularly languages. [. . .] How should the school system be developed? Until six years of age: maternity benefits, infant and childcare, day school, and kindergarten Until thirteen or fourteen years of age: general elementary school [Volksschule] (nonselective school) From thirteen or fourteen to sixteen or seventeen years of age: 1. Senior high school (Oberstufe) providing qualification for: a) university (academic orientation) b) a profession (practical orientation), agriculture, commerce, trade, industry, office work, military officer training 2. Compulsory secondary schooling to accompany practical professional training: agriculture, commerce, industry, art, housekeeping, child education. Trainee programs should primarily aim at providing workshops, where the young apprentices would receive practical and up-to-date instruction in their trade, rather than training at their masters’ home. From eighteen years 1. University with three faculties, because the theological faculty should be entrusted to the church

11 Realschulen

focused on technical subjects, Gymnasien on classical and modern languages and on preparation for university education.

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2. Free education facilities such as public university courses, public libraries, agricultural winter schools. The right path for every talent! This organization would ensure that the right path is found for every talent. The fate of young fourteen-year-olds today, at a time when the most significant and decisive developments are taking place, is left to blind chance. The desire for further eduation [on the part of students] is not aroused, resulting in permanent loss.

5. Otto Glöckel Drill Schools, Learning Schools, Work Schools Published as Drillschule, Lernschule, Arbeitsschule (Vienna: Verlag der Organisation Wien der Sozialdemokratischen Partei, 1928), 30–32. Translated by Nick Somers. The so-called School System Guidelines contain a summary of the main aspects of the Social Democratic education reform and once again emphasize the SDAP’s demand for nonselective schools. They were part of the 1926 Linz Program, which is considered one of the most important Austro-Marxist documents. Together with declarations regarding the women’s question and economic, social, demographic, and cultural policies, the guidelines constitute the Linz Program’s section on the tasks of the SDAP. Glöckel placed the guidelines at the end of his 1928 manifesto Drillschule, Lernschule, Arbeitsschule, which summed up the compromises and failures of the education reform—the elementary school curriculum of 1926 and the Secondary Education Act (Mittelschul- und Hauptschulgesetz) of 1927. It also lists the achievements— democratization, free textbooks and school supplies, new curricula and teaching methods, and teacher training in colleges of education—which were among Glöckel’s reforms that, unlike the failed idea of nonselective schools, were revived and implemented gradually after 1945. The party convention in Linz adopted the following School System Guidelines on November 3, 1926, as part of its program: “The Social Democrats advocate the abolition of the education monopoly of the  bourgeoisie. We demand a reform of the entire school system on the following principles: Public accessibility of the entire school system; free classes, textbooks, learning aids, and materials at all levels. Education of young persons at all levels to be independent (through work schools [Arbeitsschulen]) and autonomous (through the school community); combination of academic schooling with practical and physical education at all levels; teaching in the republican and socialist spirit. Prolongation of compulsory schooling to eight full years; abolition of exemptions. Nonselective school system [Einheitsschule]: four-year elementary school; compulsory general high school [Mittelschule] from fifth to eighth grade; maximum of thirty students in a classroom; binding special education for children with physical and mental disabilities. Uniform teacher training at colleges of education together with teacher-training  institutes.

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Expansion of compulsory further education attendance to include all school-age students who do not attend a technical school [Fachschule] or senior high school [Oberstufe]; establishment of specialized advanced vocational schools [Fortbildungsschulen] with practical workshop training; physical and civic education to accompany vocational training; day classes on weekdays; inclusion of schooling time in working time [of the individual]. State education establishments, grants, and student dormitories enabling gifted  children from all classes to attend technical schools [Fachschulen], high schools [Oberschulen], and universities. Impartial university administration, reform of postdoctoral qualifications, appointment and disciplinary system; general student chambers; open competition for the socialist academic concept at universities with all other academic approaches is to be ensured.” The program also calls for the separation of church and state and establishes the following: “The entire teaching and education system is secular but all communities of faith and conviction [Weltanschauungsgemeinschaften] should be permitted to provide ideological or religious instruction [Weltanschauungsunterrricht] and ritual practices to students outside the general classes. Until the children are fourteen, the decision as to attendance should be left to the parents. The theological faculties should be excluded from universities.” This outlines the direction and objectives of the coming school debate. We can look back with pride at the progress we have made, not without a difficult struggle, in the education system in the Republic. The positions we have established should provide us with a basis for further struggle. We will soon have young people in our ranks armed with valuable tools from the new schools, initially to support us and eventually to replace us. [.  .  .] Thus the struggle continues optimistically for a free school system, for the abolition of educational privilege, for a free people. Long live the school reform!

6. Max Lederer Why Do We Demand Nonselective Schools? First published as “Warum fordern wir die Einheitsschule?,” Der Kampf 12, no. 34 (1919): 769–72. Translated by Nick Somers. In this article, Max Lederer analyzes the school system as a reflection of class relations and demands a remedy in the form of a nonselective unified school system up to the age of fourteen (Einheitsschulen). His plea, written at the outset of the Red Vienna reform program, calls for an end to the perpetuation of social inequalities through the splitting up of school types into vocational schools on the one hand and higher-education and academic schools on the other. Nonselective schools remain one of the most controversial concepts in Austrian education policy. Arguments about the need to dismantle barriers to education and to establish equal opportunity presented by the likes of Otto Glöckel, Viktor Fadrus, and Therese Schlesinger stand in opposition to a fear of a lowering of standards as voiced by conservatives such as Richard Meister and Richard Schmitz.12 12 Richard

Meister (1881–1964) was professor of education at the University of Vienna from 1920 to 1938. The Christian Social Richard Schmitz (1885–1954) became minister of education in 1926 and was a prominent opponent of Glöckel.

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The extent to which our modern school system—at least until now—is adapted in particular to the interests of the bourgeois classes is the result of the goals that bourgeois society pursues with its schools. As can be seen from the attempts to reform the system in the direction of nonselective high schools [Einheitsmittelschule], these goals are specific political and social ones. The bourgeois class state needs public officials, attorneys, doctors, engineers, architects, artists—including tenured positions in all these categories. By virtue of the economic or intellectual hegemony they exercise, and through the material and intellectual weight of their positions, they are called upon to firmly establish the inviolate bourgeois ideal in the consciousness of the whole of society, including nonbourgeois classes that do not belong to these circles. This self-evident necessity from the point of view of the class-bound state is also the reason for a whole range of questions and problems, facts and wishes understood by and contained in the entitlement system. [. . .] The separation of the future attorneys, doctors, or engineers at the tender age of ten years from their less fortunate companions, whose only future is in the secondary school [Bürgerschule], establishes a smug superiority in the children’s minds at an age when they are particularly sensitive to rivalry and ensures that this sense of a higher purpose continues into their chosen profession. The members of these professions, with a few laudable exceptions, are not only separated by a gap from their former, now proletarian, classmates but have also effectively developed the caste spirit to a high degree within bourgeois society. This collegial caste spirit, which by its very nature is designed to divide by uniting, is present in all of the “intellectual professions,” especially those that have little contact with proletarian circles. In the end, however, it is merely a continuation of the splitting up that takes place in early childhood from the common schools with all members of society and the assignment to different schools. This leads the child to believe, once it has successfully survived the purgatory of the entrance examination, that it is not like those it has left behind but that it is predestined for something better and higher. However, this is the most important intrinsic reason for establishing a unified school system [Einheitsschulen]: to prevent divisions in society, to bridge the wide gaps that centuries of tradition have created between the individual estates and professions, between classes, and in this way to create a uniform people and build a great working community, whose individual members perform their work in the service of that community. Today, secondary school [Bürgerschule] and high school [Mittelschule] students are inhabitants of two different worlds that are practically as alien to one another as earthlings are from the inhabitants of Mars. There is only one way of changing things and making this difference disappear, however: the present-day secondary and high schools need to go. There are also educational reasons for this negative demand and for the positive demand for nonselective schools. There are now advocates of nonselective schools in more conservative circles—but with one seemingly minimal difference, which reveals the extent of the deep-seated ideological contradictions. The aim in both cases is to postpone the decision as to a career as long as possible to an age in which particular talents or inclinations can be recognized, namely at around the age of thirteen. These “moderate” reformers also want to leave the decision until puberty, but only for high school students. Their idea is for a nonselective high school [Einheitsmittelschule]. The distinction between secondary school and high school should be maintained, with two categories of students between the age of ten and fourteen, the patricians and the plebeians, the masses and the chosen. There would certainly be no objections to the path for the chosen being made even smoother than before. It would certainly be welcomed if high school students did not have to finally decide on which school to go to until the age of fourteen, but the fact that this possibility is confined to a certain class of students would add to rather than

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reduce the injustice done to the masses at large. This benefit must also be available to the masses, which logically results in the demand that the level of schools in general (up to the age of fourteen) be raised sufficiently to provide a solid basis for all types of further schooling. After studying hard until the age of fourteen, proletarian children must also have access to the route most suited to their talents. It should no longer be an exception, as in the past, either that a special talent is discovered in a ten-year-old child, who is then required to study under the greatest difficulty as a result of the prevailing social situation, without even achieving the success that its talent deserves, or else, as is often the case in rural areas, a student starts high school only after attending secondary school, losing two to four years in this way. For that reason we call for a nonselective school for all and not just a nonselective high school. One reason is to postpone the decision as to further schooling for all children without distinction until an age where they are more capable of making the decision. A further reason is to bridge the gap that inevitably occurs through the separation of children of the same age at a time when they are most receptive and are developing and increasing their intellectual capacities on a daily basis. [. . .] By an insidious coincidence, it is the poorest children who go to secondary school, whereas the wealthier, or the members of a proletarianized middle class who have not yet developed a proletarian class consciousness, go to high school. This insidious but strangely systematic coincidence—since the opposite is almost unknown—is ultimately the reason why we socialists call for nonselective schools. We want children of all classes of the population to enjoy the inestimable benefits of a common education until the age of fourteen, we want them to share the enjoyment and suffering of school. We want to plant in the not yet fully developed child’s consciousness—which in this case is probably an advantage—a feeling for the unity of the people, whose individual members are parts of a whole, with equal rights and obligations.

7. Joseph Buttinger The Viennese Workers’ College First published as Josef Buttinger, “Die Wiener Arbeiterhochschule,” Der Kuckuck, July 13, 1930, 14. Translated by Nick Somers. Every year, around thirty outstanding SDAP members and activists received advanced training at the Workers’ College (Arbeiterhochschule) (1926–1930)—including Joseph Buttinger (1906–1992), after 1934 one of the leaders of the illegalized Revolutionary Socialists of Austria. His article refers not only to the ideological appropriation of historical sites by the working class—the former Maria-Theresienschlössl, a symbol of Vienna’s imperial past, ironically became the home of the Workers’ College, a place for the training of socialists. It also makes clear that not all of Red Vienna’s education projects were aimed at the masses. The Workers’ College was reserved for selected young party members with potential. The teachers mentioned, the reference to the training of “men of confidence” with “Marxist workers’ education,” and male students in the auditorium or talking to male lecturers, as displayed in the photos attached to the article, reveal a certain gender imbalance.13 13 Every

year, however, a three-week intensive course for women took place; see Emmy Freundlich, “Die erste Frauenschule in der Arbeiterhochschule,” Die Frau 35, no. 11 (1926): 5.

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A Habsburg castle in Nussdorf, where the empress Maria Theresa used to stay, is now occupied every year by a collection of young representatives of the Austrian workers. The empress gave birth to her children there, a significant matter for her and her time. The students at the Workers’ College study the laws of social revolutionary development, a no less significant matter, when one considers that the initial impact of this revolution drove the entire clan of Maria Theresa’s descendants not only out of this castle but also out of the entire land. The Workers’ College is in many respects a unique institution. It was founded by the Social Democratic Party and the unions and opened in January 1926. It is of the greatest significance among the many institutions and approaches to Austrian workers’ education. The school is a residential college. Untroubled by material concerns and free of everyday inhibitions, the students can concentrate exclusively and intensively on their studies. Apart from special courses for women, trade unionists, juveniles, and members of workers’ choirs, there is an annual six-month course for union and party functionaries. The participants in this course are chosen by the party’s regional branches in the states [Landesparteien], unions, and individual cultural organizations. They come from all professions and organizations. This year there were metalworkers, printers, construction workers, white-collar workers, an unskilled laborer, and a small-parcel farmer, among others. The curriculum includes global economics, international politics, and world history. All three areas are subdivided into categories and dealt with by a large number of specialist lecturers. An introduction to social policy, labor law, and trade unionism helps with the practical requirements of work in companies and organizations. The school employs nineteen teachers, the first practitioners and theoreticians in the Austrian party and union movement, including Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, Max Adler, Edmund Palla, Viktor Stein, and Otto Neurath. [. . .] Classes start at 8 am, with lectures for four hours in the morning. Practical seminars (journalism, rhetoric, labor law) are normally held between 2 and 4 pm. Wednesday afternoons are devoted to excursions and study-related work visits. The study material is discussed in working groups and then revised and reproduced orally or in writing, individually or in small groups, depending on the subject. These new, collectivist forms of adult learning possibly deserve to be made known to a modern school expert, who could observe and describe them. The school principal is Josef Luitpold Stern. His guiding principle is that members of a socialist school community should be capable of handling their own affairs, in other words that they should have the greatest possible scope for unrestricted self-management. The students have a “constitution” laying down the basic principles for living together while boarding at the school, including stand-by duty, lessons, study periods, nights’ rest, election of representatives. Three representatives elected for four weeks at a time choose a “manager” from among their midst for each week who deals with current issues arising with the students, management, and teaching staff. There is also a teaching material monitor, book monitor, house monitor, excursion monitor, bath attendant, and others. The building has been adapted by the architect [George] Karau to the needs of this school republic. [.  .  .] Visitors from different places turn up practically every week. Last year, for example, it was students from the Düsseldorf business college [Wirtschaftsschule], this year students from the popular education center [Heimvolkshochschule] in Leipzig, as well as visitors from the USA and Finland. Every year, several dozen representatives graduate from this factory for Marxist workers’ education and have already assumed prominent roles in party and union life, on editorial boards and in secretariats. And yet every year there are only thirty from

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the ranks of hundreds of thousands. How much will the intellectual and organizational power of the socialist workers’ movement grow when there are more of these workers’ universities!

8. Ludo Moritz Hartmann Democracy and Popular Education First published as “Demokratie und Volksbildung,” Volksbildung: Monatsschrift für die Förderung des Volksbildungswesens in Deutschösterreich 1, no. 1 (1919): 18–21. Translated by Nick Somers. For the historian Ludo Moritz Hartmann (1865–1924), “learning to think,” the liberation from intellectual spoon-feeding, forms the foundation for a democratic society. Education and knowledge as a prerequisite for this liberation must be accessible to all on an egalitarian basis. Hartmann’s idea of popular education is inspired by Enlightenment ideals and postulates a principle of equality. Along with Emil Reich,14 Hartmann is regarded as the main initiator of the Vienna popular education movement. In 1901 they founded the first evening popular education center (Abendvolkshochschule) in Europe, the Volksheim Ottakring. In Red Vienna, the popular education centers cooperated closely with the Social Democratic city government, and many Social Democrats were involved in them. Like the Social Democratic reformers, the popular education movement wanted “education for everyone.” Hartmann’s concept, however, is based on a socially integrative class reconciliation theory. Unlike Max Adler or Otto Felix Kanitz, he advocated the principle of non-ideological, rational free thinking. Since democracy can be fully effective only on the basis of general popular education, democracy and popular education are complementary. Conversely, genuine popular education can only ever work completely on the basis of democracy. [. . .] Now that the popular education system is to be recognized and supported by the state, if only to the extent of the modest resources available to our small state, it is all the more necessary to clearly identify the guidelines by which it should be developed so that there is no waste or damage. There is general agreement that popular education is a necessary supplement to school education, as it offers those who have left school and joined the labor market the possibility of some kind of further general (rather than vocational) education. The main questions that arise are as follows: what is the aim of this general education and what resources are required to make it accessible to students who are no longer children but have educated themselves to a certain extent through their practical experiences? The principles of popular education could well be described in relation to the three old tenets of democracy: freedom, equality, fraternity. The principle of freedom gives the freedom to teach and learn, in which popular education is much closer to university education than elementary and secondary schools, which is based on a mandatory curriculum. Adults must be given the opportunity for academic learning, but not everyone has the same starting point. A man or woman who is already mature as an individual will start with the intellectual interests that they have developed through their environment or work and now want to intensify by learning how to organize and supplement the 14 See

Emil Reich, “Bildungsarbeit,” Bildungsarbeit 6, nos. 3–4 (1919): 1–2.

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knowledge that they have acquired haphazardly. This means that it is impossible to devise a curriculum valid for everyone. They also want to be free in another sense, free from intellectual spoon-feeding. They do not expect to be dogmatically preached at by their teachers but wish to enjoy intellectual freedom and the possibility of choice. Needless to say, everyone will attempt to promote their own ideas, be it in party schools or in associations and gatherings, and these organizations are a necessary component of a democratic society. But they have nothing to do with popular education itself. Political drilling is necessary, but something else is required to encourage independent thinking. [.  .  .] A judgment cannot be formed without listening to both sides of an argument. The choice between different opinions is an individual matter, and to be able to choose, the mind must acquire the ability to assimilate facts, which are the essence of general education, communicated through learning without preconceptions. This kind of learning is not based on dogma. Instead, the learner sees that it is possible at any time to abandon a premise—without hesitation—that is shown to conflict with a new state of affairs and to develop a new provisional hypothesis that fits the new state of knowledge. In other words, learning to think must be the aim and purpose of any genuine popular education. Those who think correctly will choose according to their experience and will become useful members not only of the state and of society but also of the party they support, because they know why they have chosen one way rather than another. They will become the true guardians of democracy and opponents of demagogy. The principle of equality means that popular education should above all be available to all. Its organizations must be made accessible equally to everyone. Its institutions may not be open only to certain castes or classes, as is often the case today with high schools, but must embrace city and country, men and women, workers and patricians, and the members of all parties. It is for that reason that the state should intervene and promote the network of popular education centers in such a way that they are as universal as elementary schools [Volksschulen]. And if the state grants adults the freedom it denies to children, if it is not to force adults to learn, the education must be socialized so that privilege no longer conveys any preemptive rights. The principle of fraternity should extend not only to all students, however, but also to the relationship between teachers and students. Teachers should not claim absolute authority and should never forget that the students are their equals. They should not regard questions or interjections as a nuisance but should themselves learn from their students and in this way become good teachers. They should not overestimate or emphasize their intellectual superiority, because only by presenting their knowledge and, even more, their thought processes in a form that is generally accessible will they become genuine educators of the people. The ideal, of course, would be a popular education system similar to the seminar or laboratory systems at universities, where students are not so much taught as guided in their acquisition of knowledge and education. And if possible, methods should be used that preclude a lecturing tone. [. . .] There are therefore two aspects of the organization statute for popular education, namely a bottom‑up democratic structure taking direct account of the students’ requirements and the influence of universities, which for their part should endeavor to exclude all dilettantism by individuals or in the subject matter. This should ensure that the link between knowledge and the broad masses of the population becomes even stronger.

Part VI Vitality

Front page of the Social Democratic illustrated magazine Der Kuckuck, June 7, 1931. (Courtesy of VGA.)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

LABOR AND FREE TIME Vrääth Öhner

T

the legal workday to eight hours is one of the oldest demands of the labor movement. It was promoted for the first time in England in the 1830s, and beginning on May 1, 1890, the first “Labor Day,” it topped the list of demands of the Second International. When the Provisional National Assembly of German Austria actually enacted the eight-hour workday on December 19, 1918—initially limited to factory operations and only expanded one year later to all businesses subject to the provisions of the trade regulations—the fulfillment of that decades-long demand came almost as a matter of course. With good reason, the eight-hour workday represented for Social Democracy nothing more than an essential first step on the way to freeing the working class from the “yoke of economic servitude.”1 Although the eight-hour workday established some freedoms and self-determination in the lives of workers, it did not affect all workers equally. Working women in particular could only dream of eight hours of rest, as traditional gender roles stipulated that they also take on the work of keeping house and raising the children. This meant that rest and free time remained asymmetrically linked with work time. As the groundbreaking study of unemployed workers in Marienthal showed, there is no free time without work, and unemployment does not simply mean a limitless amount of free time but rather a return to an “undifferentiated way of experiencing time.”2 In the view of Social Democracy, moreover, free time was meant to further the “physical, mental, and spiritual development of the worker,”3 to use free time and rest to political, social, and cultural ends. In response to the question of how the workers should organize their newly won free time (on average three more hours in comparison with the prewar period), the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) provided a dense network of political and cultural organizations and offerings. Alongside volunteering for the party and attending political gatherings, workers in Red Vienna could also choose from among more than forty cultural organizations covering a broad spectrum of activities: from choirs and chess clubs to he demand to limit

1 Anonymous,

“Warum feiern die Arbeiter am 1. Mai?,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, April 13, 1894, 2. Marie Jahoda, “Die Zeit,” in Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal: Ein soziographischer Versuch über die Wirkungen langdauernder Arbeitslosigkeit; mit einem Anhang zur Geschichte der Soziographie, ed. Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1933), 69. 3 Anonymous, Der Kampf um den Achtstundentag: Festschrift zum 1. Mai 1890 (Leipzig: Eduard Schultes Buchhandlung, 1890), 12. 2

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cycling groups and the Friends of Nature. In addition, the party, with the Central Office for Workers’ Education and the Social Democratic Arts Council, had coordination centers at their disposal. They coordinated and oversaw libraries, publications, lectures, outings, and vacations, as well as visits to concerts, exhibitions, and the theater—all of which were made available to the workers. The goal that the party pursued more or less explicitly with its cultural and training agenda was just as extensive as the agenda itself: the intention was nothing less than to produce a genuine, socialist counterculture that would assimilate the best parts of the canon of bourgeois high culture, one that would simultaneously provide for the preservation of the republic’s democratic institutions and combat bourgeois class rule. The broad ideal of the class-conscious proletarian—who shed the fetters that religion, ignorance, and poverty had placed on him, along with the yoke of economic servitude—appeared as a backdrop in every single activity. However, one of the immediate tasks of the Social Democratic and training agenda consisted simply of keeping the workers from wasting their free time: with alcohol and card games at the tavern, cheap shows at the Prater, at the circus or a variety show, or with other kinds of shallow entertainment, like that offered by pulp magazines, tabloid newspapers, radio, cinema, or modern spectator sports. There is as much room for disagreement about the success of these countercultural projects as there is about the pull that the Social Democratic cultural and training agenda exerted on those groups that were at least not hostile to Social Democracy, such as the much-praised new middle class of proletarianized white-collar workers. Helmut Gruber sees the notably high density of Red Vienna’s cultural institutions, which reached more than four hundred thousand registered members in 1932, as relatively modest when compared to the crowds of spectators, measuring in the several hundred thousand people, who made weekly visits to the cinema or a soccer game. Apart from the fact that Social Democracy pursued a policy of incrementalism, both in the political and cultural education of the workforce and in other areas—the path led from the tavern through the cinema to the soccer field, from there to the theater, to a book, into the mountains—the increase in free time brought about by the eight-hour workday nevertheless meant an increased share for workers in the production of social value. Sharing in modern cultural assets like the weekend is specifically included in this project, even if the “little people” are more likely to spend their weekends in a tent at the beach than in a nice country house on the edge of the forest.4 Further reading Gruber 1991 Ingrisch, Korotin, and Zwieauer 2004 Schwarz 2016

4 See

Austin Speer, “Das Weekend der kleinen Leute,” Das kleine Blatt, August 10, 1929, 3–4.

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1. Julius Braunthal The Eight-Hour Law First published as “Das Achtstunden-Gesetz,” Der Kampf 12, no. 39 (1919): 841–43. Translated by Peter Woods. Julius Braunthal’s (1891–1972) account of the fight for the eight-hour workday is one of the few commentaries to wring a bit of pathos from the Constituent National Assembly’s resolution on the amended eight-hour law, passed on December 17, 1919. The reduction of working hours by an average of two to three hours per day when compared with the prewar period had to have been expected from a national assembly in which the Social Democrats controlled a relative majority. Furthermore, the eight-hour law was only a single—if substantial—part of the social legislation enacted under Secretary for Social Affairs Ferdinand Hanusch (the socalled Hanusch Laws), which included, among other things, unemployment benefits, the ban on night work for women and adolescents, the Workers’ Holiday Act (Arbeiterurlaubsgesetz), and the establishment of works councils ( Betriebsräte). No present-day demand of the proletariat reflects the clash of interests between the classes with as much clarity as the demand for the proletarian workday. The deep economic significance of the class struggle, as Karl Marx’s research revealed, is the fight for a share of the value that society generates. All wealth is wrested from nature by human labor. The smaller the working class’s share of the value that it produces, and the longer the workday during which this value is achieved, the larger the bourgeoisie’s share of the social value, the higher the surplus value rate, and the larger the profits. The more human labor, the more working hours the production apparatus draws, the greater the social wealth, and the greater the bourgeoisie’s share of it. The bourgeoisie would, therefore, prefer to transform workers’ entire day into a workday. But the workday has a natural limit: the exhaustion of the workers’ energy. Thus, it is the plain and obvious law of capitalistic value-added production to draw out the workday to the utmost limits of the workers’ physical and mental capabilities. Nevertheless, the power of the bourgeoisie—which, as mistress of all raw materials and means of production, subjugates the working class to its will—is countered by the power of the working class, whose function is to “stir and sustain the world.” This power contrasts the capitalistic workday with the “normal workday.” The same hour that witnessed the birth of capitalism also saw the birth of the fight for the normal workday. It originated in England, the classic country of the capitalistic production method. In the first third of the nineteenth century, the Chartist movement carved out the legal tenhour workday in an unprecedented, decades-long fight. Karl Marx recognized the great, fundamental significance of this struggle in his inaugural address. He said then: “This fight for the legal limitation of working hours raged more and more violently when it was not simply a threat to greed, but also when it became a direct intervention into the great struggle between the blind rule of laws concerning supply and demand that account for the political economy of the bourgeoisie, and regulated production resulting from social welfare that is the embodiment of the political economy of the working class. And for this reason, the ten-hour bill was not only a great practical success, it was the triumph of a principle: for the first time, for all the world to see, the political economy of the bourgeoisie was subject to the political economy of the working class.” At that time, the ten-hour workday represented an enormous win for the working class, but it was only one step on their way to a law regulating the legal workday, one

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that would afford the working class the necessary free time not only to recover their exhausted energy but also to enjoy an intellectually and socially active life. It was for this reason that the well-organized corps of the labor movement in Australia, England, and America demanded and forced into being the eight-hour workday as early as the 1860s. It was the International Workingmen’s Association,5 however, that first promoted the legal eight-hour workday to a unified demand of the proletariat. Karl Marx, who presented the memorandum to the Geneva Conference in the name of the General Council, declared at the time: “We consider the limiting of working hours as a precondition, without which all further attempts at improvement and liberation will prove fruitless. It is necessary that we may shore up the energy and health of the working class, by which I mean the great body of every nation. It is no less necessary that we may return to the workers the opportunity for intellectual development, for social contact, for social and political activity. We recommend that eight hours represent the legal limit of the workday. This limitation is already a general demand of the workers in the United States of America, and the voice of the Congress will raise it up as the universal banner of the world’s working class.”

[. . .] The eight-hour workday is now law in German Austria, just as it is in almost all of the countries of Europe. The International Labor Conference,6 however, has already extolled it as the law for all civilized countries of the world. It is the indestructible work of the revolution, a significant step in the proletariat’s fight to emancipate itself from capitalism. The declaration of the eight-hour workday as the law of the land is a historic feat of the greatest significance. But the working class is already reaching beyond this. Right now, the English proletariat is marching toward the battle for the seven-hour workday, and the American proletariat is marching toward the battle for the six-hour workday.

2. Adelheid Popp The Double Burden of Women First published as “Die doppelte Bürde der Frauen,” in Frauenarbeit in der kapitalisti­ schen Gesellschaft (Vienna: Verlag des Frauen-Zentralkomitees, 1922), 19–22. Translated by Peter Woods. Once political equality between men and women had been achieved through universal and equal suffrage, which went into effect with the constitutional law of November 12, 1918, women in Parliament were able to lead the fight for more justice, social recognition, and equal opportunities for women. As Adelheid Popp (1869–1939), founder of the proletarian 5

The International Workingmen’s Association (aka The First International) was founded in London in 1864 and was the first international association of workers’ organizations. 6 The International Labour Organization (ILO) was one of the permanent bodies of the League of Nations established at the Versailles Peace Conference on April 11, 1919, and its first International Labour Conference (ILC) took place in Washington, DC, in October 1919. The organization was and is authorized to develop and expand international labor standards.

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women’s movement in Austria, stresses, this put an effective weapon into the hands of women; however, no one came forth after suffrage to help shoulder their burden in the fight for a new understanding and conception of their position as women and female workers. Thus, Popp’s demand for a higher qualification of female labor challenges proletarian antifeminism, which mistook female workers for “scabs,” just as explicitly as it challenges the numerous prejudices of “bourgeois” women, the majority of whom voted for the conservative Christian Social Party and thus for policies that greatly disadvantaged women. We have seen that women have not been treated more gently as workers. We have seen that it is difficult to enforce legal protections, both as they apply to women and as they apply to adolescents and children under fourteen. But consider the envy, the spiteful criticisms that are so often expressed when “ladies of society” see factory girls or working women in nice clothes. All of that animosity—aroused in some as a result of the suffering brought by the war and the hard life that followed it—gets heaped onto these working women. The perception is that they “have it so good,” since they are free at five o’clock and on Saturday afternoons and can buy themselves “pretty dresses, shoes, and other fineries,” while middle-class women, the wives of civil servants and professors, are trying once again to mend their worn-out old shifts [Fähnchen]. This is true, and it is sad. We want everyone to be able to dress in a way that pleases them and to be able to nourish themselves as befits a human being. Theater, music, and good books should be available to everyone. For all people. So too for the women working in the factories, the housekeepers, the “washer women,”7 those women who, in these times of upheaval, are tasked with cleaning various offices, homes, etc. Of course, most people have the mistaken impression that female labor, domestic work, and cleaning work are in actuality mere pastimes, a way of filling one’s hours of leisure. Meanwhile, statistics have shown that so-called domestic work is among the three least healthy means of employment. Those women who have already learned to assess their own work have long known that it is unjust to judge domestic work as marginal. Uninterrupted activity from early in the morning until bedtime is sheer drudgery. Especially for those women who carry out this work in their own households, without pay, without vacation time, without a day of rest on Sunday, without an eight-hour workday, and without Saturday afternoons off. Even without any recognition. Derision, contempt, and disrespect are typically the only wages that they earn. They are the first out of bed and the last in it. Every torn shoe strap in the family, every purchase of inferior quality, every loose nail, every bruise that a child gets, and the bad grades that get another kicked out of school—it all falls on the shoulders of the wife and mother who never enjoys any rest. As if it were established by the laws of heaven and earth, most of them have always adopted the role of whipping boy or Cinderella. The afflictions caused by pregnancy, the pains of lying in after birth, and the sleepless nights spent tending children sick with fever all take their toll on her health and on her nerves. This fact, and the fact that there is never a moment’s rest from all of this, has never been acknowledged. No one ever considers it strange that a woman, struggling between factory work and housework, even though she is earning money, still performs all of her domestic duties without payment. At most they say: “That’s what women are for.” How often it is that they hurry home at midday, if they do not work too terribly far from where they live, not to eat and relax but to prepare lunch for the family, while they themselves cannot 7

The German Waschweib has the added meaning of “a gossip” that English usage lends to the somewhat outdated term “fishwife.”

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even take the time to eat their share of it in peace. It is a heavy burden to be a worker, a housewife, and a mother all in one. Women do not only have the right but also the duty to rebel against the Cinderella-fate that has been allotted to them. But anytime one woman has it better, it awakens in the rest not the ambition to make the same gains for themselves but rather jealousy toward and malicious gossip about the women around them who are happier than they are. [. . .] Women’s labor must not be paid less as a result of people qualifying it as “women’s work” and voicing the argument that women therefore deserve lower wages. It is not true that the woman, who is paid worse, consistently does less work. According to the reports of the trade supervisors, we see that women are often employed to do jobs that the law forbids them to do, jobs that are men’s work; however, the wages for any job are lowered as soon as women begin performing it. Therefore, women’s labor must be prized more highly so that women will no longer be scabs. If, however, women’s labor does not appeal to an employer if it is not cheaper, then women will disappear as competitors for jobs in certain professions, and the male worker, unimpeded by women’s cutthroat competition, will be able to demand and receive compensation for his work that will make it possible for him to have a wife—and a mother for his children—who does not have to carry a double burden; the work that she performs at home and for the family will have to be compensated through his wages. The socialist program has demanded that communities modernize worker housing so as to lighten the load of domestic work on women or spare them this work completely. However, these communities have been unable to fulfill this obligation thus far because of the lack of money for the development of new cooperative houses and communal laundry facilities, as well as the fact that only the very rich currently enjoy hot running water and central heating. This being the case, relief for women who carry this double burden must be realized in some other way. If the industrial sector proves unable to do without women’s labor—and we consider this to be the more likely turn of events, for how can they do without women when, according to the results of the census, they make up more than one-third of the workforce?—then it must be recognized that women must be paid the same as men. After all, women are essential to the manufacturing process, commerce, etc. Then the married female workers will no longer have to wear themselves out taking on two jobs, but instead people will be able to let third parties take care of the cleaning of the home and the laundry. It is up to women to accelerate the process that ensures for them the right to rest, recovery, and vacation. With political equality and employment regulations, the republic has given women the weapons; the rest is up to women to take for themselves. The Social Democratic men will not fail to give their support when women resolve to fight for a new understanding and conception of their position as women and female workers.

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3. Ida Foges Weekend: A New Viennese Practice First published as “Weekend. Eine neue Wiener Sitte,” Neues Wiener Journal, October 23, 1922, 3. Translated by Peter Woods. The creation of the “weekend” as the end of the week, a single period of rest lasting from Saturday afternoon until Sunday evening, has greatly contributed to the modernization of individual lifestyles in the 1920s. Made possible not least by the eight-hour workday, the weekend—a systematic arrangement of the week’s free time—was an answer to increased demands both from work (keywords here are standardization and Taylorizing of the working environment8) and from metropolitan intellectual life. With the advent of the weekend, visiting family or having a relaxing Sunday outing were substituted with a wide range of mainly physical activities in the “great outdoors.” This served as a way to consciously balance the strain of work and daily life during the week. At first limited to the new middle classes, proletarian forms of weekend culture soon developed, such as the collective swimming trip in and around Vienna. Who does not remember that incredibly pleasant feeling from their school days when Saturday afternoon arrived: the lucky child had a free afternoon, doubly wonderful because it was followed by Sunday, an entire day of freedom. One need not even mention all that this day portended, but all of the Sunday indulgences—the morning spent sleeping in, the long strolls, the hearty midday repast, etc.—paled in comparison with Saturday afternoon. For after Sunday unavoidably came a hideous Monday—which is a well-known psychological problem, the general Monday malaise that plagues humanity—while the incipient Saturday afternoon held within it the sum of all childhood joy. Later on, in working life, it was mostly different. In many trades it was precisely on Saturdays, being the end of the week, that people worked long past the usual time, that shops remained open longer than other days, and that employees returned home later than usual. This has now fundamentally changed. Since the English word “weekend” has been adopted, the end of the week has also taken on English mannerisms and behaves in a most Sunday-like fashion, albeit with the lovely distinction, known to us from childhood, of the added anticipation of Sunday pleasures still to come. In Vienna, the weekend has integrated itself so fully into nearly every profession and circle of life that all social ties and habits revolve around it. A sanatorium in Vienna—whose name has a historical ring to it, as it calls to mind memories of Schubert—is now advertising that it offers cozy, heated rooms, as well as music and dancing to provide ambience, “on the weekend.” The entire week is spent sitting at a typewriter, selling neckties and gloves, or scrutinizing the latest Parisian design in order to determine its historical provenance, as well as its sociopolitical, emotional, physical, and erotic effects on both young and old, all in order to reproduce it—with some flashy personal touches—for Madam Banker X. Ambience is thus part and parcel of the Saturday afternoon ritual of abandoning Vienna and going to a nice country house or a more-or-less elegant hotel somewhere on the edge of the forest, there both to dream of Sunday and dread Monday. All the same, I find the proclamation about creating ambience through music and dance gratuitous. One need but take one look at the train stations on a Saturday 8 Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) is regarded as the founder of scientific management (also known as Taylorism) whose goal is to determine the “one best way” of movements for every human activity.

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afternoon, when the Semmering Railway trains are departing, or the trains to Payerbach, or even just the local trains of the Westbahn or the Franz Josef Railway. They are chock full of weekend people: young girls accompanied by their male acquaintances, all merry and amused, and many, very many, young married couples. Busy throughout the week and given to coming together in the evenings over tea and sandwiches in their rented furnished rooms, they seek respite from the tedium of this way of life that has been forced upon them by their circumstances. Thus, they choose to enjoy their Sundays, and half of their Saturdays too, of course, somewhere “in the outdoors.” If they were to wait until Sunday to leave, they would have to wake up very early, only reaching their destination in the late morning, and a cloud in the morning sky might, in spite of their best intentions, lead them to seek out their beds once more. If they leave as early as Saturday, the evening still awaits them, and the following morning remains undiminished. If it is a nice morning, then the time spent outside in nature will be doubly pleasant and full of Sunday spirit, and if it proves to be rainy instead, it nevertheless offers the chance to sleep in, undisturbed by considerations of any kind. One would forgo asking many of those who masquerade as married couples to produce their marriage certificates. Their blood, young and roiling, will not allow anyone to take away its right to the weekend it sees fit to enjoy. Moral philistines may cross themselves—yes, the world is evil. In their day, when they were still young and full of roiling blood, one sat at home, loitered around the coffee house, played cards, and in the evenings sneaked into dark, narrow alleys. . . . [. . .] Perhaps our ancestors—who worked for years and years without a single day of vacation and only thought of a summer trip when they were sick and in need of recuperation— did not find this weekly relief so necessary. They knew nothing of it and would surely have been astounded and aghast at the way things are taking shape. They lived quieter, more serene lives that, in spite of work, were less stressful, and aside from that their bodies were better nourished. Did they celebrate a Sunday at this time of year with anything other than an ample roast? And does our generation know anything of fried chicken, roast goose, or even so much as a slice of rich roast pork? Do we know cream in our coffee? Do we know pastries from grandmother’s cookbook, the one that should by rights be completely destroyed so that we may never see how far into poverty we have sunk? The weekend of today, an English practice to be sure, has been adopted so quickly not least because we no longer have a Sunday celebration according to old customs. Nature offers us and our undernourished nerves a substitute for the Sunday appetites of our ancestors.

4. Anonymous Time! What Do I Do in My Free Time? First published as “Nur Zeit! Was mache ich in freien Stunden?,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, August 18, 1929, 19. Translated by Peter Woods. For the tenth anniversary of the eight-hour law and the establishment of worker vacation, the Social Democratic Arbeiter-Zeitung summarized a “cultural revolution” brought about simply by free time and the proper use of it. As the articles—penned by party members— demonstrate, cultural advancement can precipitate the cultivation of one’s own garden, self-discipline in athletics, or the pleasure of cultural production. As a guide for successful recreational activities beyond “cultural industrial” offerings, however, the articles also indicate

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a tendency within the SDAP toward a cautious opening vis-à-vis those new free-time and consumption practices propagated by the burgeoning illustrated press: just as workers’ sports train “staunch socialists” even without long political discussions, working on a political cabaret in no way precludes a visit to the movies. Free time: the magic word that contains all that is required for the cultural advancement of the working class. Ten years of the eight-hour law, ten years of worker vacation: exquisite, newly won free time—and at the same time, a decade of the most intense cultural advancement of the general public. From the musty, smoke-filled tavern to the cinema, from the cinema to the soccer field, from there to the theater, to a book, into the mountains: thousands of laborers and white-collar workers have walked all of these ascending serpentine paths, and they are going further and further. And it will take nothing more than a little time, in the service of one arm of the great proletarian liberation struggle, this cultural revolution which forces people to reflect on human dignity. How do we make use of our free time? This question, which we are letting a few comrades answer today, is the great problem of proletarian culture, the question of the rise of hundreds of thousands to the enjoyment of the most prized human commodities. Time! Work in a settlement garden. I live with my wife and two children in a small but pleasant settler house in the Altmannsdorf-Hetzendorf housing development. Our garden, which is approximately 360 square meters [3875 square feet], makes me particularly happy because it is truly a site of relaxation in my free time. Even though the upkeep takes a bit of work in autumn and spring, the long summer makes it well worth the effort. I focus primarily on cultivating flowers and orchards, and I spend the most of my free time maintaining my garden. I am especially fond of raising small fruit trees on low wire frames (cordons); they produce an abundance of fruit because they are well protected from the wind. Grafting roses and planting various kinds of flowers in the fresh and fair air also brings me a great deal of joy and helps me relax. The garden is “inspected” daily: here a bit of help with the pruning scissors, there the chance to admire a flower that was planted. On hot summer days, we swim with the kids in a big pool that we set up in the garden. A patch of grass in the shade of the fruit trees affords serenity while reading the newspaper. On Sundays, things get especially lively there: everyone wants to be first to read the Arbeiter-Zeitung—only the little one allows herself to be satisfied with “Das klei­ ­ne Kinderblatt” and Bobby Bear.9 And we even do our party work here in the settlement. Two to three evenings a week are occupied with this [work]. Every season here brings us new joy: spring with its sumptuous flowers, and summer and autumn with their fruits offer variety in our daily life. In light, air, and sunshine we are steadily becoming strong and healthy people! Franz Haskowetz, factory manager. [. . .] Sports. [. . .] 9

“Das Kleine Kinderblatt” was an insert in the popular Social Democratic daily Das Kleine Blatt which included the comic strip “Bobby Bear’s Adventures.”

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When I started my apprenticeship, my most fervent wish was to have a bicycle. Soon I was able to ride—but only on borrowed wheels. It was not until I had finished my apprenticeship that I could acquire my own bicycle. After that, I began taking very long bike rides almost every Sunday, and after a year I had gotten so good that I became interested in racing. I particularly liked it because there is hardly any other sport that puts such huge demands on a person, and also because one is never competing directly with one’s opponent. If a person wants to be a successful racer, they have to commit themselves to a very diligent and rigorous training regimen. I train three times a week. Sometimes I ask myself if this is not just a waste of time. But when you head out on your own for a workout and set yourself a particular goal, or when you combine maximum attentiveness with maximum exertion like you have to for a race, then when it is all over you get this feeling of strength and mastery, knowing that you could not have had a better time. As soon as the road racing season is over, my interests lead me to take a turn in the mountains. In the winter I am of course an enthusiastic skier. Strangely enough I do not feel a need for friendship. I do have a larger number of nice fellow athletes with whom I sometimes discuss serious things, though. We often have it hard with the older comrades. It is surprising just how ignorant they are at times when it comes to the world of sports. If they knew how many staunch socialists have been trained by the worker’s sports movement without any need for hours of arguing, they would gradually learn to judge us differently. Anton Hietzinger, cobbler. My day starts now . . . Good night! What employee does not breathe a sigh of relief when they hear these words on their way out the door! The grey rooms, the shop with its racks, the workroom, the boss’s office—all are forgotten. Also forgotten are the annoyances and indignities that fill an employee’s existence. I do not think about that anymore: my day starts now. What was the boss saying again today? Did he say that I am stupid, incompetent, clumsy? What does it matter? For today I am free! Now I am going to go home, read the newspaper, chat with my mother, change clothes, and then go out because today is the performance of the political cabaret! I am looking forward to this performance, just as I look forward to every performance of the cabaret. Even though I perform in it myself and therefore know exactly what will happen, I still have to laugh all over again every time with my comrades. Wow, we had so much fun in rehearsal! Every new scene, every new couplet got interrupted by the actors’ own bursts of laughter. We are already the show’s most grateful and enthusiastic audience. Every day there is a rehearsal for the cabaret, I wake up with the thought: Great, tonight . . . When it is time, I will go to the appointed spot as soon as possible, and the work can begin. There is so much to get done. Tickets have to be taken care of, invitations sent off, and roles copied out. The costumes are not finished yet. The girls examine their stage clothes curiously. “Yellow doesn’t look good on me!” someone cries, while another asserts that yellow is the only color that looks halfway decent on her. “The costumes are a mix of rococo and Josephine Baker,” whines Trude. The comrade nailing up the cube “Republic” says that he looks forward to the moment when it falls apart. It would be fitting punishment for the executive authority that would not grant money for a new hammer. One can accomplish so much in a few spare hours! A few comrades have even successfully built a small stage, and that is with everyone working day jobs as well.

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But this is not the only thing that I can tackle in my free time! Two or three times a month I go and collect money in my administrative district. Twice a week I work at the local SDAP membership register, recording monthly receipts [for membership fees received]. This activity is not exciting or romantic at all, but I get to meet many comrades at the secretariat, and we always have a nice chat. On Saturdays I go to choir practice, organized by fellow students, the Red Falcons,10 and adolescents. That is always very nice. We sing battle songs and choruses from the great masters, including Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Haydn. Every choir practice is a nice experience. And on Sundays we head outdoors! In winter with skis and in summer on foot. If it is not too late, we even go to the movies or the theater in the evening. Daily life with the boss and job worries are forgotten, and only happiness is left! Klara Kaiser, clerk.

5. Ernst Fischer The Work Ethos and Socialism First published as “Arbeitsgesinnung und Sozialismus,” Der Kampf 24, no. 7/8 (1931): 369–73. Translated by Peter Woods. Taking his cue from Paul Lafargue’s “The Right to be Lazy,”11 writer Ernst Fischer (1899– 1972) develops a radical critique of the work ethos of the bourgeois age. The bourgeois work ethos was adopted out of necessity by the proletariat in its struggle for recognition; however, in a time of mass unemployment and a devaluing of work as a result of technological advancements, Fischer argues that it is now valid to overcome this ethos through the “will for socialism.” One of the aims of Fischer’s essay may have been to create a new revolutionary drive out of the crisis, and in particular to give the youth of the party a goal that was worth fighting for. Fischer challenges the party’s adherence to the “religion of work” effectively, but his utopian “cultural mission of socialism” does share a crucial feature with it: instead of political action, Fischer proposes “educating people to enjoy free time.” When the traditional song of the Austrian Social Democrats, The Song of Work (Das Lied der Arbeit),12 is sung today, it sounds almost like a mockery of the hundreds of thousands of unemployed. The dutiful optimism that celebrates work as the noble bride and an earth-shattering, world-preserving principle appears strange to us today. We have grown skeptical, and not only because work has been denied to millions of people and granted to millions of others as a kind of favor, but also because, as a result of advances in technology, work means less and less and is more and more unsuitable to serve as the purpose of life. Each year it becomes more vital to limit people’s working hours; the fact that millions of people are working too much means that millions more are pushed into a permanent state of unemployment. We must find a way to move from a world in which work is the measure of all humanity to a world in which another standard applies. 10 The

Red Falcons were founded in 1925 by Anton Tesarek and are still a Social Democratic youth organization for twelve- to fifteen-year-olds. 11 Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy (Chicago: Charles Kerr and Co., 1883). 12 This song is considered the anthem of the Austrian SDAP. First performed in public in 1868, it is still sung today at Social Democratic events, such as May Day celebrations.

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[.  .  .] Today, unemployment is inseparably linked with a guilty conscience. The unemployed suffer not only from the material need to which they are exposed, or from the crippling inactivity to which they have been condemned. These people also suffer from deep feelings of inferiority and from the unspoken accusation that it is a fault and a disgrace to be kept away from work. It is considered a given that every person’s duty is to work; still more, the idea that the true measure of a person’s worth is dependent upon the work that they accomplish is a principle that people accept unconditionally. Everyone is in a hurry to ensure that they have work, and not even the ones without it have the courage to admit to their inactivity; they pretend to have a job, whether by making use of a briefcase or some other hallmark of steady activity. The busier that people are, the greater their value; the more a person becomes absorbed in their work, the greater the respect bestowed on them from all sides, and the more they respect themselves. Anyone who goes about their work without a fuss, doing their job without complaint or selfapproval, or who does not place the main emphasis of their life on their work but rather in other passions and hobbies, will always encounter suspicion and rejection. Work is the religion of the century, a religion that every European and every American respects—the ridiculous saying: “We do not work to live, we live to work!” enjoys a thousand-fold approval. But work was not always worshiped with such fervor, and it will not always be the utmost deity. The religion of work is the ideology of the bourgeois age. The bourgeoisie imagined that they were “ennobled” by work. Such nobility will mean very little in a socialist society. Since socialism is no longer a distant dream but now the task at hand, it is worthwhile to examine the transformation of the ideology of labor in Europe. In every aristocratic era, work was considered to be menial; those who were free left work to those who were not free, to the slaves and the bondsmen, those without rank and without rights. War and politics, hunting and adventure—these were the activities of the free man. The virtues of working people—diligence, compliance, usefulness—were accorded little respect. The nobility cultivated other virtues: courage, chivalry, courtesy, poise in any situation. Today, with the power of the aristocracy broken and their influence as good as eliminated, we can do them justice; polemicizing against a social system built on slavery, bondage, and the powerlessness of the nameless masses would be like chasing shadows. We can now analyze the contributions of aristocratic society without resentment or prejudice, and by doing so we will discover that a contribution does not have to be linked to work in our sense of the word at all. The contribution of aristocratic society was the aristocratic person. It was not the production of food, the making of basic commodities, or the manufacture of goods that was most salient, but rather the cultivation of a type of person who was beyond reproach, the realization of an idea in body, bearing, and the way of life of the ruling class. In contrast to the ways things are in the capitalist world, being a member of the ruling class was not only a great privilege but also a strict duty. A person’s worth was determined not by what they did but rather by what they were. An aristocrat served a collective ideal; the aim of education was not the originality of the individual, it was the convergence of everyone toward the type, toward the conception of the aristocratic person. It would be completely incorrect to contrast the aristocratic idler with the productive farmer or craftsman; the nobleman’s inactivity cultivated his own form and breeding. This work was a part of the noble way of life, free of sweat and toil, always hiding the effort it took to keep up appearances. From the perspective of the bourgeois work ethos, this all seems inane and good for nothing; after all, the bourgeoisie only recognizes achievement when it corresponds to producing tangible goods, things that can somehow be expressed in monetary terms. Food, basic commodities, luxury products, buildings, books, and pictures—all of these can be sold, it all represents material

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value. A lifestyle, the polished and genial characteristics of a person, their beauty and harmoniousness—none of these show up on a balance sheet and are therefore useless and superfluous. The individual person is not the measure of all things today; rather, the person is measured against the things they produce and the work involved in their production. [. . .] Work was the common denominator, and money was the divisive numerator of this new social system. Until now, social differences were in principle qualitative; now they have become purely quantitative. No one could be adopted into the ranks of the aristocracy, but everyone who made enough money belonged to the bourgeoisie. But the work quota was expressed in money. The bourgeoisie held firmly to this fiction, unwaveringly defended this legend. Money was power, but work was the moral foundation of this power. To this day, therefore, people are anxious to depict the capitalists as particularly hardworking and to attribute the profits of their enterprises to their valuable work. [. . .] Money is the hardiest abstraction to have ever won power over the living. This means of exchange, this medium that related various things with one another, this insubstantial ether into which all of the products of work evaporate, has taken on a demonic life of its own. Because everything is worth paying for, everything has lost its intrinsic value. Because we can express everything in terms of money, one thing is basically just as important as another, and just as trivial. Whether the product is strollers or gun barrels, bread or perfume, beds or fake Buddha statues, it is all the same; it all makes money, it is all work, and as such it is worthy of the greatest respect. Yes, work is abstract in the same way that money is; it is enough that a person works and earns a living by that work. Whether the work is useful or pointless is irrelevant. “I work!”—that can mean, I write books, I turn screws, I am a conman, I plow the earth, or I throw sand onto a pile and then clear the pile away again. Whether my work is trash or a marvel, whether it is harmful to humanity or helpful, is inconsequential. The work itself, the time and the energy that it takes to perform it, the money that it makes—these are what is important. Sweating, feeling rushed, being unable to breathe, the sound of screaming machinery, whether it is producing something needful or simply idling—stretch, little mule, until your tongue is hanging out and the money tumbles out of your bowels—this is the ideal system of capitalist society. [. . .] This European “work ethos” has even been appropriated by the proletariat—rightly so, as long as it is struggling for complete recognition in the capitalist world. “Our work is no less worthy than yours—we demand equal respect and equal value for it!” This was a natural claim, and since it succeeded in making workers proud of their work, it was an achievement of the highest order. Yes, it was even necessary to overemphasize the importance of manual labor, to celebrate it as actual work, as it was paid less and thus suffered from the stigma of inferiority. The worker in the capitalist world should and must insist on his work and derive from his work the right not to live worse than the bourgeois citizen—but the worker should take care not to overestimate his work in general! It is certainly a strike against a person if he does not perform his work flawlessly, but it is by no means a credit to a person if he is merely capable of doing his work. We evaluate differently. We evaluate each worker according to his socialist ethos and according to his contributions to socialism. Not work, but rather socialism lifts the proletariat above the bourgeoisie, gives them a magnitude of historic proportions; not the ability to work, but rather the will for socialism distinguishes us from the ruling class. Socialism is, however, an ideology and a way of living. It is not crucial that everyone in the socialist world has work; what is crucial is that this work has greater meaning: service to the community! It is crucial that human relations change completely from the way

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they are today. To be a socialist means to develop a new kind of human being, to transmit an idea into flesh and blood. Thanks to developments in technology, work will require less and less time; even now, if everyone were to work, it would not be possible to keep to the eight-hour workday—the six-hour workday would handily suffice. Thus, after the first years of massive economic transformation, the central issue in a socialist society will not be work. Free time will be the key—educating people to enjoy free time will be the cultural mission of socialism. We will see that work has often ruined people, that millions of people are unable to engage with their free time tactfully, that a feeling of responsibility outside of one’s job, beyond forced labor, must first be awakened. Most people today believe that they have done their part when they have stood at a machine or sat in an office for eight hours, that they can then leave uninhibited. “I work!” says the bourgeois citizen. “No one can demand more of me. I can do whatever I like in my private life, as long as it is not against the law.” It will be the duty of socialism to eradicate this bourgeois lack of discipline, to make people understand that it is there, in their private lives—where before now the task of life ended—that the true task of life begins. [. . .] This is how socialism will overtake the bourgeois work ethos and bring the contributions of the aristocracy to life at a higher, more far-reaching level. In aristocratic society, serving an idea of human perfection was the role and the privilege of a small master group, but in socialist society this will be the right and the duty of all people. Whereas the measure of worth in aristocratic society was being, as in bourgeois-capitalist society it was doing, in socialist society this being and doing will merge in a great synthesis. People will serve socialism—and the wealth, joy, and growth of collective life—both by being and by doing their best.

6. Marie Jahoda Time (from Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community) First published as “Die Zeit,” in Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal: Ein soziographischer Versuch über die Wirkungen langdauernder Arbeitslosigkeit; mit einem Anhang zur Geschichte der Soziographie, ed. Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungs­ stelle (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1933), 59–69. Translated by Peter Woods. From November 1931 until the middle of May 1932, a seventeen-person team led by the sociologist Paul F. Lazarsfeld carried out a project to investigate the effects of large-scale unemployment in the industrial village of Marienthal, which lies to the southeast of Vienna. Proposed by Otto Bauer, the prominent thinker and party leader of the SDAP, the Marienthal study documented the dramatic physical, social, and mental effects of unemployment in the village. Among other things, the study challenged a widespread notion in the Social Democratic camp, namely the idea of the unemployed as revolutionary subjects. As unemployed men in particular lose the “physical and moral capacity” to structure time in a useful way, the result of unemployment is not revolt but rather depoliticization and resignation. First published in Leipzig in 1933, the Marienthal study only gained worldwide recognition after its translation into English in 1971 (see chapter 4). Those who know how hard the work force has struggled for more free time since the beginnings of organized labor might well suspect that, despite all of the hardship of

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unemployment, this boundless free time is nevertheless a win for the individual. Upon closer examination, however, this freedom reveals itself as a poisoned chalice. Cut off from their work and without contact with the outside world, workers have forfeited the physical and moral capacity to make use of their time. Those who no longer have any reason to hurry cease to do anything at all and gradually slip away from any organized existence and off into a detached and empty state. When they look back at any one stretch of this free time, nothing will occur to them that would seem worth the trouble of talking about. For hours men stand around on the street, alone or in small groups; they lean up against houses or bridge railings. When a car drives by, they turn their heads a bit; many a man among them smokes a pipe. Slow conversations unravel into the limitless time at everyone’s disposal. Nothing has to happen quickly anymore—people have forgotten how to hurry. [. . .] Time has split its course in Marienthal, and there is one course for women and one for men. For the latter, the division of the hours has long since lost its meaning. Get out of bed, eat lunch, go to sleep—these are the only points of reference that they have left. In the meantime, time tumbles along without anyone really understanding what has happened. The surveys of how people spend their time reveal this sharply. A thirty-threeyear-old unemployed man writes: 6:30–7 am I get up, 7–8 I wake up the boys because they have to go to school, 8–9 once they are gone, I go to the shed and get wood and water, 9–10 when I come back, my wife always asks me what she should cook, so in order to avoid this question, I go down to the meadow, 10–11 meanwhile, it gets on toward midday, 11–12 (left blank), 12–1 pm we eat at 1 because the children are just getting out of school, 1–2 after lunch it is time to look through the newspaper, 2–3 I headed down, 3–4 went to Treer’s [. . .] 4–5 watched them fell a tree in the park, too bad about the park, 5–6 went home, then we had dinner, noodles toasted in meal, 6–7 go to sleep. [. . .] 7–8 Waking up the children, of course, did not require a full hour. The shopkeeper, Treer (3–4 pm), is located three minutes away from this worker’s residence, and his path home from the park, which he takes between five and six o’clock, is three hundred steps. What happened, then, in the remaining time? [. . .] It is always the same: the unemployed of Marienthal only remember a few “events” when they fill out the survey. This is because what lies in between the three points of reference (get out of bed, eat lunch, go to sleep) are lulls, idleness, which is difficult enough for the observer to describe and must be especially so for the unemployed individual. He only knows: meanwhile, it gets on toward midday. And when he tries to describe this “meanwhile,” these strange distortions appear in the survey: activities that lasted no longer than five minutes supposedly took up an entire hour. This method of filling out the survey is in no way an indication of lower mental acuity in the population; the much more difficult task of maintaining a housekeeping book was performed

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well. The unemployed man is simply unable to account for everything that he did over the course of the day. Other than the points of reference, it is only the few activities that retain any meaning that get enumerated and named: washing the boys, feeding the rabbits, etc. Nothing else that happens has any meaningful connection to his own life anymore. In between the few actual activities—where the survey has “meanwhile, it gets on toward midday”—there is idleness, the complete lack of any meaningful use of time. Everything that happens comes, as it were, accidentally. Any petty trifle determines the activity in the next half hour. This trifle is in fact so negligible that he is barely conscious of it, and should he be called upon to report on it afterward, it has already long since escaped his memory. You hear an insignificant noise out on the street and step outside, and a moment later the noise is already forgotten. But now you are standing outside, waiting for the next trivial sensory perception to lead you a bit further once more. [. . .] The fact that workers are aware of the meaningless way they spend their time can be seen in the following comments, which serve as an addendum to the survey. “What is an unemployed man supposed to do with his time?” Or a reference to an earlier period: “I used to have less time for myself, but I did more for myself.” Or: “There is no longer any opportunity for us unemployed men to occupy our time.” We can understand this “I used to do more for myself” very well if we take another look at the free time survey of that Viennese worker for comparison. The feeling of only having free time in limited quantities leads to using that free time in a considered way; however, the feeling of having limitless time makes every division of time superfluous. Whatever one wants to do before lunch can just as easily be done afterward, or in the evening; and suddenly the day is over without getting it accomplished. [. . .] All of this is only true for men, however, as women are only lacking income and have not become unemployed in the strictest sense of the word. They still need to keep house, and this fills their days. Their work is strictly contextualized and regularized, with many points of reference, functions, and duties. [. . .] The typical survey of how women spend their time looks like this: 6–7 am get dressed, get the heat going, prepare breakfast, 7–8 wash, do hair, dress the children, and accompany them to school, 8–9 wash the dishes and go shopping, 9–10 tidy up the rooms, 10–11 prepare the cooking, 11–12 finish cooking and eat, 12–1 pm wash the dishes, straighten up the kitchen, 1–2 accompany the children to the day care, 2–3 stitching and sewing, 3–4 stitching and sewing, 4–5 stitching and sewing, 5–6 pick up the children, 6–7 eat dinner, 7–8 get the children undressed, washed, and put to bed, 8–9 sew,

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9–10 sew, 10–11 go to sleep. This is how women’s days are filled with work: they cook and scrub, they patch up and look after the children, they economize and consider and have little leisure to go alongside their house work, which in this time of more limited means of subsistence is twice as difficult. We may compare this to the table for men provided above. So entirely differently do men and women spend their time that we could not even establish the same categories for them. [. . .] If one watches women at their work, it seems almost unfathomable that they used to do all of this almost in passing, after working for eight hours in a factory. Granted, the financial management of the household is incomparably more difficult and time consuming than previously, given how limited resources are now, but the purely physical exertion was nevertheless incomparably greater before. The women know this, too, and they talk about it; nearly all of the women’s biographies report that, after working in the factory, they used to have to work late into the night keeping house. But this is followed, in almost every biography, by the sentence: “If only we could go back to work.” As a simply material desire this would not be so surprising, but the women always add: even if we were not paid. Mrs. A. (29) says: “If I could go back to the factory, that would be my best day. It’s not only because of the money, but here in this little home, so alone, a person isn’t really living at all.”—Or Mrs. R. (28): “The work is easier now than in the factory days. Back then I was up half the night doing housework, but I still preferred that.”—Mrs. M. (32): “It used to be just wonderful in Marienthal. The factory itself was a diversion.”—Mrs. S. (37): “Since the stoppage at the factory, life has gotten harder. You always have to rack your brain thinking about what to cook, there’s not enough money. And you can never go anywhere; you’re shut in the whole day.”— Mrs. P. (78): “I would go right back to weaving if it were possible. I just miss the work.” It is not only for material reasons, then, that women would gladly accept the extra burden of going back to the factory; the factory broadened their world and gave them opportunities for social contact that they now miss. The collapse of time that we saw with the men, however, cannot be found among the women. We encounter a change in the larger temporal rhythm when we take one last look at the village as a whole. Sundays and holidays have lost much of their meaning—the librarian reports, for example, that today there is no longer the spike in book borrowing that once accompanied Sundays and holidays in Marienthal (as it does everywhere). In economic terms, the welfare payments that recur every fourteen days have replaced the function of the end of the week or month. Only schoolchildren retain any concept of a weekly schedule, which is transferred to the family somewhat as well. Even the changing of the seasons now appears stronger: loss of lighting and heating, the relief through the yield of allotment gardens, and the possibility for hiring the unemployed to assist with agricultural work all take on a weight that they do not tend to have in the industrial worker’s household. Thus, we can see that overall, as well as on a small scale, the people of Marienthal have returned to a more primitive, undifferentiated way of experiencing time. The new circumstances will not be arranged according to the usual schedule; rather, this poorer grasp of events and of standards is gradually beginning to correspond to a poorer way of organizing time.

Collage by F. Fröschl for the cover of the Festschrift to the Second Workers’ Olympics, published with texts in German, French, Czech, and Esperanto, Vienna 1931. (Courtesy of VGA.)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SPORTS AND BODY CULTURE Georg Spitaler

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he beginnings of workers’ sports date back to the late nineteenth century with the foundation of workers’ gymnastics associations, cycling clubs and organizations such as Friends of Nature (Naturfreunde), dedicated to recreational activities. After World War I, sports became an important pillar of the social democratic movement. In Red Vienna, a new culture was meant to form New Humans, and body culture was considered a part of it. This found its strongest expression in the Second Workers’ Olympics, held in Vienna in 1931. Tens of thousands of participants gathered in the city for a sports festival that included features such as a mass theater performance honoring the heroic history of the proletariat. Most events were held in the newly inaugurated Prater Stadium; with its béton brut facade and the democratic arrangement of terraces, the stadium was a landmark of progressive mass architecture. Social Democracy, however, had to compete with the boom in commercial sports. Sports were becoming a mass phenomenon and an important part of popular culture. Spectator sports experienced a significant upswing after World War I, especially association football (soccer). In 1924 the renowned sportswriter Emil Reich (1884–1944) described Vienna as “the soccer capital of Europe,” claiming that no other metropolis on the continent had more clubs, bigger crowds, and comparable interest in the game. In his words: “With regard to soccer, Vienna has surpassed all other European cities—whether you consider this a benefit or not.”1 Sports newspapers and magazines abounded. Even intellectuals embraced this latest form of popular entertainment. Sports facilitated the promotion of new models of masculinity and femininity, identity politics, and localism. Besides the workers’ clubs and the “nonpolitical” clubs of the bourgeoisie, postwar Austria saw the growth of clubs with other political or community affiliations, such as pan-German gymnastics and alpine clubs, as well as Zionist clubs, such as SC (Sport Club) Hakoah. Sports posed challenges to the Social Democrats. As a form of modern entertainment, sports—in their view—undermined the emancipatory potential of workers’ sports, and the appeal of spectator sports, in particular, diverted working-class youth from the political struggle. Otto Bauer commented on the many young people who used their newly won rights and free time “only for going to soccer matches and the cinema,” rather than for engaging in politics.2 According to Bauer, they could only be won by the party if the party 1 Emil

Reich, “Die Fußballstadt Europas,” Neues Wiener Journal, November 15, 1924, 17. Otto Bauer, Die Arbeiterjugend und die Weltlage des Sozialismus. Rede, gehalten auf der Jahreskonferenz des Kreises Wien des Verbandes der sozialistischen Arbeiterjugend am 2. März 1924, 2

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managed to “spark in them the desire for a bigger and much more significant kind of struggle”; they ought to be less interested in “whether Rapid or the Amateurs will win a soccer match,”3 and more in “whether the working class or the capitalist class will win the history match.”4 Central to the conflict was the relationship between sports and capitalism, in particular the role of sports with regard to labor and free time. When a professional soccer league was introduced in 1924, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) press dismissed it as “sports artistry,” contradicting the spirit of social democratic sports. According to SDAP journalist Jacques Hannak, this spirit could be found “on the cabbage field where a few boys in bare feet chase a raggedy ball; in the meadow where people in their free time jump, and run, and do cheerful exercises; or in the swimming pool.” Hannak saw sports “truly at home” among “the nameless, the amateurs.”5 For the Social Democrats, professional sports subjected free time to the logic of organized capitalist labor. Therefore an entertainment tax was collected from the organizers of commercial sports events. The situation was similar to the one in the Weimar Republic: on the one hand, the new sports culture indicated modernization associated with an American way of life, in which the athlete appeared as the human prototype of the industrial age; on the other hand, both bourgeois and Social Democratic circles regarded body culture as a means to fight the alienation from nature in modern civilization. The proponents of Red Vienna regarded sports as explicitly political. This distinguished their understanding of sports from many others. Physical training was considered important for self-defense and the preparation for the eventuality of armed struggle. This was particularly stressed by the high-ranking party member and sports official Julius Deutsch. As chairman of both the paramilitary Republican Protection League (Republikanischer Schutzbund) and the Austrian Workers’ Association for Sports and Physical Culture (Arbeiterbund für Sport und Körperkultur in Österreich, ASKÖ), Deutsch propagated a military organization of sport, calling for the establishment of gymnast militias (Wehrturner) in order to confront the danger of fascism in Europe.6 Further reading Hachleitner, Marschik, and Spitaler 2018 Horak and Maderthaner 1997 Krammer 1981 Kuhn 2017 Marschik 1994 Rásky 1992

Sozialistische Jugendbücherei no. 1 (Vienna: Verband der Sozialistischen Arbeiterjugend [1924]), 25. 3 Rapid Vienna (Sportklub Rapid Wien) and Wiener Amateur-Sportverein (later, FK Austria) belonged to the best-known of Vienna’s soccer clubs. 4 Bauer, “Arbeiterjugend,” 26. 5 Jacques Hannak, “Sport und Kunst,” Kunst und Volk: Mitteilungen des Vereines “Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle” 2, no. 7 (October 1927): 2–3. 6 See Julius Deutsch, “Sport und Wehrhaftigkeit,” Erstes österreichisches Arbeiter-Turn- und Sportfest Wien, no. 2 (July 1926): 1.

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1. Willy Meisl Sports at a Crossroads First published as Der Sport am Scheidewege (Heidelberg: Iris Verlag, 1928), 19–22. Translated by Gabriel Kuhn. In this excerpt, Willy Meisl (1895–1968) examines sports as a new aspect of mass culture. He calls this a “phenomenon of our time,” finding its cause in the horrors of World War I. Meisl, the brother of the manager of Austria’s soccer “wonder team” (Wunderteam)7 Hugo Meisl, was an athlete, sports official, and coach. As a member of the Wiener Amateur-Sportverein, he was a successful soccer goalkeeper and water polo player. Shortly after the war, he began to work as a journalist. In 1924, he moved to Berlin, where, among other occupations, he was an editor of the sports pages of the Vossische Zeitung. His Der Sport am Scheidewege was considered a prime example of the discussion of sports in the context of the New Objectivity. Apart from Meisl’s own text, it included contributions by Egon Erwin Kisch, Frank Thiess, Arnold Bronnen, Bert Brecht, Heinz Landmann, and Carl Diem. Willy Meisl embodied the intellectual exchange between Vienna and Berlin during the Red Vienna era. A problem of our time [. . .] Can it be a coincidence that our time—this short, not even completed postwar decade— has brought with it a tsunami-like wave of sports? I don’t think so. Our civilization has a hole, no, several holes that need to be filled, or, at least, plugged. Maybe sports are such a means, a remedy to stop the cultural decline of our era. Maybe it promises healing by heeding the principle that “the opposite is cured with the opposite.” Let us examine this matter more closely. First, we can state that sports are a product of our time, rather than time being a product of sports. Yet how meaningful is it to study the relationship between creator and creation, between father and child, between the artist and his work? Has not even God become the image of man? Sports have become big in our time, but they began to take root decades ago. Man’s nature (and culture) longed to escape the ever-expanding urban landscape. People’s lives were determined by wage labor. Between desire and coercion, a compromise was made: activity for the sake of activity; physical exercise as a kind of vigil honoring the force of nature closest to us, our body. Then, the war came. Many people spent years in their living rooms, in hospitals, in trenches. Many were disheartened rather than strengthened by the sacrifices that war demanded. When it ended, they realized, perhaps for the first time, how beautiful the shining sun was. The contrast they experienced made them appreciate air, water, life, and human motion in unprecedented ways. They felt: freedom. It is possible that the pendulum was so violently restrained for such a long time, so long held back by shame, vanity, and an education mistaken for culture that when, all of a sudden, it was released, it swung further than if it had simply followed the regular rhythm of life. But where do we find this rhythm? Where can we feel our natural beat? Eventually, 7

The term “Wunderteam” (“wonder team”) was commonly used for the Austrian national soccer team that remained unbeaten in twelve matches from 1931 to 1933.

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the sports pendulum will find its balance. Each action causes a reaction, and vice versa. The denial of the body, the hypertrophy of the mind (and of what claims to belong to it), and the terror of the philistines inevitably led the oppressed to rebel. A modern version of the old tale of Mons Sacer might include the following twist:8 the body tells its superiors, mind and soul, that it is unhappy with their performances; that, from now on, it will be independent; and that it will only adopt from them what it considers necessary and useful. Considering these metaphors, it may seem as if I approve of those who romanticize the past. One might even think that I concur with Herr Stresemann, who recently warned in strong terms that a “biceps culture” was about to erase our “intellectual aristocracy” [Geistesaristokratie].9 But I already asked in an earlier article when and where such an aristocracy—allegedly about to be thrown off its throne by the sudden flexing of an overdeveloped biceps—really existed.10 And even if it did play a more important role than today, what were the consequences? If it was responsible for the almost complete absence of body culture, a bit of biceps will hardly do any harm. Things cannot get much worse for humankind, including its intellectual and spiritual ideals. We experienced war. (Does anyone who recalls that experience really dare speak of an intellectual aristocracy and intellectual culture [Geisteskultur]?) When the war ended and peace prevailed, millions of people still experienced misery, only of another kind: they stood in line for bread, they froze in the dark, they suffered starvation. They were free but rather felt like they were freed from any rights. They had learned how precious life was; they felt it needed to be lived. They were driven by a diffuse and grinding desire. They were coming from death and they were looking for life. They were searching for adventure because the paths well-trodden had let them nowhere. Others were also looking for adventure. They had gained what they did not have before and what the masses had lost: money. And it didn’t take long before they got used to spending it, too. While they arrived at the scene from the opposite direction, they shared the masses’ interest in sensation and saw the same opportunity: the body as a promising asset. Sports were suddenly everywhere. The commercial instinct of the decade discovered what the intellect, with its characteristic lack of instinct, had not been able to discover during the previous decades: They offered sports, sports were in demand, and they delivered sports. Boxing boomed. It was a “tree” carrying golden fruits, even though its roots were soon rotten and the orchard ended in the hands of all the wrong people. Sixday races flourished. Yet, sports were not reduced to a mere spectator sport; they also changed the everyday lives of people. Playing field after playing field was built, club after club was founded, and free time expanded. A whole new world emerged: the weekend. Sports—in all of their varieties—have become a powerful force. They were lifted by the economic boom, and they are still flying high, even if the boom itself has subsided. They are one of the few spheres of life that has remained almost unscathed during the recent chaos. Today, they are bigger and healthier than ever. Let us examine this new Gargantua: let us ask how it grew, what it suffers from, and why it makes others suffer. 8 According

to ancient historiography, the Roman plebs gathered at this mountain outside the city during their conflict with the upper-class patricians in order to demand political rights. 9 Speech given by the German foreign minister and former chancellor Gustav Stresemann at the party congress of the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei, DVP) in Cologne, October 2, 1926. 10 Willy Meisl, “Was die Woche brachte,” Vossische Zeitung, February 1, 1927, 9–10.

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Does it really threaten the blessings of our culture, empty our theaters, and cause books to collect dust on their shelves? Does it really unleash the youth and discourage them from learning? Does it really seduce our men—and even our women!?

2. Stephanie Endres Rhythm and the Proletariat First published as “Rhythmus und Proletariat,” Oesterreichische Arbeiter-, Turn- und Sport-Zeitung 7, no. 9 (May 1930): 66–67. Translated by Gabriel Kuhn. In her essay “Rhythm and the Proletariat,” the Social Democratic educator Stephanie (Steffi) Endres (1891–1974) counters the Taylorism associated with the United States with a European model that uses a new body culture to overcome the damage done to workers by capitalism. Individuality and naturalness are pitted against the “techno-artificial” rhythm of capitalist labor to allow for a proper development of the human body. Endres calls for a new education that includes a culture of human motion, guiding the youth through “individual rhythm” (for example, in gymnastics). Apart from her activities in the Austrian Workers’ Association for Sports and Physical Culture (Arbeiterbund für Sport und Körperkultur in Österreich, ASKÖ), Endres was active in Red Vienna’s intellectual networks: she worked, for example, as a reform educator in the Schwarzwaldschule and the Schönbrunner Schule, was a member of the secularist Freethinkers’ Association (Freidenkerbund) and the Ernst Mach Society,11 and authored many textbooks, (radio) lectures, and articles on the physical education of children and feminist body culture. Only at the very basic level are gymnasts concerned about the body; when they aim higher, their concern is the soul, a step above life itself. —F. Giese Every morning, crowds of people stream to the workplace. There, the thumping of the hammers, the humming of the transformers, the ringing of the telephones, the pounding, the buzzing, the roaring begins. Speed, monotony, machine, engine—all dead things. And in the middle of this clamor that characterizes the millennium of mass labor we find the proletarian: a human being with a heartbeat, a pulse, and a rhythm of his own, tied down by the engines of the machine, put under its spell, and turned into a slave. Antiquity gave birth to chattel slavery whose subjects had no rights; the Middle Ages gave birth to intellectual and spiritual slavery; and the present age has given birth to rhythmic slavery. We believe that we are free because the constitution guarantees us democracy and physical and intellectual liberties, but at the bottom of our souls we are still enslaved: to the machine. [. . .] The machine’s rhythm demands of the worker to move levers up and down for hours on end, using his arms and legs. This intervention in natural rhythm has serious consequences. Apart from the commonly known proletarian diseases such as tuberculosis, scrofula, and others (diseases caused by dusty and poorly aired factories), machine labor kills all individuality.

11 See

chapter 5.

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The intellectual worker too has been harmed by one-sided accumulation of knowledge, increasing commercial interest, and the mechanization of life. Thus, socialism must not only fight against the economic exploitation of working people but also against their enslavement to the rhythms of the machine, against their certain demise in the hubbub of the big city. But how and where must this fight begin? We can name two examples. Karl Bücher has emphasized the relationship between labor and rhythm.12 Labor is accompanied by rhythmic acclamations and motions. Workers yell “hoy hoy” while loading materials, and “hey hop” while lifting them. These most primitive forms of rhythmic labor have been consciously introduced on the factory floor. Modern factory owners are determined to install assembly lines. The American [Frederick Winslow] Taylor has evaluated the underlying principle scientifically—labor supported by rhythm—and introduced the famous Taylor system. [. . .] All of America, its entire culture, is characterized by this new “techno-artificial” rhythm. The purpose of modern terms such as “accident prevention” is to prepare people for it. Workers are drilled to lift, unload, get out of the way, and so on, according to one and the same beat. The goal is to prevent accidents, to integrate an individual’s pace and movement into the overall timing for the task, and to subordinate individual performance to the performance of the collective. Industry, technology, economy, trade, transport, the big city—these are the behemoths of our time. They are meant to be served by both the individual and by society. This has created the rhythm of big city life that we experience today. The big difference between America and Europe is the following: America has turned the analysis and manipulation of biological conditions into a system that shortens the way to the dollar but prolongs the way to the proletariat’s liberation. Europe has embarked on a different course. Despite all the pragmatism it has adopted, it has not forgotten human beings themselves; sentient, rhythmic beings who follow inner laws. Europe and its workers want to feel their relationship to the universe through their pulse, breath, blood, and heartbeat. They want to adjust to nature, not manipulate it. They want liberation from the destructive forces of the machine. We are not advocating the destruction of the machine and the return to craftsmanship. This would be not only naïve romanticism but also impractical considering the demands of contemporary life. But when we work with machines, the work must correspond to human’s natural rhythm. We ought not be the slave of the machine but its master. To reconcile machine labor and the demands of constant production with the natural dynamic of stress and relief is not easy. But the time we live in and our needs as human beings not only demand it, they also show us the way. Human nature defends itself instinctively against the degeneration of life. The new generation, born within the hustle and bustle of the big city, used to the rattling of the streetcar (which people feel compelled to use rather than relying on their own two legs, not least because their workplaces are often far away and they are always pressured for time), used to the honking of autos, and used to breathing polluted air: this new generation now flees the confines of the big city every Sunday, seeking a remedy against urban life by wandering about, unchained. This new generation has also realized that physical health is the necessary foundation of all intellectual culture. That is the reason why our schools have begun to put so much more emphasis on physical education. 12

See Karl Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1899; rev. and exp. 6th ed., Leipzig: Emmanuel Reinicke, 1924).

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The new generation demands healthy living conditions for everyone in order for public life to be healthy and natural. But the force of habit is hard to overcome. It maintains a strong grip on the lives of many. The desire for a new relationship to the human body, for a deeper understanding of human values, and for related forms of education clash with old-fashioned views, desperate to weaken and derail any effort to progress. If workers want better health, they need to engage in struggle and break the chains that have enslaved humanity for way too long. Only new forms of education and new schools can bring liberation. Physical education needs to complement intellectual education in order for the body to develop naturally. Yes, people need to be prepared for manual labor, but in a way that ensures that life’s natural rhythm will not be violated, even at the peak of their performance. Gymnastics needs a new soul. This requires a strong sense for that which gives the human body power and shape, namely a rhythmic sequence of human motions. Robotic motions to musical commands (indeed called “rhythmic gymnastics”!), cramped motions on parallel and high bars, sweaty, breathless, and pale figures with red faces, protruding veins, and tense tendons—does any of this help the worker to find his own rhythm, the rhythm he needs to heal? Even in sports, the idea of peak performance, the dangerous enemy of any healthy physical development, must give way to a physical education based on humans’ natural rhythm. To be in touch with one’s own rhythm is what the worker needs to maintain his health and lust for life. In the collectivity of economic socialism, the individual aspects of socialist conviction must not be neglected. They are mandatory to make the working class the center of culture. The rhythm of life has to be awakened in the proletariat—of the kind of life that labor requires. Only then will the worker no longer be a servant to life but a human being whose mind, body, and soul are free.

3. Julius Deutsch Sports and Politics First published as Sport und Politik: Im Auftrage der Sozialistischen Arbeiter-SportInternationale (Berlin: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1928), 20–31. Translated by Gabriel Kuhn. The following excerpt is taken from the chapter “Can Sports Be Neutral?” in Julius Deutsch’s (1884–1968) influential Sport and Politics. It illustrates the political conceptions of sports in Red Vienna and the polemical rejection of “bourgeois” sports and body culture.13 Deutsch held several posts in the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP), was the chairman of the paramilitary Republican Protection League, and a leading workers’ sports official. In 1926 he became the head of the Austrian Workers’ Association for Sports and Physical Culture (Arbeiterbund für Sport und Körperkultur in Österreich, ASKÖ). One year later, he was elected president of the Socialist Workers’ Sports International. A central figure in the European workers’ sports 13 In revised form, parts of this text were included in Julius Deutsch, Unter roten Fahnen! Vom Rekord-

zum Massensport (Vienna: Verlag der Organisation Wien der Sozialdemokratischen Partei, 1931).

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movement, Deutsch outlined the ideals of workers’ sports in theoretical texts and was a co-organizer of the 1926 Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Festival (Arbeiter-Turn- und Sportfest) and, most importantly, of the 1931 Workers’ Olympics. IV. Can sports be neutral? Among the hundreds of bourgeois newspapers that—year in, year out—write about sports, there are only a few that do not proclaim with utter conviction that politics has nothing to do with them. The writers ensure us over and over again that any sport is simply a human activity, one that has no relation, none at all, to the contradictions between different classes and parties. Only the obnoxious class warriors among the proletarians insist on bringing their rage into the most innocent of all arenas, disturbing the athletes’ peace with their militancy. . . . It seems as if such hypocrisy belongs to the standard weapons used in discussions on the topic. Otherwise, such blatant and regular attempts to conceal the facts are hard to conceive. Let us take a look at what these writers call “neutral” sport, and what we, for the sake of clarity, simply call bourgeois sports: In its purest form, it reveals itself at the big, pompous events arranged to satisfy the people’s craving for sensation. For weeks, the advertisement machines are rolling at full steam, until finally tens of thousands of people gather at the day of reckoning. With all the passion that has been artificially whipped up, they watch some record hunters compete for a big prize. The prize is as much part of the commercial ballyhoo as all the rest of it. The more raw and dangerous the sport, the bigger the attraction. Boxing matches therefore trump all others. [. . .] But these are artistic stunts that have nothing to do with sport. Sports aim at the harmonic development of the entire body, not the hypertrophy of singular muscles. Artistic stunts belong to the circus. We have no objection to the circus as a place of entertainment. But no one can convince us that there exists any relationship between the circus and the improvement of public health, the purpose of true sport. Aiming for peak performances is understandable. It even has educational value, and we do not condemn it categorically. But we strongly oppose the way in which the bourgeois media of all countries exaggerate and glorify it. We also oppose the addiction to records, which is a danger to any serious practice of sports. The bourgeois obsession with records is no coincidence, of course. Bourgeois sports are individualistic. That is their deepest essence. They rank individual peak performances above the collective performances of mass sports. Bourgeois sports can never be anything but the expression of bourgeois life. In capitalism, the stronger triumph over the weaker and are rewarded with honor, fame, and riches. Everyone is fighting for himself and against everyone else. We can therefore draw the conclusion that bourgeois sports necessarily foster the character traits that capitalist life depends on, particularly unrestrained egotism. In the current social order, everything is available for money. So why should money not buy athletes, too? It is only a short step from chasing records to introducing professionalism. In the same way that we pay artists who perform in the circus, we will soon pay sportsmen performing for us. In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with accepting money for an athletic performance. Being a professional athlete is no more objectionable than being a professional artist. They can all be honorable people and earn their bread in a respectable way. We do not question that. But what is of main concern to us is whether sports have any

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inherent educational qualities that can benefit the people as a whole, and, if so, what are they? [. . .] We have come to the conclusion that the working class needs to reject bourgeois sports on principle. Bourgeois sports lead to the chasing of records and professionalism; it is an expression of capitalism’s very essence. It is not true that sports are neutral. Sports reflect the dominant social and cultural order whose destruction is the historical task and the moral duty of the proletariat. So far, we have only mentioned the unsavory side effects of sports in passing. For the sake of completeness, we need to point out the truly repulsive implications of bourgeois sports: the atmosphere of greed, the trading of athletes, the betting, sensationalism, gossiping, the dubious forms of amusement, the alcohol—truly no environment in which a new, emancipatory working-class culture can prosper. On the contrary, it will be suffocated the moment it appears. Neutral sports divert workers from their class interests, they force them to adopt bourgeois values and morals, they turn them into gladiators who serve the interests of others, and they prevent them from understanding the needs of their own class—in the worst case, they will actively oppose them. * * * Next to championing a sports movement of neutral colors, the bourgeoisie has in many countries established sports associations with a political agenda that is only faintly concealed. These associations, however, are rarely open about their intentions. They present themselves as patriotic, religious, or representative of a particular community, hoping— unfortunately, not without reason—that this will allow them to seduce and control a significant number of naïve workers. [. . .] In the German territories of Austria, the development was similar to the one in Germany. Until the end of the war, the bourgeois gymnastics clubs dutifully followed their ideological and athletic peers in the Reich. At first, they were democratic, even republican—then, they gradually entered the reactionary camp. The process was somewhat delayed in Austria, because the gymnastics clubs were often pan-German and antiHabsburg. But after the overthrow of the empire, they became probably even more reactionary than their counterparts in Germany.14 Today, they serve as nothing less than combat units of reactionary bourgeois parties, ready to partake in violent attacks against the republic and democracy. [. . .] They are filled by the spirit of fascism and pose a serious danger to public peace. They must not be underestimated. Yet, this doesn’t prevent people from all camps to reiterate the old mantra of sports being “non-political.” These people plead with the workers that they must under no circumstances found their own sports clubs, since this would be a deviation from the path of virtuous neutrality that alone, so they proclaim in speech and writing, guarantees salvation. All the while, the bourgeois sports clubs form armed battalions bent to destroy the socialist movement with gunfire. . . .

14

This is a reference to the German Gymnastics Federation 1919 (Deutscher Turnerbund 1919), which, similar to pan-German fraternities, played an important role in recruiting members for the pan-German and, later, the National Socialist movement in Austria.

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4. Roch Hakoah Wins the League First published as “Der Meisterschaftssieg der Hakoah,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, June 23, 1925, 8. Translated by Gabriel Kuhn. The author “Roch”—presumably, chief editor Robert Stricker (1879–1944)—reports in the sports pages of the Zionist Wiener Morgenzeitung on the Jewish sports club Hakoah winning the Austrian soccer league season in 1925. This made Hakoah the first champions in the era of professionalism, which had been introduced before the 1924–1925 season. Roch quotes a euphoric article from Prague’s Zionist weekly Selbstwehr (Self-defense), which celebrates this memorable success of Jewish athletes in Vienna—a city “swamped with Swastikas”—as proof against the alleged physical inferiority of Jews and a shining example for other countries. But the article also issues a warning, at least implicitly, against the danger of the costly and controversial professionalization of sports coming into conflict with the original purpose of the Zionist sports movement, namely the education of the youth in the spirit of “muscular Judaism.”15 The echo among the Jewish sports audience. The extraordinary victory of Hakoah, the most significant in the club’s history, finds recognition in the non-Jewish world as well. However, its biggest impact has been on the Jewish sports movement, where it has caused great excitement. Every day, Hakoah officials receive compliments sent by Jewish clubs from all parts of the world. Sixteen years after its foundation, and in the fifth season of participating in the highest league, Hakoah has won the most prestigious trophy in Austrian soccer. The reverberating echo that this great example of Jewish regeneration has caused is proven by the following tribute published in Prague’s Selbstwehr. Hakoah: Vienna’s soccer champions. The Jewish sports movement will always remember the year 1925. Hakoah Vienna, which carried the idea of the physical renaissance of Jewish youth into the masses, are the champions of the Austrian soccer league. This means that a Jewish team is the strongest in the country where English association football first found a home in Europe. It means that a Jewish team has received the calling to represent Austria, a true soccer nation. Hakoah does not have it easy in Vienna, a city swamped with swastikas. Since its inception, the club has had to deal with ugly and cowardly attacks. Despite being vilified as a consciously Jewish club, it managed to advance to the first league, and not just to succeed but to outperform all opponents and take the title. Hakoah has rewarded itself with this incredible achievement, but it has also, in a striking manner, disproved the assumption that Jews of the diaspora are physically inferior. The Jewish community acknowledges the enormous accomplishment of Vienna’s Hakoah. There is plenty of gratitude, recognition, and respect. The Jewish players of Hakoah ought to be proud of what they have achieved, and their achievement shall serve as an inspiration for future 15

See Max Nordau, “Muskeljudentum” and “Was bedeutet das Turnen für uns Juden?,” in Max Nordau‘s zionistische Schriften, ed. Zionistisches Aktionskomitee (Cologne, Leipzig: Jüdischer Verlag, 1909), 379–81 and 382–88.

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efforts within the club as well as the Jewish sports movement at large. The club’s leaders ought to be proud, too. For many years, Dr. [Ignaz Hermann] Körner [1881–1944], born in Moravia, has been serving as a tireless and highly dedicated chairman. The development of soccer in Europe forced Hakoah, like all first-league clubs in Austria, to introduce transparent and honest professionalism. This was, first and foremost, the result of economic necessity and is of no concern as long as Hakoah remains true to its ideals. As long as Hakoah remembers its mission to bring Jewish sports to the Jewish masses, the entire Jewish community will rally behind it. This, however, is also the reason why it seems particularly timely, in this hour of triumph and joy, to demand of Hakoah and its leaders that the club, as the Jewish community’s biggest and most influential representative in sports, will indeed remain true to its ideals and not even deviate an inch from its tradition. In our country [Czechoslovakia], the Jewish sports movement experienced a boom after the end of the empire but has recently faced stagnation. [. . .] May the triumph of Vienna’s Hakoah serve as an inspiration to passionately resume the work that has been neglected in recent years—or, if necessary, to start anew, undeterred.

5. Jacques Hannak Only a Soccer Match . . .? First published as “Nur ein Fußballmatch . . .?,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, December 6, 1932, 6. Translated by Gabriel Kuhn. In an Arbeiter-Zeitung preview of the soccer match between Austria and England on December 7, 1932, SDAP journalist Jacques Hannak (1892–1973) cautiously applauds the so-called wonder team, despite it being formed by professional players (rather than workers’ athletes). The game at London’s Stamford Bridge attracted great attention in Vienna. It was a modern media event, not least because of the live radio coverage via submarine cable. In this case, the SDAP accepted the power of popular mass culture. But not every party member agreed. For Hans Gastgeb, federal secretary of the Austrian Workers’ Association for Sports and Physical Culture (Arbeiterbund für Sport und Körperkultur in Österreich, ASKÖ), the SDAP was guilty of supporting the “nationalist swindle” surrounding the match. He stressed that workers’ sports had to reject both nationalism and soccer’s capitalist professionalization.16 Little Austria is challenging the dominance of mighty England With passion and anxiety, hundreds of thousands of people are anticipating the result of a soccer match played on a pitch in London tomorrow afternoon. Ninety minutes will reveal whether England, the motherland of the sport, can live up to its reputation. In recent decades, English sports have experienced many setbacks. [. . .] Today, only soccer remains an English domain (even if an increasing number of English clubs have suffered defeat on the continent). Since soccer happens to be the most popular sport in the world, the English are clinging to their advantage with tooth and nail. And now comes this dwarf, Austria, threatening to kick the giant off its stronghold and become the new world champion. 16 Hans

Gastgeb, “Panem et circenses,” Der Kampf 26, no. 1 (1933): 36–38.

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Twenty-five years ago. When, twenty-five years ago, the English players came to Vienna they didn’t play soccer with the Austrians but cat and mouse. The newspapers reported that a sensationally large crowd had gathered for the match: six thousand people! A few days ago, six thousand people accompanied the Vienna players to the railway station as they were leaving. Almost another six thousand are traveling to England from all of over Europe to witness this encounter between David and Goliath. The man who, twenty-five years ago, scored Austria’s only goal in the cat and mouse game, Willy Schmieger,17 will be at the microphone to report from the Chelsea sports stadium for practically all of Europe. And we will be there—through the radio. This technical miracle would have been considered to be a joke twenty-five years ago. Schmieger will speak to Vienna via submarine cable. At the very moment his voice arrives, it will be sent out into the ether. And while he is speaking, photographs of the match will be wired to all parts of the world. The next morning, they will appear in the newspapers. Sixty thousand people will watch the game in London, and at least twenty times as many will listen to it on the radio. From six thousand interested souls in 1908 to millions of them—we are living in a different world. . . . Every other café in Vienna has announced that they will broadcast the game. The Winter Help [Winterhilfe] invites people to the Heldenplatz,18 where they can listen to it for a few cents. Loudspeakers will be set up on Vienna’s sports fields where the masses will gather not to watch a game of soccer but to listen to the live coverage of a game from which they are separated by an ocean. We are only talking about a soccer match, of course: twenty-two men who kick around a leather ball. The world, no doubt, has bigger problems. But whatever we may think of it, we have to accept the times we are living in. And, in fact, what we are witnessing is not bereft of progress. From Hiden to Haydn and from the amazing forward runs of Sindelar to Goethe, culture has yet to come a long way.19 But the journey from taverns to Hiden and the public soccer fields of workers’ sports, where the masses don’t watch but play sports themselves in order to train and strengthen their bodies, has been an even longer one. If . . . What does it matter whether eleven young men from Vienna will win or lose this “heroic battle” in the mist of a bleak early-winter London day? No matter the outcome, the world will still be here tomorrow, and Austria’s problems still will not be solved. But do not blame the people for it! Blame the poverty of an era that has no higher ideals to give them! When life is as limited and destitute as it is today, our ideals are as well. We have to be fair and acknowledge that this “viking journey” of an Austrian soccer patrol 17 Wilhelm

(Willy) Schmieger (1887–1950), sports journalist, radio reporter, and an official of the bourgeois Wiener Sport-Club was known as an opponent of the workers’ sports press. 18 Based on a collaboration between the city of Vienna, the Austrian government, and private institutions, the Winterhilfe was launched in 1931 as a charity program for the unemployed. 19 Rudolf Hiden (1909–1973) and Matthias Sindelar (1903–1939) were two star players of the wonder team.

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to the proud Albion is an attempt, if a very modest one, to overcome the limitations and destitutions of people’s lives. For one day, the deplorable nothingness of Austria will rub shoulders with a world power; for one day, the world will not speak of England without thinking of Austria. And what if Austria won . . . Vienna is in the grip of championship fever. If you overhear two people conversing and uttering a number today, be assured that they are not discussing the stock market or their debt; they are simply trying to predict a soccer score. If you board a streetcar and watch what people are reading in the newspapers: for once, they are not reading about murders and court proceedings or a serial novel; only about Austria–England! If you wait for your turn at a government agency, there is no need to despair today; you can simply chat about the game! And if you visit the barber and, just as his knife is tickling your throat, he casually asks you, “So, will we win?,” then the knife won’t even bother you, and, at the risk of your life, you will mutter: “Yes, three to one!” Two methods. If Austria loses, the people of Vienna already know the excuse: “The English have done it all by force!” This is comforting. And there is truth in it! It is not only two countries that will meet in London tomorrow, but also, let us say, two methods. Little Austria has been the most faithful student of the English game as we got to witness it in 1908: a delicate, artistic, and collective style of play, not relying on physical force but on refined technique and intricate combinations. No other players on the continent have adopted this style the way the Austrians have. And not only that: the “Viennese spirit,” whose existence cannot be denied even in the realm of sports, has given it a unique flavor. It is the blend of the prewar style of the English and the postwar style of the Austrians (characteristic also of Austrian workers’ soccer, which dominates the continent as well) that has made the unprecedented run of success enjoyed by the Austrian professionals over the last two years possible: they have remained unbeaten in thirteen consecutive matches, playing the teams of Scotland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and Sweden—in short, almost all of Europe. The “Viennese style” is widely acknowledged as the most advanced form of continental soccer today. English soccer, on the other hand, abandoned its roots with the end of the war. It is no longer characterized by superior methodology on the pitch but by strength, speed, determination, and power. Spirit and beauty are no longer of importance. To win and to defend their number one status is all that matters. Force against spirit: this is the common formula used across Europe to summarize tomorrow’s encounter. It might be too simple a comparison, but there is something to it: the Englishman is better fed than the Austrian, he knows the local conditions, he is used to playing in the fog and on deep, soggy grass. All of this will work in his favor. He will fight to defend his hard-won prestige and will do so ferociously. But little Austria has nothing to lose but hope. It could achieve more than to win a soccer match, namely to convince the world that, despite the great poverty in the country, there resides a free and creative spirit and a youth full of ambition and strength, ready to give the world so much more than victory in a soccer match, if given the chance . . .20

20 The

game ended with a 4–3 victory for England.

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6. Marie Deutsch-Kramer Rise First published as Maria Deutsch-Kramer, “Aufstieg,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, July 19, 1931, 8. Translated by Gabriel Kuhn. On the occasion of the 1931 Workers’ Olympics in Vienna, the Social Democrat and feminist Marie Deutsch-Kramer (1884–1973) writes in her lyrical piece “Rise” about the political and social emancipation of women. For her, women’s participation in the Olympics is proof of it. As a member of the women’s committee of the Austrian Workers’ Association for Sports and Physical Culture (Arbeiterbund für Sport und Körperkultur in Österreich, ASKÖ), founded in 1928, Deutsch-Kramer played an important role in the international workers’ sports movement. In 1929 the Socialist Workers’ Sport International accepted a program for women’s sports developed by the ASKÖ’s women’s committee. As the committee’s chairwoman, Deutsch-Kramer featured prominently in the publications of the Workers’ Olympics. Together with Stephanie Endres, she is also the coauthor of the mass theater play performed at the 1932 ASKÖ May Day celebration in the Prater Stadium. In many articles and (radio) lectures, Deutsch-Kramer propagated the emancipation of women through socialism and sports. Three generations ago: the stagecoach was the fastest means of traffic, and the first small locomotive built by Stephenson [was] considered a wonder of the world, marveled at by unbelieving and frightened eyes. Today: rocket cars, rail zeppelins, movement at three hundred kilometers per hour, a Zeppelin flight to America in forty-eight hours, journeys to the stratosphere, unimagined possibilities, the universe for humankind! One generation ago: women [were] excluded from civil rights, public activities, and all possibilities of learning; confined to the house, intellectually restrained by a combination of shameful prejudice and age-old laws, unfree and enslaved, their bodies deformed by ludicrous norms of fashion that prevent natural physical development. Today: [women are] freed by the revolution, advancing on the path of liberty, intellectually and politically equal to men, on the verge of legal equality, successful in their fight for a new era in which bourgeois ideology and male dominance in all spheres of culture and life will be replaced by the equality of the sexes, paving the way to socialism. And as a symbol of all of these achievements, we see women as competitors equal to men at the Workers’ Olympics. The women and girls who have entered the ranks of worker athletes [Arbeitersportler] by the thousands and tens of thousands, have understood the sign of the times. They know that only those are truly free who have freed not only their minds through the belief in socialism but also their bodies from all constraints and damage that employment and wage labor have imposed on them. Women have adapted to the demands of the new era with impressive ease. When we will see thousands of female athletes (Austria alone will send more than four thousand to the mass practice of the gymnasts) in the opening parade, and then hundreds from Austria alone (the best of the best) in the Olympic competitions, then we will realize how enormous the steps are that women have taken. Look at the runners and jumpers, their grace and their endurance! Look at the javelin thrower and the cyclist, look at those who demonstrate their harmonic training in handball and tennis!

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Look, finally, at the hundreds of exhilarated girls and women joining in the festival’s joyful dances and realize that these women will never again allow anyone to subjugate them! They know what they have to demand, both for themselves and for their children. They no longer accept the teachings of old, neither “The rich and the poor must always exist” nor “Be humble, and patiently accept your lot!” Those who have flown to the stratosphere will no longer be satisfied by traveling in the stagecoach. And those who have freed themselves, in the way these women athletes have, will move in one direction only: forward. But they need to join forces with the many women militants of the Social Democratic Party, who, in turn, need to reach out to their sisters in sports. The notions of “Socialism for women athletes!” and “Sports for all socialists!” must accompany and reinforce each other. After the Battle of Marathon, a runner brought the message of victory over the Persians to the anxiously waiting Greeks. In Vienna, the masses of athletes will storm through the Marathon Gate into the new stadium. But they will not bring messages of victories in bloody battles; instead, they will bring the wonderful message of peace and unity among the working classes of all nations! Marathon runners of the International, women side by side with men—this is how we are marching into the new era. Despite the hardships and the misery of the present, these runners bring the message of hope that lies in the union of all working people; a hope that trusts in the power of the socialist idea. Nothing can stop the moral will when it is carried by enthusiasm and conscious commonality. The sense of belonging is the central theme of the Olympics; in ancient Greece, it was meant to create unity among the country’s people. To partake in this festival as equal companions proves the rise of women and shall make them proud.

7. Ernst Fischer Crisis of Ideology (from Crisis of Youth) First published as “Krise der Weltanschauung,” in Krise der Jugend (Vienna, Leipzig: Hess and Co., 1931), 71–127. Translated by Gabriel Kuhn. In 1931 Ernst Fischer (1899–1972) released Krise der Jugend, a socio-psychological study of postwar youth, also addressing the dissatisfaction of young SDAP members with the passivity of the party and the lack of a “heroic ideology.” Fischer, author and literary critic of the ArbeiterZeitung, was the cofounder of an oppositional left-wing current within the party, the Youth Front (Jungfront).21 Being well aware of the problems from which the youth were suffering— repressed sexuality and gender relations as well as the economic crisis—Fischer portrays a generation torn between the desire for radical social change and the retreat into private life. He asserts that many youth turn to fascist parties that promise revolution because young people are disillusioned with the “fruitless back and forth of parliamentarian politics.” Fischer sees sports critically. He deems it an escape and questions its use within the socialist youth movement. Perhaps sports are the only way of life that satisfies countless young people. Of all the ideologies that are emerging to replace the old ones, sports are the most important. They stand at the center of the revolt against rationalism and intellectualism, against learning 21 After

the events of February 1934, Fischer joined the Communist Party.

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and knowledge. In sports, the struggle against the old world has been successful: deeds triumph over words, the body over the mind, the audacity of youth over the cautiousness of age. Sports have everything that society still owes to young people: reward for one’s efforts, uncontested (individual and collective) victory, daily trials. Sports allow young people to escape the dull and mind-numbing uniformity of capitalism that reduces everyone to a nameless part of a gigantic machine with no chance to prove individual ability, strength, and skill, to set oneself apart from the masses, and to experience the brightness of heroic glory. It is in the soccer club or in the rowing club where young people find community and collaboration, the transformation of organization into a living organism, the balance of individualism and collectivism, the advance of the individual coupled with the cohesion of the group. This means that sports are able to unite in harmony that which is considered the biggest contradiction in our miserable social order. Is it surprising that young people seek the joy and satisfaction that society denies them? That they flee from the mechanization and inadequacy of our economic life? That they escape headfirst into sports? But this escape into sports is a serious symptom of a highly dangerous disease. Sports have become a substitute for everything that people seek but cannot find. It is a poor world that forces the youth to rely on substitutes. The role that the young man plays in sports is the role he ought to play—the function he ought to occupy—in the social order, in cultural and political life: the role of the free, the daring, the electrified young man. When he descends on his skis down into the valley, he does not care about anything else: “This is my reality—everything else can go to hell!” He falls in love with his body, his elasticity, his smoothness. He embarks on an ego trip of muscles and tendons. A selfcenteredness that amounts to nothing becomes his nature. Yes, he marches happily at demonstrations, displaying his suntanned, perfect physique—people cheer for him and celebrate him as the ideal of a new generation. But the athlete is nowhere near an ideal. As much as we must understand and acknowledge the sports movement, as much as we must rejoice over the bodily beauty of our outdoor youth, we must also ask whether their force and strength shall only serve to generate handsome bodies and breed runners, swimmers, skiers, and soccer players? Is it really enough for our youth to ski down a hill and kick a ball into a net? Do our young people really think that well-trained flesh and a mind that focuses on controlling every muscle can turn the world upside down? It doesn’t help to simply reiterate the story of “a healthy mind in a healthy body.” Can someone explain to us what a healthy mind even is? I am afraid that people mean a welltempered mind, immune to radical ideas and ideological passion; that “common sense” which used to delight the bourgeois establishment. I am also afraid that all the attention given to the body does not, in fact, benefit the mind at all, that an excess of physical activities may harm rather than strengthen it. The ideology of sports entails a new synthesis of individuality and collectivity, of individual heroism and collective discipline. But it also entails many elements of the capitalist world. [. . .] A socialist ideology of sports would have to focus on meaningful harmony, not on a meaningless chase for top performance. Theoretically, we have long known this, but, practically, it is hard to break free from a capitalist environment. But the real danger is not capitalist elements creeping into the ideology of sports. The real danger is the catastrophic lack of ideas that the focus on the body, on physical success entails. We can already observe what happens when countless of our most active and promising youth shy away from social responsibility and substitute unproductive heroism and private sensation for heroic convictions and communal goals. All too often it is only the drudges, the colorless careerists, who remain in the socialist

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parties; people to whom life and youth means nothing; people who have turned into savvy and experienced apparatchiks at the age of twenty or twenty-five. Such a role is alright for forty- or fifty-year-olds, but the youth must serve the spirit of the movement, not its apparatus. Some young people, deceived by the superstition of violence and expecting renewal only from new movements, join the ranks of the fascist parties. In Germany, they are National Socialists. In Austria, they once were members of the Heimwehr22—today, they are National Socialists, too.

22 See

chapter 36.

Emil Dowisch, “Jugend von heute [Today’s youth],” symbolizing the liberated woman, who is now also able to enjoy sports and other outdoor activities. Wasser und Sonne, July 6, 1928. (Courtesy of ANNO/Austrian National Library, ÖNB.)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

NATURE Cara Tovey

T

he seemingly apolitical realm of nature was in fact an active stage for many social and political debates of the early twentieth century. Because nature is seen as a separate realm, uncorrupted by civilization, the principles of nature provided an appealing model for political institutions and social movements to strive for, as well as the means for achieving this goal. In modeling their ideals and structures on nature, these institutions and movements legitimized themselves as promoting superior standards of living. Nature was at the heart of the life reform (Lebensreform) movement which emerged in the late nineteenth century, drawing on the Enlightenment tradition of critiquing civilization as well as advancements and discoveries in the natural sciences. This resulted not only in a new understanding of and appreciation for nature but also in the formation of the concept of what is natural. Nature as the realm uncorrupted by humans was considered inherently good. Consequently, that which was considered natural was also idealized. As such, nature provided a model for the perfect life. The phrase “return to nature” (“Zurück zur Natur”), inspired by Rousseau’s attitude toward nature, was often cited as embodying the spirit of this movement. The motto was, however, often misunderstood as many proponents of a more natural lifestyle were actually forward thinking with a vision for the future rather than looking back to a lost past.1 In addition to taking part in the life reform movement, the bourgeoisie also embraced open-air free-time activities, mainly hiking and mountain climbing, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The German and Austrian Alpine Club (Deutscher und Oesterreichischer Alpenverein), created in the 1860s and 1870s, promoted a respect and appreciation for nature as well as helped to lead the way in conservation efforts. The organization generally attracted members who came from the bourgeois class and took pride in their country and national traditions, which cultivated a certain amount of nationalism and anti-Semitism among many of its members. There was nevertheless a strong tradition of Jewish mountaineers within and outside of the club in Vienna and throughout Europe. In protest to the rising antiSemitism among Alpine Club members and the continued inclusion of Aryan clauses 1 A handful of publications at the time discuss how the life reform motto “Zurück zur Natur” was in practice not regressive. See R. M., “Treu der Natur,” Kraft und Schönheit, 1, no. 9 (1901): 97–98; and Robert Landmann, Monte Verità: Die Geschichte eines Berges (Ascona: Pancaldi, 1934).

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that limited membership to Aryans in their constitution since 1919, mainly VienneseJewish members founded the Donauland Section (Sektion Donauland), which initially operated as a branch of the German and Austrian Alpine Club before it gained independence in 1924 when it was officially expelled from the organization.2 In contrast, the Friends of Nature (Naturfreunde) were established in 1895 as a Social Democratic organization and as such were more geared toward recruiting members from the working class. Red Vienna actively incorporated the principles of nature into its policy as a means of furthering the individual citizen and by extension the population as a whole. Both urban planners and architects aimed at reconnecting the everyday lives of city dwellers with nature.3 This took the form of designing green spaces and buildings that let in plenty of natural light.4 Red Vienna’s policy toward nature also promoted allotment gardens so people could grow their own food for a healthy diet. Finally, and most significantly, an appreciation of nature shaped free time in Red Vienna. For example, the Friends of Nature promoted physical health and a sense of community as well as the ideals of socialism through outdoors activities such as hiking and mountain climbing, and many Viennese enjoyed swimming and other water sports on the Danube. These activities provided a space for workers to relax and enjoy themselves away from the city and the stress of their everyday lives. In all of these respects, Red Vienna ensured that its citizens came into regular contact with nature in a productive way, providing an essential component of the New Human and serving both the individual and society. The social consciousness of and respect for nature in Red Vienna was part of a revolutionary trend that swept across Europe at that time. Further reading Brunner and Schneider 2005 Deutscher Alpenverein, Oesterreichischer Alpenverein, and Alpenverein Südtirol 2011 Flasch 2000 Günther 1997, 1998 Keller 2016 Loewy and Milchram 2009 Morris 2012 Pils 1994 Rohkrämer 1999

2

The Donauland Section reflected on its founding in its newspaper, Nachrichten der Sektion “Donauland” 1, no. 1 (1921). See also Oskar Marmorek, “50. Hauptversammlung des Deutschen und Österreichischen Alpenvereins zu Rosenheim (19. und 20. Juli 1924),” Nachrichten der Sektion “Donauland” 4, no. 36 (1924): 109–12. 3 See chapters 20 and 21. 4 See chapters 20 and 21, as well as several articles published in Viennese newspapers dealing with the topic of health and architecture. For example, Walter Guth, “Neues Wohnen—Neues Bauen: Neue Formen,” Dein Ziel 3, no. 12 (1931): 5–7; and Anonymous, “Sind moderne Wohnungen ungesund?,” Neues Wiener Journal, August 25, 1932, 4–5.

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1. Robert Winter Socialism in Nature First published as Der Sozialismus in der Natur (Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Buchdruckerei und Verlagsanstalt, 1919), 5–9. Translated by Peter Woods. Drawing on the credibility of the natural sciences, which had been on the rise since the eighteenth century, Robert Winter examines pre-human, empirical evidence for socialism in the natural world, thus providing a justification for why socialism is both a natural and practical societal structure. Originally published as a series of feuilletons in the Innsbrucker Volks-Zeitung, Winter’s text is not only a scientific summary of non-human occurrences of socialism in nature, but also a reflection on humanity’s place in the natural world and a reflection on what makes culture and the self-organized states of society unique. The following excerpt comes from the first text in the series titled “The Gastrea.” Socialism in nature is older than both of us, older than Christ and Moses. Yes, it is even older than the traces of early human settlements found in prehistoric caves—what am I saying, it is even older than mammals, reptiles, amphibians, older than fish and worms! [. . .] Say we go back in time one hundred million years. A nice little figure, although for eternity this amounts to as much or as little as one lifetime, or a single heartbeat. Primordial ocean. The first constellation of thermal energy. Solar heat plus the residual heat from the formation of the Earth. You may laugh, friend, but socialism already existed back in this primordial ocean. And what socialism it was. This was socialism of such tremendous consequence that socialism among humans today, which labors so arduously to win over hearts and minds, pales in comparison like the moon before the sun. The natural scientist Ernst Haeckel established a history of prehistoric species—based on precise investigations of the ontogeny of corals and according to the law of the emergence of life (biogenetic law)—which compels us to recognize the erstwhile existence of a microorganism that was the first socialist unification of about one hundred primordial cells.5 This was the gastraea. It is clear—even from the later, larger animals with their strong bone structure—that the Earth’s crust faithfully preserved many a skeleton from an extinct animal for us. But a primordial mucus-mass with several hundred unified single-cell organisms—and what is more one that lived in the water—can never hold much for the beautiful human eye; instead, we must consult ontogeny. This can be explored at any time under the microscope, just as the gastrula can be explored as a hypothetical gastraea. This microorganism itself makes a strong case for socialism in nature. Picture a pear, and say, you had ripped out its stem so that you ended up with a hole where the stem used to be; then imagine one half of the pear nicely hollowed out and there, in place of the remaining pear flesh, sit two layers of infinitesimally small primordial microorganisms, rhythmically aligned—now you have this creature in front of you. Strictly speaking, it is no longer a microorganism, not an individual, but rather a clump of organisms, a community of organisms, a cell collective, a cell nation, or whatever you 5

Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) was an influential German zoologist, natural scientist and philosopher. He is the author of Die Welträtsel: Gemeinverständliche Studien über monistische Philosophie (1899).

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want to call it. But get the idea out of your mind that you are dealing with an individual. A unified mass is not an individual. The cells that are set against the inner abdominal wall eat—that is, in a process of direct absorption, they use the proto-mouth to suck nourishment into themselves as it flows in through the front. This on its own would not quite be socialism. Simply eating is not a socialist activity, but that is coming shortly. The cells in the cell layer on the outer side of the imagined pear have arranged little hairs with which they propel the entire community through the water. These outsiders have neither time nor opportunity to eat in this arrangement, so they receive sustenance according to primeval socialist logic: from their brothers positioned on the inner abdominal wall. Sustenance flows over from assimilated cell to assimilated cell on a straight path. The digestive cells eat for themselves and for the propeller cells, and the latter row for themselves and for the digestive cells—all for one and one for all! Each does its duty. There is no overseer, no department head, no superintendent, no general, and no king. These are pure democrats, staunch republicans, true socialists. It is the mass that eats its way through life, not an individual! Competition, free trade, even the black market are completely useless in such a gastraea community. And nevertheless, the machinery runs smoothly. Strangely enough. And yet we should assume that this foolish equality can lead to nothing good? This, friend, is the secret of nature: nature is the oldest socialist. What is nature at its core, in the final analysis? The expression, in human language, of a phenomenal world that is necessary just as it is. For if it were not necessary, then it would not be, and we would not be along with it. Consider the following: the gastraea evolved into worms, and worms evolved into lancelet fish, the first with an internal vertebral column. The lancet fish evolved into fish, which in turn evolved into amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, and currently at the top of this evolutionary chain: you and I, humans. We humans are all unified cell nations just like Mother Gastraea. We are all unified masses—not individuals. Do not be upset about that and keep listening. Just because we realize that we are not distinct beings does not mean that we must lose our evolved view—it is only our dreamy, unnatural, and unrealistic view that we must fight against. We should face the facts, soberly. And the socialist science, even though already part who we are, reveals itself in a very matterof-fact way as we rediscover it in the one-hundred-million-year-old gastraea. Rediscover? Is it not perhaps more accurate to say that nature, socialist nature, rediscovers itself in the initial awareness of those people who are or want to be socialists? Could the gastraea gain awareness because of man, or is not instead man who gained awareness because of the gastraea? You see, friend, it actually comes down to quite simple things that surround the fact of socialism in nature. It all revolves around the question of whether the individuals within an organized territory should withhold sustenance—and today, at the height of human progress, the enjoyments of culture—from one another, or whether they should provide each other with both. And it is also a question of whether all individuals want to work and create, as a whole for the whole.

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2. Gustav Harter Back to Nature First published as “Zurück zur Natur,” Neues Wiener Tagblatt, October 2, 1923, 2–4. Translated by Peter Woods. The phrase “back to nature,” the frequently quoted motto of the life reform ( Lebensreform) movement, gained in popularity after World War I. Gustav Harter approaches the question of returning to nature from the point of view of medical science. After an introduction discussing the cause of the demise of most great civilizations as a turning one’s back on nature, Harter analyzes contemporary attempts to integrate nature into everyday life as well as the role of nature in healing and hygiene. Elsewhere, Harter provides a few examples of how turning toward nature in medical science has proven to be beneficial in recent years. The following excerpt focuses on the larger social projects and institutions in Vienna that are aligned with nature. With the exception of certain factors—such as climate, soil and water quality, conditions for employment and nutrition, and others—public health in general, and thus the power, life, thinking, and creativity of a nation, depends mainly upon whether the vast majority of people live their lives as strictly as possible according to natural guidelines. They are very simple, and instinct alone has always led wild animals or primitive peoples down the right path—a path from which every older civilized nation has strayed further and further over the years. The most critical steps for general public health are: proper nourishment of newborn babies, which only mother’s milk—that of a wet nurse, if necessary—can provide; appropriate care for adolescents; a healthy and varied diet that robs the natural foods of as few nutrients as possible; cleanliness; clean clothing and living conditions; sufficient exercise outside in the sun and fresh air; a harmonious relationship between physical and mental exertion, as well as necessary periods of rest; and finally a healthy sex life. The more a people strays from the natural way of life, the more that people weakens its physical and mental health, its fertility, and the faster it rushes to its doom. [. . .] What did the city-dweller know, some sixty years ago, of the blessings of hiking in the great outdoors, high in the mountains, of mountain tours! To be sure, the journeyman ventured across the country, and some individuals, such as Seume or Kyselak,6 also took long hikes, but the vast majority of the city folk did not yet know the tonic effects of a hike in the mountains. They wasted their free time sitting in smoky inns or coffee houses, went down to wine taverns or, at most, to the Prater. It was only in the “romantic period,” with its infatuation with ruins and bizarre rock formations, that the Viennese were gradually lured out of the city. The building of the railroads eased travel and allowed even the less well-off classes to spend some time in the country restoring their health in the summer. Fans of mountain tourism continued to grow, the first disciples of which were ridiculed as “mountain faddists.” I need not waste words discussing the enormous breadth that they have achieved and what beneficial impact they have had on public health. The health-promoting benefits of sunlight are by no means a new discovery, as 6 Johann Gottfried Seume (1763–1810), a German author known for Spaziergang nach Syrakus (Stroll to Syracuse). Joseph Kyselak (1798–1831), an Austrian Alpinist who had the habit of tagging his name on prominent places during his hikes.

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two old proverbs surely testify: “Sunshine everyday keeps the doctor away!” and “The hearse stops twice as often on the shady side of the street as it does on the sunny side!” But this remains a thing of proverbs, and in reality, people shunned the sunlight. In the eighties, gentlemen even walked around the streets of Vienna with parasols! Even years later, traditional medical science was still completely unaware of the invigorating, stimulating, detoxifying effects of sun- or air-bathing. Our ancestors in Tacitus’s day surely enjoyed this practice regularly, as Roman doctors already knew of it, and the layman Rikli already adopted it in his sanitarium in Veldes in 1855.7 [. . .] It is interesting that one of the first and most far-reaching steps toward a return to nature in the field of medicine was taken in our very own city. It was the famous Professor Skoda8—to whom, along with Rokitansky,9 the Vienna School of medicine owes its world renown—who in the forties first dispensed with the nonsensical, mostly superficial, often even harmful junk remedies that dominated medical treatments at the time. He showed irrefutably that many diseases went into remission even when they were left completely untreated. Of course, Skoda encountered fierce opposition from his colleagues at first. [. . .] Skoda’s mistake was that he used almost no treatment at all on his patients, which rightly discredited him a great deal among those people. Unfortunately, this led to a return to the prevailing remedy with its mysterious ingredients which continued to be the sole preferred medical treatment for a long time. This was in spite of Prießnitz’s hydrotherapy in Gräfenberg10—and that of the neglected Viennese doctor Ferro before him11—and of Schroth’s own hydrotherapy and dietary treatment,12 all of which had already broken through the facade of a medical treatment committed to highly questionable remedies. They were later joined by the aforementioned Rilki in Veldes, who, thanks to his sunbaths and outdoor rest cures, was the precursor to all modern light treatments and the beneficial sanitarium movement. Can one imagine what enormous progress it is that the poor tuberculosis patient who is not beyond help is no longer left in hospital rooms devoid of air and light, but rather rests outside in the sunshine and the fresh air? One need only go along the Himmelstraße in Grinzing and look at the solariums for the sick! The shining successes of such a treatment are further evidence of how good it is that medical science has found the way back to nature. One has to give the natural healing associations [Naturheilvereine] credit, embattled though they were early on, for being the loudest and most successful pioneers of “Back to Nature!” in medicine. Although some of their adherents rather often went too far and invited justified criticism, for the most part these associations have done immense good in that they have enlightened the populace in the strongest way with regard to the value of natural healing factors, have made these methods of treatments fashionable in a healthy way, and have forced the official medical community to adopt these methods of treatment. If the Viennese today have a Gänsehäufel and a myriad similar facilities13—in addition to other things I do not have the space to list here—if they can be pleased about 7 Arnold

Rikli (1823–1906), a Swiss natural healer. Skoda (1805–1881), a Bohemian-Austrian doctor in Vienna. 9 Carl von Rokitansky (1804–1878), an Austrian pathologist, politician, and philosopher. 10 Vincenz Prießnitz (1799–1851), a naturopath from Austrian Silesia. 11 Pascal Joseph de Ferro (1753–1809). 12 Johann Schroth (1798–1856), a naturopath from Austrian Silesia. 13 Still open today, the Gänsehäufel is an island in the Old Danube that houses a large public outdoor swimming and water sports complex. 8 Joseph

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them and fortify themselves with them, then let them not forget that the natural healing associations paved the way for these wellsprings of health. In my opinion, the ordinary Florian Berndl did more for public health than many so-called medical titans.14 Out of healthy, natural instinct, he founded the Gänsehäufel and thereby led the Viennese en masse out of dusty, smoky rooms and into the water, into the light, onto the sunbaked sand. There is much left to say on the subject of “back to nature”: about sports; the allotment gardens [Schrebergärten]15 that lead the big-city proletariat to Mother Earth; the temperance movement;16 today’s more natural women’s clothing; the dwindling of an unnatural, sanctimonious shame that resulted in gender-segregated swimming areas and shied away from nudity as though it were a grave sin—even the sort of nudity that often goes unnoticed today, its eroticism widely seen as comforting rather than stimulating. There is much more to add about these and other things, but then I would need to write a book and not a feature article.

3. Gustav Müller The Mountains and Their Significance for the Rebuilding of the German People First published as “Die Berge und ihre Bedeutung für den Wiederaufbau des deutschen Volkes,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen und Österreichischen Alpenvereins 53, no. 1 (1922): 1–9. Translated by Peter Woods. The rhetoric of regeneration and rebirth after World War I was commonplace in the defeated German and Austrian nations. Many had hoped the war would rid society of what it saw as moral degeneration in the preceding decades. Yet, in the end, it only further exposed the problems of a morally corrupt society. Subsequently, many looked to nature for inspiration and ideas about how to renew the human body and mind and by extension society as a whole. In his article, Gustav Müller (1871–1943), chair of the Munich section of the Alpine Club at the time, addresses these issues by looking at what makes mountaineering attractive to many people. The following excerpt focuses on the concept of struggle in nature and how hiking and mountaineering teaches people to triumph in this battle between natural forces. With its “survival of the fittest” rhetoric, the text is representative of the widespread nationalist and anti-Semitic attitudes of the Alpine Club. The mountains teach us mountaineers something else. It is shallow to approach mountains with that very popular, superior, appreciative feeling of pleasure, or to enjoy them showing no deeper feelings than one has for a pretty showpiece, or with the petty vanities of sports in mind, or that bird-brained curiosity that fails to penetrate even the thin crust of the Earth. It is profound to approach mountains with humility in the face of 14 Florian

Berndl (1856–1934), a naturopath and founder of the Gänsehäufel. Schreber gardens (Schrebergärten) or allotment gardens are community gardens, usually on the outskirts of cities, for private citizens to cultivate their own food. They were named after the German physician Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber (1808–1861). 16 The temperance movement (Abstinenzbewegung) was a social movement against the consumption of alcohol, alcoholism, and the use of drugs. 15

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omnipotence, to cross their tops with heart and soul and, just like the mountain vegetation adapts its roots to the conditions of life, to strike the right balance between oneself and one’s surroundings. That is the language and the philosophy of the mountains. Here, restlessness ends, egotism perishes, and peace begins. Whoever recognizes that the primal force confined us within boundaries, and that it preserves its regal calm when its creation strives to break free from its boundaries, that person will receive the proper reward— peace of mind—by adapting to being. Therein lies the root of the blissful feeling of mountain tranquility, of spiritual balance, of harmony with the surroundings that spring from the same primal force, of spiritual recovery and strengthening. This is by no means a confirmation of the verity of the oft-heard phrase: “Peace lives in the mountains.” [. . .] Struggle is everywhere in the mountains. The foaming mountain stream struggles, the glacier struggles with the rock, the most delicate plant struggles for its existence. Struggle is the essence of the mountains. The essence of the seemingly lifeless matter of the flora, of the fauna in the mountains—there is always a struggle. Not even we mountaineers can escape it, nor should we, nor do we want to. We seek out the struggle and are glad to find it in the mountains. [.  .  .] Struggle is also second nature to us, and because we are not afraid to recognize this and act accordingly, because we desire strength and deed and struggle, the result of that harmony with the creative primal force—the satisfaction, the joy of a meaningful existence—comes on its own. This gift of the mountains is the power to struggle and be victorious; it is the power to overcome all obstacles that stand in the way of a worthy goal. The oft-heard phrases about struggle, the chalybeate waters of war and so forth, are not ones that I espouse. But no sensible, intrepid mountaineer with healthy marrow in his bones can ignore the fact that struggle is a necessity of nature. He observes the law of the fight wherever he goes. He sees that everything that does not fight, that is no longer willing to fight or is not able to do so, must perish, for such is the rigid and unalterable law. Not to fight is to be destroyed! It is not in the comfort of effortless indulgence or in relishing the cowardly avoidance of the fight, but rather only through the toil and tension of the fight that a creature will know its destiny, its purpose, and its strengths, and only thus will it fulfill its destiny. The pleasure of indulgence is only a reward after a battle won. Nowhere in the manifestations of this world has Kant’s imperative, “Do what you should because you should,”17 come to mind so clearly as it has in the mountains. It emerges here in its harsh, almost gruesome, and yet irresistibly alluring power. Fight because you should; win what you should! Mountain vegetation lives by this law, as do the simple inhabitants and the animals of the mountains. The development of all things in the mountains is subject to this law. Delight or aversion, suffering or joy, ability or inability, desire or unwillingness—in the end, none of these are worth considering. Only obligation, because it should be, is important here. It is the iron law of the world, and it can be read in the mountains. For creatures endowed with will, it goes thusly: “Do what you should,” and, “You should struggle with yourself and with everything that sets itself against you.” “Do your duty!” Those who pour their heart and soul into climbing mountains will hear their whispering: The venerability of duty has nothing to do with the pleasures of life but is itself the purpose of life; therefore, do your duty! The mountains give us so many wonderful things, and they distinguish so sharply between seriousness and flippancy. They call and steel us for serious and harsh battle with them, with ourselves, and with the environment.

17 This

is not an actual quote from Kant but rather summarizing and reinterpreting the spirit of his concept of the categorical imperative.

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Thus, the mountains throw healthful fruits into the laps of the contemplative, bestowing the power of the spirit, with abundance, to toughen an ailing people. [. . .] Little Greece harbored a great and unconquerable people as long as the olive branch was the highest reward for victory. Only when Germany’s people, and above all Germany’s youth, recognize the fight as the iron law of the world and demand no other reward for the fulfillment of their duty—in battle and in times of need and danger—than the awareness that they have done what they were supposed to do, and properly, only then will we Germans be able to call ourselves a great people once again and be undefeatable. The mountains can provide us with worthwhile values in this regard. I cannot give up hope, for there are yet men among us who desire no other reward for toil and danger than a look from the mountaintop, into the holy light, across and into the transcendent realm, to eternal life, up to the giver of these deeds. Yes, in the mountains we can still find ideals. There one recognizes the meaninglessness of one’s own self. There humility and courage mate; there purpose and aspiration tone one another into an indomitable will; there harsh obligation and perseverance train one another in battle; there the heart rises up to prayer, free of teachings, free of hypocrisy and habit; there, under the spell of the eternal the chills dissipate at its presence; there we find soul and strength; there all that counts is virtue for its own sake, not the mask; there is the realm of selfless struggle; there burns the fire of patriotism. From among these treasures, Germany, draw your will, your courage, and your power for your struggle for existence; there, Young Germany, harden your arms, senses, and will, nourish your soul, and forge your resistance!

4. Franz Kleinhans On the Question of the Aryan Clause First published as “Zur Frage des Arierparagraphen,” Nachrichten der Sektion “Donauland” 4, no. 36 (1924): 112–13. Translated by Peter Woods. Although Jews had joined the German and Austrian Alpine Club in significant numbers, regional sections began as early as 1919 to adopt the so-called Aryan clause, thus openly discriminating against Jews. The following excerpt, part of the Donauland section’s response to the anti-Semitic policies of the larger organization, is a critical look at the Aryan clauses as well as the group’s own identity. Franz Kleinhans (1877–1954), a prominent figure in the Austrian Tourist Club, makes a tactical as well as a moral argument for the inclusion of Jews in the Alpine Club. The purpose of the Aryan clause, in short, is to legally exclude Jews from membership in club sections. Legally speaking, each club is of course free to select its members in accordance with its bylaws. The Alpine Club has always had Jews in its ranks; thus, the Aryan clause means excluding old members, and the way the issue in the Austria section, along with the attendant circumstances involved, leave no room for doubt that we are dealing not with a gross fault on the part of the alpinists but rather antiSemitism as the sole motive for this exclusion. Given the circumstances, Jewish section members naturally left, even though the changes to the statute did not specifically require this and related only to taking on new members. The former members formed

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a new section of their own as a means of safeguarding their earlier rights and countering the crackdown, which they were obliged to view as an infringement. This is how the Donauland section came to be. Under these circumstances, the formation and continued existence of the club’s Donauland section can in no way be characterized as an intentional provocation but rather as the natural consequence of the preceding events. The fight continued and was accompanied, particularly in the beginning of the movement, by occurrences that revealed that the Jewish members had no intention of keeping to themselves. The Jews remained members of the larger association and still frequented the associations’ mountain huts. This led to attempts to exclude Jews from entering or visiting the huts. The situation, which received critical attention because of the nature of the Alpine setting caused people to refrain from further attempts along those lines.18 As people or humanity fell silent, the mountains began to speak a haunting language. And what remained as the most harmless, albeit unpleasant, vestige of this were the boards still seen in many mountain huts today that flaunt the phrase: “Jews and members of the Donauland section are not welcome.”—It used to be that mountaineers would not think twice when the call rang out: People in distress! Now people in certain circles wonder apprehensively whether the cries for help might come from a member of the Donauland section. Things have become more outwardly apparent these days. People wear the sunwheel on their chests,19 but they have grown dark on the inside. [. . .] Less than a principled position on the topic of anti-Semitism itself, the issue at hand is to keep these raw expressions of anti-Semitism out of the mountains. Although they intensify the earth-bound banalities of everyday life, they are doubly off-putting in the clean air of the mountains. After all, one may pose the question of whether and to what extent anti-Semitism in the mountains and in mountaineering is possible or justified. Furthermore, one may ask whether, with regard to mountaineering, one cannot speak of a similar boundary that anti-Semitism must not cross, as is the case, for example, in scientific or artistic fields—indeed, in all fields in which the whole person is at issue, in which essentially the personal assessment of the individual and his inner character takes precedence over questions of ancestry or blood. This is a legitimate question to ask, because there are plenty of people who will argue that at all times we should accept and assess a person above all as a person. They rate the individual, their character, higher than ancestry and race. When judging individuals, they refuse to make the accident of birth into a particular milieu or race as the constant deciding factor in their assessment of the whole person. Let us put ourselves in the position of a person whom destiny placed into a race like that of the Jewish people, a person who, pushed away and ostracized from the time of their youth, sees even the seeds of their progress being scorned and trampled. Let us consider the inferiority or perniciousness of the Semitic race as proven. Can such behavior lead one to forget the watchword of humanity that holds true even for criminals and wild animals,

18

Although individual sections of the Alpine Club were permitted to include the Aryan clause in their bylaws, the bylaws of the central organization did not permit sections to forbid other sections’ members from frequenting their huts. The more overtly anti-Semitic sections responded, as the texts indicates, by posting signs indicating that Jews and members of the Donauland section were not welcome rather than explicitly forbidding them. 19 The sun-wheel (Sonnenrad) is an early alternative nomenclature for the swastika. Originally a religious Hindu symbol, the clockwise facing swastika represents the sun.

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namely that all creatures have feelings—and growing out of this sentiment, the instinct to help—without it being necessary to fall into feeble acquiescence to each and every thing? One factor in particular may justify highlighting this position. It would be difficult to find an intellectual movement that reflects the pursuit of the unrestrained development of one’s character more than mountaineering itself. Mountaineering entails dedication, empathy with that spirit that radiates behind the mountainside’s purity, its transcendence, and its forms that herald divinity. Mountaineering is not a matter of course; more than anything else it is a matter of character. Mountaineering is wholeheartedly a matter of ethos. Only those who attempt to approach the mountains with the right ethos can truly be called mountaineers. Many make such an attempt. Let them be welcome to join us in the name of a most worthy cause. They can join the ranks of those who aspire to greater heights.

5. Theodor Hartwig The Political Impact of Our Apolitical Action First published as “Die Politische Auswirkung unserer unpolitischen Tätigkeit,” Der Naturfreund 33, nos. 1–2 (1929): 35. Translated by Peter Woods. In this article the sociologist and freethinker Theodor Hartwig (1872–1958), representing the philosophy of the Friends of Nature association, argues that nature, especially the mountains, has always been closely connected to politics. He claims that members of the Friends of Nature not only preach socialism but also live it in the mountains. In this way, they lead by example and derive their political relevance from modeling a healthy practice of socialism in their free-time activities. Our opponents accuse us Friends of Nature of taking politics into the mountains. That is incorrect. Politics has been in the mountains since before there ever was a Friends of Nature movement. Politics was in the Alpine huts of the bourgeois Alpine Clubs, as touring the mountains was seen as a reserve for the privileged class. Only the “right” kind of people were allowed to have an appreciation for nature’s beauty, and humanity was measured according to one’s level of income. This was a common phrase in feudal times: “There are no humans below the rank of baron.” And today it appears to run: There are no humans below the rank of car owner. The people are “riffraff,” fit only to serve as cultural fertilizer for the ruling class. This attitude was not limited to the big hotels of the tourist industry but could also be found in the Alpine huts. The mountain air trend was suitable only for the “top ten thousand.” Hence the strict separation between “guide” and “gentleman.” The mountain guide belonged in the guide lounge; he was paid and his “labor” was at one’s command. As long as the rope tied “gentleman” to his guide for life or death, there were no class distinctions—they stood together as human beings, sharing danger and difficulty. But as soon as this “tie” was detached, the segregation of society came into force: the social barriers were erected once more. But there was politics in the mountains in another sense as well. Not only did the mountain guide proletariat get wind of the existing social order, but even the farmers in the valleys on up to the last forester and hired hand were contaminated by the capitalist spirit. Priest and teacher were tasked with carrying the idea of governmental order to the most far-flung corners of the mountains. School and church made certain to instill

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discipline and order in the souls of the people’s children, great and small, who were entrusted to them. Rants against the red specter of socialism were thundered from lectern and from pulpit. The spiritual Heimwehr was mobilized even before the Heimwehren came into existence.20 Socialism was heralded as a prophet of doom, intent on robbing the farmer of his private property, destroying the family, preaching godlessness, and spreading immorality. Then came the Friends of Nature movement. The bourgeois tourist industry stood in hate-filled opposition to the insolence of the proletariat. The farmer turned defiantly against the red wave that rolled into the mountains. Angry looks pursued us Friends of Nature wherever we appeared. We did not let ourselves be deterred and performed our pioneering work in the mountains. We spoke not a word about socialism, and yet we promoted socialism. We Friends of Nature do not preach socialism, we live it.21 And through their contact with us, the farmers have learned that we socialists are also “people,” so to speak, in fact very sociable people, free from prejudices. We built our Friends of Nature huts, and the “locals” slowly gained confidence in us, in spite of all the rabble-rousing against socialism found in those bourgeois and clerical leaflets. Whoever wants to study the impact of the Friends of Nature movement can head out into the Rauris Valley where the Viennese Friends of Nature built their lovely lodge in Kolm-Saigurn. The farmers have contacted us about working together to preserve and expand the road. In the entire Rauris Valley, where it used to be that a friendly greeting was hardly answered with a sullen “Good day!” [“Grüß Gott!”], the socialist greeting “Friendship!” [“Freundschaft!”] has been adopted. A symbol! The idea of socialism has set off for the mountains with the Friends of Nature movement. This is the political impact of our apolitical action.

6. Karl Renner On the Friends of Nature First published as “Dr. Karl Renner über die Naturfreunde,” Der Naturfreund 35, nos. 5–6 (1931): 104–5. Translated by Peter Woods. A leading figure in the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) and a founding member of the Friends of Nature, Karl Renner (1870–1950) delivered this speech at the opening of a new headquarters in Vienna. Renner explains how the working class has historically been excluded from the realm of nature, and how organizations such as the Friends of Nature are helping workers to finally become connected to nature. The result of their efforts is a positive, socialist vision for the future of Vienna and the Friends of Nature. The proletarian, at the height of the last century, was not only excluded from human society, into which he had fought to reenter but also expelled from nature! Being dispossessed, he had no share of field, meadow, wood, or pasture, or of urban land. He 20

The Heimwehren were nationalist, paramilitary groups in the 1920s and 1930s in Austria. See chapter 36. 21 Original note: See Theodor Hartwig, Wanderlust und Bergfreude (Vienna: Verlag R. Cerny, 1928).

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was penned up for the night in hovels without air or light and rallied during the day in factories and workshops—upon which the eye of the labor inspectorate seldom fell—and during the periods in between, he was reliant on wretched tavern rooms and his comforter, alcohol. Nothing of boundless nature was left him but the dusty highways of the job search. It was even up to the proletarian to reconquer nature—nature, with its inexhaustible spring of strength and beauty; nature, with its incredible laws, which the human spirit gradually unlocked. What a maddening contradiction: the same worker who was called to make use of natural laws in the factory—who, in countless workshops, channeled the power of steam and directed the incredible might contained in lightning along patient wires, at the same time the servant and the master of natural forces—this man was shut out of nature. But this man in particular felt within himself the immense love for Mother Nature of which he was robbed, felt most of all the excitement for nature that he had learned to master. All that was required was to lead him out of the alcohol haze of the tavern and guide him into the midst of the swelling meadows and rustling forests, to confront him with the mountainous giants and the thunderous waterfalls, and to show him the firmament with its circling constellations from atop the benighted mountain peaks in order to release a cheer of redemption from his soul. The nature propaganda was a sheer triumph for the couple dozen people in the “tourist group.” In a few years, they grew into hundreds, those hundreds into thousands, and those thousands into tens of thousands. Out of a simple enthusiasm for nature, of which we were the pioneers, there soon grew a love of natural science and the joy of exploring the world of nature. The Friends of Nature explored and studied caves, ascended and scaled peaks, navigated rivers and streams with paddleboats, and soon even familiarized themselves with gliders that were laboriously and primitively cobbled together. The Friends of Nature became correspondents of natural scientists and their institutes. On those pleasant evenings that one was forced to spend in the city, the young explorers presented their experiences in photographs, and scholars brought the latest discoveries to the increasingly knowledgeable masses. In this way, a branch of science had won an audience and a following that was ready not only to absorb what was there, but to join in as well. Thus, a perspective on the future unfolded, one that not everyone is familiar with yet today, but one that stands out clearly against the backdrop of our confusing times. In solidarity with all of the other organizations that established the labor movement, the following view has emerged: the free community of the Free School and Children’s Friends [Freie Schule-Kinderfreunde] is taking on the education problem from the bottom up, an issue which a ministry with all of its institutions serves from the top down. The free community of the Social Democratic Arts Council [Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle] is taking possession, from the bottom up, of the theater, the museums, and the galleries that today are administered from the top down by the state. The free community of the statutory health insurance [Krankenkasse] members is seizing control of medical science from the bottom up, which today the state medical institutions serve from the top down. The free community of the Friends of Nature is conquering the natural sciences, which— according to the state, and thus from the top down—are a matter for the universities. And so on! [. . .] We foresee how this future society will no longer be dominated by dictatorship or ruled by bureaucracy; instead, it will govern itself by means of a rich array of independent, specialized organizations—and such a future society is the consummation of democracy; this is the fulfillment of socialism. And it is becoming clear to us now that the Friends of Nature, as well as all sports associations and other cultural and intellectual arms of the

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labor movement, are not so much a departure from socialism but the preparation for true and proper socialism, socialism that captures all aspects of human existence and shapes them in democratic associations. Thus, the Friends of Nature have been proven right. They have become the pioneers in their field of socialism in that they are conquering nature and the natural sciences for the working class and augmenting the political work of the proletariat in their specific area.

7. Anonymous The Sunday Fleet First published as “Die Sonntagsflotte,” Der Kuckuck, June 21, 1931, 3. Translated by Peter Woods. Vienna residents did not have to head into the mountains to enjoy nature. The city of Vienna provided residential parks and other recreational areas for workers in and around the city. One of the most popular sites for outdoors recreation was the Danube. The following excerpt discusses the “folding kayak craze,” the numerous boats manned by workers floating on the Danube on Sundays. The author interprets this as a testimony for socialist achievements, when after hundreds of years of only looking at “their” river, the river of the elite, the Viennese proletarians finally succeeded in seizing the Danube for themselves. A series of images depicting individual moments of this free-time practice accompanied the original article, including snapshots of everyday activities such as shaving or cooking, the process of setting up the boats, and the kayakers on the water. At Nussdorfer Spitz. This is where Vienna begins and where the waters of the Danube break resoundingly upon the structure whose stones the Donau Regulatory Commission once slipped into the flow. The sun is setting, the Leopoldsberg looms dark and foreign from on high, while further on lies the remarkable Bisamberg. A bustling coming-and-going on both sides of the river, the spa trains of the Franz Josef Railway heave back and forth. But the river, in majestic equanimity, thrusts its glistening torrents toward the Black Sea. Suddenly, on the river’s back far off in the distance, a kind of turbulence, a peculiarity, something that looks like a large swarm of birds. It comes closer, and one discerns kayaks, many, many kayaks decorating the river, gliding swiftly downstream, and more and more of them keep coming. Phonographs, which some rowers have set up in the front of their boats, play merrily in the evening air, spilling strange- and silvery-sounding music across the mirror of the gliding waters of the river. The succession of boats does not end. At the [Nussdorfer] Spitz they turn into the Danube Canal and dock here and there. But new crafts continue to appear, new tunes continue to ring out, and everything is so light, free, and buoyant. This is the evening homecoming of the Vienna kayakers on Sunday. The return to the weekday world of the city. The kayaks glide up for a while, until darkness breaks. They dock, are hastily disassembled, put away. This spectacle always fascinates new groups of onlookers: leisurely, over oldstyle wine snacks, they observe, with temperaments both gracious and sullen, how these citizens of the new Vienna have now also taken on and conquered the Danube, the perennial sleeping beauty of rivers. For centuries, it had run past the lives of Viennese workers, who were kept from exploring and experiencing its enchanting beauty, its majestic glory.

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8. Adele Jellinek The Children’s Crusade First published as “Der Erobererzug,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, August 26, 1931, 7. Translated by Peter Woods. Nature also had a place in the literature of Red Vienna. Adele Jellinek (1890–1943) published numerous stories and feuilletons in Vienna’s newspapers before the rise of fascism in Austria. In this article, published in the Arbeiter-Zeitung, Jellinek reflects on how her relationship to nature was formed as a child. Specifically, she speculates on how this relationship was influenced by gender and economic standing. The city stands in stark contrast to nature, as the children vehemently defend their idyllic vision of nature. Jellinek weaves these issues into her personal narrative to create a critical text that provides an individual experience of nature that is not associated with one of the many nature clubs at the time. It is strange how the concept of nature was formed within us. At first it was merely the dark silhouette of a tree, of a hillside in the distant twilight of our childhood years. Then came the songs sung by maids in the courtyard: of the linden in the valley, of the mountains and the lakes, of the treasure that stirs us to distant wanderings. Then the well-worn pages of fairytale books, where the Black Forest lived. How would we have heard about the deep dark green mountain lake if the Frog Prince had not lived there? Then came school, which gave us our first cold, intellectual peek into nature’s laboratory. We set out in our essays to unveil her intimate life, though we knew her neither from without nor from within. There were only a few among us who pressed their way toward her. These were the boys, who organized little campaigns into nature. They arose at four o’clock in the morning, took mason jars with a sling made of wire or string, an old specimen jar of sorts that was missing its lid, and set out. When they returned in the evening, the same exotic smell clung to them that the wind occasionally carried over. Now they had delicious strawberries in their mason jars, or sometimes a tiny silver fish, and in the specimen jar were beetles and herbs. We girls were excluded from these campaigns, however—our mothers did not let us go. How was it, then, that we finally organized a great, magnificent campaign into nature? It happened like this. We were sitting and writing an essay, very neatly, with the title “Mother Nature.” Our bed lodger [Schlafbursche],22 who was looking over our shoulders, made a face and mocked that this “mother” acted like those wenches who preferred to go around with men who have money. He used a much more oblique and cynical expression. But some of his bilious nature could be forgiven. He suffered badly from tuberculosis, and the local doctor would ask him now and then if he did not have family in the country, preferably in more southerly regions, to which the fellow always replied that no, he had no uncle in Brioni. Because we protested so passionately, he engaged in a debate with us. Which of our classmates would be lucky enough to get to visit the countryside, go out into nature, 22 A bed lodger was a low-paid shift worker who would rent a bed from a family. During the industrial revolution, apartments were very expensive and renting out beds while they were not in use provided the workers with a place to rest during the day and helped the family finance their own apartment.

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when summer came? Would it not be those children whose fathers had the means to afford it? We could not deny this. And which one of us would be able to go on the school trip to Mount Rax for Pentecost? Was there not also a connection there between nature and money? And did we not think that he would be healthier if he had his bed in a room in a sanatorium or in a pension by the sea instead of in this musty kitchen? We could not deny any of this, and yet everything inside of us rebelled against this grotesque line of reasoning. It felt like the world was turning upside down. The argument got livelier and livelier; others got involved, and the bed lodger seemed extremely pleased to be able to rid himself of his bile for once. He played with us like a cat with a mouse; he assailed our weak, lowly logic with a grim humor, spurred on by some dark force. Whenever one of us countered with something, he said merrily, “Thank you, Mr. Defense Attorney!,” or “Thank you, Mr. Witness!” And then we, too, abandoned the serious discussion and joined the fun. It became a proper trial, and we were everything from the defense attorney to the jury witnesses. “Mother Nature” was the invisible accused and had to defend herself before a tribunal of little pariahs, and despite our passionate support for her, she was found guilty. As much as we made it out to be a game, it nevertheless stung a little. And perhaps that was the reason that suddenly a plan was hatched to organize a big, big nature excursion. And not only the boys would be allowed to participate, but everyone, simply everyone—even our derisive friend. And one fine day, a big gang actually set forth, filling the street with noise and shouts. Old specimen jars and mason jars and canteens played a major role. Unfortunately, we lived in the midst of a sea of houses, so we had to hike a long, long time before we reached the edge of the city, where “nature” began. After two-and-a-half hours spent moving through the sunbaked streets, with our expectations and stress levels pushed past their limits, it was understandable that when we reached the first stretch of forest, we beheld it with looks of disappointment. The big city had already put its stamp of corruption upon it. Thus, it was unsurprising that after a half hour of rest, the boys gave us an ultimatum: either we could wait here in this “mangy forest,” as they called it, and they would pick us up in the evening, or we could press on with them. Sighing, we decided on the latter. Then we went on for hours longer, and slowly the forest, the real and true forest, began to open up before us. More and more of us began to lag behind, and the most stubborn among them was the bed lodger. His face was ghastly pale with exertion, and an intense smell of sweat emanated from him. He finally told us not to worry about him anymore—we could just keep going, he would catch up with us eventually. We finally made a stop on a large slope in a meadow and made ourselves at home. It did not take long for our exhaustion to vanish, and we began to frolic in the meadow. Suddenly, we discovered that our big friend had not caught up with us. Although there was no need to worry, of course, since he was an adult and knew his way around the area much better than we did, we were not going to let even a trace of adventure get away from us. We pretended that the man was at least in danger of getting lost in the jungle. We immediately formed several groups to fan out in every direction, and we agreed on whistle and call signals. It only took us about ten minutes going back the way we had come before we saw him lying there. It looked as though, overcome by exhaustion, he had gone to sleep. As punishment, we mounted a screaming attack on him, but he seemed to be sleeping soundly and he did not move. As we got closer, we saw a thin, red thread that ran down his ghastly pale cheek from the right corner of his mouth. Even the forest floor was

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covered with dark splotches. We tried to raise our friend, which widened the little red stream that flowed from his mouth. The diseased lung had not yet bled itself out. Soon the entire troop of children was standing around the unconscious man with horrified expressions. We talked over what was to be done. A couple of the boys should run to the closest inn—there would surely be a telephone there to call for help. The rest of us would have to stay. But it took an endless, endless amount of time for help to arrive, for a stretcher to come for him. We came home late, our mothers already worried about us. We brought no flowers along, no strawberries, and no little fish swam in the mason jars. And even what we had taken with us internally—the image of forest and meadow, of wonderful green abundance of growth—was overlaid with the image of the pale man who had paid so dearly for his campaign into nature. He never came home . . .

Part VII Housing

Gerd Arntz: “The Municipal Housing Construction Program of Vienna. Apartments completed through the end of 1930.” Exhibition board from the Social and Economic Museum, ca. 1931. (Courtesy of International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Gerd Arntz Estate/Bildrecht, Vienna 2020.)

CHAPTER TWENTY

URBAN PLANNING Aleks Kudryashova and Werner Michael Schwarz

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municipal housing complexes (Gemeindebauten) with almost sixty-four thousand apartments, as well as welfare, sports, and culture facilities, Red Vienna permanently inscribed itself on the space of the city. Seizing the opportunity to create a new social and democratic city, the building program began in 1923 with large-scale efforts to define housing as a public responsibility, embedded in a complex series of education and welfare policies. Initially, however, the officials did not have a unified vision of how this “new city” was supposed to be created, as urban history scholar Eve Blau has shown. The dire social and economic situations in Vienna at the end of World War I left little room for the questions of planning. The supply chain was in total disarray. In spite of the starkly falling number of residents, the housing crisis in Vienna was steadily worsening. Even before the war broke out in 1914, the housing market had been driven almost exclusively by capitalism and private property rights, characterized by real estate speculation and fluctuating property prices. The market could not even come close to providing the amount of new housing that was needed. This market-driven approach resulted in urban spaces that were, compared with international standards, more densely built: 85 percent of the land space was devoted to buildings, with many small, crowded apartments. During the war, building activity came to a standstill. The introduction of rent control in 1917—including a rental price freeze and protection against evictions—made investment in existing housing unprofitable. After the end of the war, the number of marriages increased, and the rental market was overwhelmed by young couples and families. The most important public means of controlling the situation was the 1919 apartment requisition policy, which allowed the government to force residents to provide private rooms for those in need. At the same time, the extreme housing shortage led to an active do-it-yourself movement among the city’s residents. After the war, “wild settlers” occupied land on the outskirts of Vienna in order to provide for themselves by growing fruit and vegetables and by raising small livestock. In the early 1920s, this do-it-yourself activism gave rise to the Vienna settler movement. The movement was founded upon the ideals of nonprofit cooperative ownership of housing, voluntary labor, shared infrastructure, and self-administration. Intellectuals and architects such as Adolf Loos, Otto Neurath, Grete Lihotzky, and Josef Frank euphorically supported the movement and saw the beginnings of a new urban residential culture arising out of the ideals of self-sufficiency and the necessary simplicity of the settlements. Although the city government was rather reluctant about the settler movement, the settlers staged a series of large demonstrations that forced the city to support their cause. y building nearly four hundred

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In this phase—when the settlers seemed to be determining the future development of the city—several major conditions arose which would make way for the coming paradigm shift in housing policy and urban planning. Vienna became a federal state in 1922, and the city gained the right to levy wide-reaching taxes. At the same time, territorial negotiations to expand the borders of the city fell apart with the Christian Social federal government, and Vienna lost the option of building on new, large settlement tracts. In 1923, a dedicated, strongly progressive housing construction tax (Wohnbausteuer) was introduced, and the decision was made to construct twenty-five thousand apartment units in the next years. Instead of settlements on the periphery, as was the preference of international experts, the city government decided to build multistory residential buildings surrounding courtyards that were often large, green spaces. Some of these housing complexes, such as the Metzleinstaler Hof had been conceived during the war and completed shortly thereafter, thus serving as prototypes. This “new Vienna” was not conceived to be an alternate city, instead, it was integrated into the existing city following pragmatic and political imperatives. Because of the fall of real estate prices after 1918, the municipality was able to purchase plots that were in fact large, but they were also scattered throughout the city. In addition, the economic situation improved, and the argument for self-sufficient settlements lost some of its steam. The decision to build multistory buildings instead of settlements cannot be traced back to one single decree; politically speaking, however, it did fall along a foundational pattern of Red Vienna. Instead of a radical break with the past, the city should be transformed socially and democratically from within. Outwardly, “new Vienna” thus stayed in the frame of the liberal urban planning of the late nineteenth century, just as Otto Wagner’s prizewinning design for the General Development Plan of 1892 had itself evolved organically out of the historical urban form. Red Vienna was also able to build upon the legacy of the communal policies of the previous Christian Social government that had brought public transportation, gas service, and electricity under municipal authority. These housing and urban development policies also reflect the central negotiation between the individual and the collective, the private and the public, as they had been laid out in the theoretical foundations of Red Vienna. The new apartments were usually not any bigger than those constructed en masse in the pre-1914 era, although the new complexes often had generous communal amenities such as laundry facilities, gymnasiums, counseling offices, and kindergartens. Many of the complexes also served as public spaces for the surrounding areas. Contemporary critics railed against the city’s turn away from the settler movement and the reliance on historical, representative building forms, derisively referred to as residential palaces (Wohnbaupaläste). Although they have long become architectural icons, many aspects of the municipal housing complexes are still being reevaluated today, especially the way that they lend themselves to social control. Further reading Blau 1999 Blau, Heindl, and Platzer 2019 Hautmann and Hautmann 1980 Nierhaus and Orosz 2012 Novy and Förster 1985 Sieder 2019 Weihsmann 2019

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1. Otto Neurath Urban Planning and the Proletariat First published as “Städtebau und Proletariat,” Der Kampf 17, no. 6 (1924): 236–42. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. As the founder of the Austrian Association for Settlements and Allotment Gardens and the founding director of the Museum for Settlement and City Planning (later renamed the Social and Economic Museum), Otto Neurath (1882–1945) was committed to advocating the idea of a garden city in support of the settler movement. But given the shortage of housing and the limited availability of land suitable for development in and around Vienna, Neurath also endorsed the idea of creating hybrid spaces—a balanced mix of small family homes and mid-size terraced houses, settlements, urban gardens, and high-rise buildings interspersed with green public stretches of land. His vision of “new Vienna” as a harmonious architectonic whole—“a cultural, economic and aesthetic unity” comprised of industrial and residential buildings as well as commercial and institutional spaces—materialized in the form of an ambitious yet ultimately unsuccessful general architectural plan commissioned by the settlement association to replace the old General Development Plan of 1892.1 What will the city of the future look like? It will be a work of modern industry and a massive body of global trade. Ports, train stations, silos, warehouses, factories, highways, bodies of steel—these are the markers of the city of the future. Skyscrapers stretch proudly out of a harmonious totality, where each piece is built in a particular place for a particular purpose. But how will the homes be allotted? It is growing ever more unlikely that we will continue pressing people more and more tightly together as we do now. There is mounting evidence that the most central districts will become pure business districts; residential neighborhoods can be displaced. Today’s leading architects are considering how to make this happen. It is not only a matter of correctly apportioning industrial and residential buildings, or of connecting homes with transportation, it is also necessary to make each structure architecturally harmonious, so that the city presents itself as a single consonant whole! The general architectural plan can become a public good for the masses, even before a general economic plan can help with the distribution of production or improve the circumstances of the population. And just as the philosophy of the enlightenment established itself as a power at the same time that the social revolutions were beginning, so might architecture be the cultural sphere in which the new era of proletariat socialism first appears in full force. Architecture is more firmly dependent on the social order than, say, painting, because architecture is always goal oriented, whereas the painter can paint without regard for the goings-on of the day, which is good news perhaps to him alone. What kind of architectural ideas are living inside the minds of architects and planners, what kind of architectural ideas will the broad masses accept? We are turning away from the idea of letting the high-rises proliferate with no restraint. In Vienna there is momentum behind the idea of keeping green spaces that connect the forested areas to the high-rises, so that workers looking to reenergize themselves can quickly and conveniently get to the green paths that lead to the forests and fields. Such green spaces, which may 1

See Otto Neurath, “Neu-Wiens Gesamtarchitektur—eine Aufgabe des Proletariats,” ArbeiterZeitung, October 28, 1923, 5.

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be linked with overlapping and intersecting parkways and parks, could also be flanked by high-rises. Leading architects associated with the settler and garden city movements have proposed plans for establishing allotment gardens and settlements in these green zones. Oskar Strnad, for instance, has outlined a plan for the Favoriten District that has such a strip bordered by the small gardens of terrace houses, similar to what Adolf Loos and Peter Behrens have proposed in a different form. Two high-rises complete the development on the city side, while the buildings on the other side drop down to the level of the homes beyond. This is one example of how modern architecture unites extremes. Someone could therefore walk from the last high-rise through the allotment gardens and settlements all the way to the Laaerberg area, where a terrace could offer up a view over all of Vienna. It would fit the spirit of the new time to support the Favoriten District by relocating cultural institutions there, so that they could tower above Vienna, as a sort of counterweight to the Steinhof complex and the nursing home. Similar green zone projects have been proposed by Josef Frank and Peter Behrens. Such combinations of high-rises and allotment gardens—which would be turned into public parks containing not groves but fruit trees, not meadows but vegetables—could be the hallmark of our current period, in which democratic structures join centralized administration structures. Outfitting such sites with playgrounds, sports facilities, and other amenities could make a deep impression on the workers of the neighborhood. It shows a deep grasp of the essence of all architecture when a worker, deeply moved by Strnad’s project, declared that passing in between the skyscrapers and leaving the dark city is like stepping through the gates of paradise! The settlers and gardeners, who came from small and humble beginnings that were bound up with so much narrow thinking, through their organizing efforts have achieved some lofty ideals. Full of energy and a strong will to build, they march, in terms of architectural interests, at the head of today’s proletariat. Through their architects, they are able to interest the rest of the proletariat in their concerns. And it will hurt all workers, not only urban gardeners, if the resistance put up by the bourgeois order succeeds in putting up high-rises as a remedy for a shortage of real estate, in a place where gardeners and the rest of the proletariat would rather see urban gardens. That such beautiful and meaningful plans can so far only be realized in pieces, sometimes after delays, sometimes after being undermined in advance, that can only increase the general frustration with the current allotment of land. The proletariat will not remain indifferent for long about whether a high-rise with private apartment units is built here or there, it will soon begin to fight for a distribution of residential high-rises, settlements, and urban gardens that serves the interests of the whole, without regard for the profits of real estate speculators. The working class and the city of Vienna have a will to build that is being choked by the powers that control the real estate. This is a crucial matter, if we are to create a city that belongs to the proletariat. Clear, bold construction ideas containing an inner truth will once again be transformed into historical reality, because the proletariat is a rising class, a class that knows what it wants and has no use for empty forms any more than the medieval burghers did. And the new style will prove it! It leads us away from the creations of the collapsing bourgeoisie which only end in hollowness. What is the cupola of the Karlskirche? An image of heaven. When you walk in, you are flooded by light, your gaze led upward through light and shadows into the distant heights. From outside, the dome is a mighty sight! What is the cupola of the museum of fine arts? A useless dome over a useless space! If you sit underneath it, looking out into the entrance hall, you wonder what the point is, and if

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you look up, nothing compels you to let your eyes rest there. But what is the cupola of the war ministry? A chunk of empty roofing. It vaults over nothing, it is a mere backdrop! The Karlskirche, a creation of the self-conscious, mighty baroque! The museums, pretentious buildings of the late imperial period; the war ministry, a structure built by a ruling class that no longer believes in itself. That is the path we are on! The working class will build no more cupolas designed to deceive, it will probably build no more cupolas at all, nor any heavenly domes, but rather self-conscious, powerful meeting spaces, concert halls, theaters, sites of science and pleasure, all of which are exactly what they seem at first glance! Will we be forced to endure more dreary superficiality again, one day in the distant future? We will have to wait and see.

2. Anonymous My Skyscraper First published as tt, “Mein Wolkenkratzer,” Der Tag, February 2, 1924, 3–4. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. Throughout the 1920s and well into the 1930s, debates surrounding the future of Vienna culminated in headlines that stressed the opposition between two competing building models: low-rise building ( Flachbau) and high-rise building ( Hochbau). Whereas low-rise buildings were closely associated with settlement-type housing, high-rise buildings could range from multistory apartment complexes to not-yet-existing skyscrapers. Public debates on advantages and disadvantages of high-rises, and skyscrapers in particular, intensified in January 1924 following the publication of Hubert Gessner’s (1871–1943) controversial design for the Reumannhof with a twelve-story tower at the center of the structure flanked by six-story apartment buildings.2 Some journalists and professionals defended the idea of a high-rise city as a healthy solution to housing shortages and traffic congestion—but the majority remained skeptical, maintaining that high-rise buildings were unhealthy, unlivable, and unacceptable in a city like Vienna. Once again, Vienna is talking a great deal of nonsense. Skyscraper euphoria has broken out. Architects and business people, married couples and brides and grooms who finally want to have children—everyone is shouting for skyscrapers, skyscrapers that will fulfill all their dreams, put an end to housing shortages, and give people who live up there on the fortieth floor a splendid view. In my opinion, skyscrapers belong in Vienna just about as much as a pair of Goiserer mountain boots belong in one’s face. A skyscraper is the natural consequence of a lack of space. New York proper—that is, Manhattan—does not have one square foot left over; stuck between the Hudson and the East River, it has nowhere to expand. And because, like everywhere else in the world, New York’s business is restricted exclusively to the socalled City, spatially a very limited area, it is natural that towering buildings have appeared. The tallest is the Woolworth Building, with its fifty-six floors. It is named after its owner, Henry Woolworth, who about thirty years ago was a peddler, then set up small junk shops that only sold goods for five and ten cents. Now he is one of the richest men. All America 2

See Anonymous, “Der erste Wolkenkratzer in Wien,” Die Neue Wirtschaft. Wiener Organ für Finanzpolitik und Volkswirtschaft, January 10, 1924, 9.

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is proud of this Woolworth. For us, someone who started small and has made himself into something is is frowned upon. Every lowly clerk recalculates his wealth and claims his own moral superiority because he has remained a freeloader. For us, the only legitimate wealthy person is someone who had gold tossed into his diapers as a baby! But that’s not what I want to talk about, rather I want to talk about skyscrapers. If there is one large city in the world that does not need one, it is Vienna. In the midst of the Inner City, in Mariahilf, there are still tiny, one-story houses with large courtyards. Opposite the huge printing plant on Canisiusgasse there are houses whose roofs are so low you can touch them. Before building ghastly skyscrapers that take away the air and light of the whole area, you should tear down the shanties and replace them with decent five-story buildings whose architecture blends in with the cityscape. Contrary to all the claptrap going around, it must be emphasized that there are no apartments in skyscrapers, only offices. Also because of the inherent fire hazards, skyscrapers should not contain apartments. And it should be noted that even when it is used as an office building, a skyscraper is definitely not an Eldorado. In New York I pushed pencils on the twenty-seventh floor for nearly five years, and I can assure you, I wished all the builders of skyscrapers to hell. Skyscrapers have the nice feature of constantly swaying. They have to be able to shake since otherwise the wind would knock them over. They are designed to sway. If you put a quill nib holder on the desk, it keeps rolling back and forth. And if you are very sensitive, you can get seasick. Moreover, from the tenth floor upward it is always drafty. Leaving the windows open in the summer is out of the question! Your papers get blown all over the place and slices of salami are mixed up with the most beautiful poems. New York is not windy at all; Vienna is windy all the time. How funny it would be to open a window here on the thirtieth floor! Although if our Commissioner General Dr. Zimmermann were assigned an office on the fiftieth floor, there might be something good in that.3 If the wind has already blown around a harmless tailor on the absolutely flat Simmering Heath, what would it be like up there?4 And above all, I think skyscrapers are completely out of the question in Vienna for psychological reasons. A skyscraper needs at least three or four elevators that are continuously moving. That’s impossible in Vienna! In Vienna, every elevator gets jammed. They are out of order at least three times a week. Furthermore, Viennese elevators are so slow that the lunch break of a shorthand typist would only be long enough for her to travel up or down the thirty floors. And speaking of going down: it is absolutely unthinkable that a Viennese concierge would ever tolerate anyone taking an elevator to go down. You would have to walk down the thirty, forty, fifty floors. No, I am firmly convinced that we will soon get a couple of lovely new coffee houses, but never a skyscraper. And we do not need one at all. You can scratch your head on the fourth floor, you do not have to climb into the clouds. And we will be scratching our heads in puzzlement for a long time to come! 3

Alfred Zimmermann (1869–1937), former mayor of Rotterdam (The Netherlands), served as Commissioner-General of the League of Nations for Financial Reconstruction of Austria (1922– 1926). Zimmermann was often criticized for his attitude, temper, and rather lavish lifestyle for an appointed official. 4 The author is referring to a popular song mocking a Hungarian tailor, János Libényi, who in 1853 had attempted to assassinate the Emperor Franz Joseph I and was later hanged, as the song goes, on Simmeringer Haide (or Had) (although the actual execution, as some sources suggest, probably took place at a different location).

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3. Franz Siegel What Does the Municipality of Vienna Build? Sunny and Healthy Homes First published as “Wie baut die Gemeinde? Sonnige und gesunde Wohnungen,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, February 22, 1924, 8. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. On September 21, 1923, in an effort to alleviate the housing crisis and to reduce the high unemployment rates, the city government unveiled its plans to construct twenty-five thousand housing units within a five-year period. Public discussions among city officials, architects, and other experts negotiating the desirable qualities and optimal arrangement of new dwellings ensued. The following article by Franz Siegel (1876–1927), city councillor of technical affairs who oversaw the Division of Public Works and Technical Infrastructure, is exemplary in the way it succinctly summarizes the characteristics and the kinds of multifunctional spaces the municipality sought to promote. The Social Democratic city government considers it a duty not merely to build new homes, but to build the healthiest and most beneficial homes possible. To show how great the housing shortage was, how unbearable the housing conditions in Vienna were before the war, remember that 73 percent of homes were listed as “small apartments,” that is, as one-room apartments. Nowhere else in the world are housing conditions as bad as in Vienna. The Social Democratic government wants to build “lung corridors,” that is, green spaces stretching deep into the city center. The city also wants to create so-called garden zones with a prohibition on building on the great gardens in Schönbrunn, Belvedere, the Prater, and so on. They are therefore also opposed to the plan to obstruct the Schönbrunn palace with new buildings. Until now, all Viennese houses have been built so that the central corridor and the kitchens are left in darkness. And all these houses had small atriums [Lichthöfe]. The city is building large groups of houses with imposing courtyards with lawns and wading pools. The building on Lechnerstraße, for example, has a large yard facing the Donaukanal. The residents have a pleasant view of the paths of the Prater park. The proletarians spend almost their entire lives in the kitchen. And so, instead of a dark kitchen, the city wants to build for its workers a spacious, welcoming kitchen, a space not only for cooking for but living. In this live-in kitchen there is a small side pantry, where unpleasant kitchen work (peeling potatoes, washing dishes, and so on) can be taken care of. The worker can take his meals at the bay window. This type of live-in kitchen, with the other rooms coming off of it, will be introduced in all public housing units. The exterior of the buildings will have a simple beauty. One condition is that in every municipal building, most of the apartments must be facing toward the sun, regardless of whether that means the street side or not. If this is not possible, then at least one room of the apartment must face south. The playgrounds for children in the courtyards can also be turned into skating rinks in the winter. Moreover, the larger housing complexes have common spaces for bad weather and public libraries and reading rooms are planned. A centralized laundry will ease the burden of housewives no longer compelled to wash clothes in the kitchen.

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Of particular benefit to housewives will be the Taylorism in the kitchen. In a small room, each object will have its own place, and cooking—including preparation and clean up—will take place with the least possible expenditure of effort. In the next five years, the city will build twenty-five thousand airy, sunny, in a word, healthy homes.

4. Adolf Loos The Day of the Settlers First published as “Der Tag der Siedler,” Neue Freie Presse, April 3, 1921, 10–11. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. By 1921, postwar settlements and allotment gardens—also known as Schreber gardens named after the German physician Dr. Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber (1808–1861)—had outgrown their purpose as provisional solutions for a temporary crisis. By May 1921, when the famed Austrian architect and theorist Adolf Loos (1870–1933) assumed office as the architectural director of Settlement Office of the City of Vienna (Siedlungsamt der Stadt Wien)—which was to coordinate and manage the development of settlements—the garden city movement had gained enough socioeconomic appeal and support from the ranks of architects, public intellectuals, and even city officials to be considered a viable long-term alternative to other forms of urban dwelling. Published on the day of a major demonstration of settlers in front of city hall, Loos’s article presented urban settlements as the model for future development which promised economic stability and even cultural renewal for the working masses. How you feed the people depends on what food the agricultural land provides. Every people therefore has its own way of feeding itself, its own cuisine. We have heard a lot about Austrian cuisine, but only today are people becoming aware that that cuisine was only made possible by a state structure called the AustroHungarian Empire, which took centuries to come into being. Moravians, Poles, and Hungarians provided the flour; Southern Hungarians and Bohemians provided the plums; Bohemians and Moravians the sugar. Nature was too generous to the non-German lands. Expansive plains, black soil, burning sun. Everything that used to nourish us is now lost. And that means that it is time to learn something new. We must create for ourselves our own national cuisine. Bohemian dumplings [Knödel], Moravian dumplings [Buchtel], Italian schnitzel (frittura), simple things that over the course of centuries became pillars of Viennese cuisine, must now be replaced with domestic foodstuffs. [. . .] Seventy years ago, a man named Dr. Daniel Gottlieb [sic] Moritz Schreber died in Leipzig. One day, while watching the children playing in the busy streets flanked by tenement housing, he said to himself: families with many children should come together, rent a small piece of land outside the city gates, and put the children under the supervision of an adult picked from the families on a rotating basis. That way they can play outside, away from the noise and dust of the city, and get plenty of fresh air and sunshine. This patch of land could have some small huts with thatched roofs where parents could rest after a day’s work. And this is what happened. [. . .]

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A father stood on the open, undeveloped land. He, the same man that had worked himself to exhaustion all day in the factory, took a shovel in his hand and began to turn up the earth. On the spot where Dr. Schreber imagined a playground, there was now farmland. His wife and children helped out, and they made what we now know as a Schreber garden, an allotment garden. It is wrong to give credit for the Schreber garden to Dr. Schreber. It was not the product of any single mind. It emerged, as all necessary things do, out of emotional distress. It is the result of a revolution undertaken by the workers against the strict tenement and work requirements of the factories, the result of a bloodless revolution and therefore a revolution with a human outcome. Unlike a bloody revolution, which forces us to measure with the scale of inhumanity. Do not think that Schreber gardens are only a momentary psychosis. That piece of land, which people have cultivated themselves, will remain for all time what it is today: a refuge in Mother Nature, man’s true happiness and true contentment. It is a matter for legislators to turn this psychosis in the right direction. Theirs is the task of making this work useful for the general public, a work that is being completed by a part of Vienna’s population of its own free will. The work of the Schreber gardeners brings food, which would otherwise have to be imported from abroad. The Schreber gardeners of Vienna produced food worth one billion kronen last year [1920]. The question for lawmakers is: How can we increase this number, and thus reduce the purchase of foodstuffs from abroad? There are two options. The first is to provide land for anyone willing to voluntarily work to produce food. There are hundreds of thousands in Vienna, millions in Austria, who yearn to garden in their own free time, and whose will and energy to work is not used up. Eight hours to work, eight hours to play, eight hours to rest and eight shillings a day, as the English union slogan has it. Some of our workers want to put their eight hours of play to good use. There has been a false argument that the hours in the garden are lost to the earning of wages. The opposite is true. Work in the garden is a first-rate tonic. I do not need to spell out how else these eight hours of play could be used. The Schreber garden that is far from the home is a waste of time. Some people need to commute an hour each way using the streetcar. This is why we must apply the second option, as quickly as possible. Every Schreber gardener should live near his garden. Then the various members of the family can look after the garden over the course of the day. The essential morning work can be taken care of, kitchen waste, refuse, and sewage can be composted into gardening soil. With the same amount of time spent working as it took the Schreber gardens of Vienna to reach a billion kronen worth of food, the gardeners could increase the output fivefold in the few years it would take to prepare the land. Here is the point where a substantive economic renewal for the people can make itself felt. The worker who owns neither a home nor a garden, that is, the Viennese worker (for who would call a Viennese working-class apartment a home!), wants to divvy up these eight hours of “play” over the course of the day with the help of breaks from work. That is uneconomical. The gardener will be the pioneer of undivided work time. He will strive to arrive at work as late as possible, to leave for his garden as early as possible. His home is his happiness. He will find a table at home that his family can gather around. Just as the poorest cottager, the poorest woodsman can. Does the world know that there is a metropolis where 80 percent of the residents do not sit at a table for their meals? This table, which is to be given to the working class of Vienna, will enrich mealtimes, will represent the new, modern, truly Austrian cuisine. The settler’s wife will no longer need to make the vegetables last. The intensive tilling of the garden, which produces three harvests per year, will give us every kind of food that other cultures have long had,

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unlike those peoples confined to a single annual harvest. The vegetables from the garden will replace imported flour. What we lack in fruitful soil, we will make up in hard work. Tomorrow the urban settlers are crossing the Ringstraße. Under the sign of the earthturning spade and the house-building standard, a sign of symbolic power, they will silently set off. It will be a military parade of a volunteer workers’ army. Joining with them is a heroic decision. To dedicate the eight free hours of the working day, as well as every Sunday and holiday, to the rebuilding of the state. They turn their backs on taverns and coffee houses, on outdoor concerts on Sunday afternoons, on all the dear customs of Vienna. The holiday sunshine no longer calls them out on excursions to the countryside. The garden calls and demands its due, all the more when the sun shines bright. Tip your hats, people of Vienna, and bow before them. Look up at these men, women, and children!

5. Anonymous Was the Program of 25,000 Public Homes in the Form of a Garden City Really Possible? First published as “Hätte das Programm der 25.000 Volkswohnungen in Gestalt einer Gartenstadt verwirklicht werden können?,” in Die Wohnungspolitik der Gemeinde Wien: ein Überblick über die Tätigkeit der Stadt Wien seit dem Kriegsende zur Bekämpfung der Wohnungsnot und zur Hebung der Wohnkultur (Vienna: Dt.-Österr. Städtebund, 1926), 17–22. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. Even after the municipal building program was officially introduced in 1923 with the plans to build over twenty-five thousand dwelling units within the span of five years, the question whether a garden city model could have been realized in full continued to inform debates about Red Vienna’s future. Many advocates of single-family settlement-type homes such as Otto Neurath (1882–1945) and Hans Kampffmeyer (1876–1932)—both of whom briefly lead the Austrian Association for Settlements and Allotment Gardens—acknowledged the challenges posed by the economy and the existing spatial arrangement of the old city and its suburbs. One major obstacle, as Vienna’s recently appointed director of urban planning Franz Musil (1884–1966) explained,5 was that most outer districts of the capital lacked the infrastructure, mass transit systems in particular, necessary to support and sustain the development of suburban settlements and satellite towns (Trabantenstädte) on the edges of the city. Multistory housing, by contrast, appeared to be a reasonable solution for a city that, like Berlin or Paris, already housed part of its population in large residential apartment blocks. Those friends of the garden city movement, who without specific understanding of the situation in Vienna wish to condemn the results of the program to build twenty-five thousand public homes, could easily be misled into thinking that the decision to carry out the majority of these housing projects in the form of high rises was a fundamental mistake. This criticism only invites the question of whether it would have been possible to build twenty-five thousand homes in garden settlements of single-family homes, and, if so, why this was not done. 5 See

Franz Musil, “Hochbau oder Flachbau?,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, October 12, 1926, 6; “Sollen wir die Untergrundbahn schon jetzt bauen?,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, July 8, 1927, 8.

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The extraordinary advantages of garden settlements are obvious, and it goes without saying that single-family homes are the most desirable kind of housing in Vienna. The fact is that it is only in wealthy Western countries that single-family homes have become the dominant form of housing. Such homes have not been able to proliferate in the metropolises of the European continent in the wake of heavy urban industrialization. Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest: all of these cities shared the same type of tenement housing for the working class, even before the war. It became evident that the construction of individual homes with small gardens was well out of reach of the means of the working classes of these cities. It was a different story for the better-paid industrial workers of America and England. Remarkably, it seems the conflict between single-family homes and high-rises with rental units is already taking shape in the cities of North America. It must be emphasized that the American cities only grew into fully modern population centers when highly developed technology for mass transit became available. By means of these mass transit systems it became possible to move through the city fast enough and with enough range that a single-family home was affordable for the working class. While real estate prices “downtown” reached dizzying heights, and just like the businesses, the prices in the residential suburbs remained reasonable because it was always easy to link up new properties with speedy trains on a large scale. On top of this, steadily impressive economic growth meant that there was always enough venture capital for building homes and train lines. The result is that American cities have never seen the kind of housing shortage that plagues the formerly walled city of Vienna. Our city had already passed one million residents when the first electric streetcar was introduced, which addresses the most pressing transportation problems, but cannot have the same effect on land development as a commuter rail system radiating out from the city. Vienna lacked and continues to lack the kind of mass transit that (under normal economic circumstances) would be able to spark new construction even on the outermost edge of the city. This may be one of the reasons why even before the war, multistory buildings became the dominant type of housing here. The generally high property tax was another major reason. In the last years before the war, the garden city movement proposed as a model the “satellite towns” of Letchworth and Welwyn surrounding London. Let us consider these satellite towns. Their supporters say that gardened suburbs still suffer from the disadvantages of a big city. The ideal garden city, they say, should be an independent satellite town with its own social and economic life, independent from the metropolis. It should be separated from other settlements by a wide agricultural green belt, and thus unite the advantages of country life with those of being in a larger, intellectually stimulating city. It is not a suburb where you only live in order to get to your work in the nearby metropolis; the people living in the satellite towns should also earn their living there. The satellite town therefore needs its own industry. Such a town will rise and fall with the prospect of attracting new industry, or luring some away from other places. In Vienna, the creation of such satellite cities as a way of relieving the urgent housing shortage was out of the question. Since the treaty of Saint-Germain, Austria has been fighting for new markets. Current industry is running at only partial capacity, and the establishment of new industries or the transfer of existing factories to new locations is not possible in light of the extraordinary financial shortages. An alternative idea involved building on garden lots within Vienna. A gardened suburb for twenty-five thousand families requires a total of 7,500,000 square meters, or 7.5 square kilometers, allowing 200 square meters for a house and garden and 300 square meters of street front and undeveloped area. There was no contiguous area of that size in the city’s possession, nor did the municipality have any means of acquiring one. It was also impossible to acquire enough

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tracts of land that could be developed in such a way to make up for an area of equivalent size at an appropriate price. Just consider the scale of the development costs of such a large piece of land. Sewer systems, water pipes, gas and electricity grids, and a network of throughways and residential streets would have to be built. This massive development would also have benefited from a train connection to the city center, which would have been inordinately expensive, since both elevated and underground trains would be necessary. Since the housing crisis in Vienna demanded immediate action, the city government had to settle for the smaller lots that were available. Because of preexisting streets, sewers, gas and water networks, electric connections, and so on, it was possible to quickly begin construction without the need for new infrastructure. Developing smaller sites also meant that the city could avoid building new schools, public offices, new market halls, fire stations, and the like. The building sites chosen by the city all have convenient access to electric streetcars. Even though they did not offer large, connected pieces of land for a gardened suburb, they nevertheless sufficed for urban blocks with remarkable gardens and yards. Where the city was able to acquire larger pieces of property with a relatively rural character, they consistently dedicated space for garden settlements. If the city set out to realize its ambitious housing objectives in the only way that was possible for Vienna, that does not mean that the city has no interest in the garden city movement. On the contrary! Thousands of single-family homes in tidy garden settlements now demonstrate the city government’s full understanding of low-rise homes and garden culture. In the decades before the war, the dream of owning a garden was out of reach for working families. The settlement houses offer this dream, with all of the advantages of a private home and garden. Nevertheless, it must be said publicly that it would be too expensive, and cause grave public harm, for the single-family home with garden to be the only form of public housing in the city. The only way to fully address the housing crisis is to offer a large number of healthy apartments in multistory buildings to those in need of housing. As the city government has demonstrated that it could relieve the housing crisis in a sustainable way, it is now time to explore what the city has done to outfit these apartments as inexpensively and soundly as possible, to raise the terribly lacking standard of living in Vienna.

6. Werner Hegemann Critical Remarks on the Housing Projects in the City of Vienna First published as Schriftleitung, “Kritisches zu den Wohnbauten der Stadt Wien,” Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst und Städtebau 10, no. 9 (1926): 362–70. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. Red Vienna’s ambitious building program generated much interest abroad with specialized journals—such as the Berlin-based Wasmuths Monatshefte, a monthly periodical for architecture and urban planning—regularly publishing richly illustrated articles, some more critical and even skeptical in tone than others. The well-traveled German urbanist and architectural critic Werner Hegemann (1881–1936) who made a name for himself on both sides of the Atlantic was particularly assertive in his commentary on the newly built apartment complexes which he referred to as “tenement blocks”—a pejorative term invoking the old nineteenth-century working-class rental barracks. Echoing Otto Neurath’s call for an

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aesthetically harmonious city, Hegemann argued that Viennese authorities failed to develop a coherent building plan and to produce an “artistic unity” reflective of the city’s mission rather than an “architectural chaos” of competing forms and visions. Indeed, Vienna’s authorities refrained from a standardized building practice, permitting the commissioned architects to realize instead a comparatively broad range of ideas. The achievements of the city of Vienna are outstanding in every aspect, even outside of housing and other building projects, for example, in education (all school supplies are free for students), school reform, and welfare. Today, Vienna has perhaps the largest and most meaningful welfare apparatus of any city in Europe. The city has established welfare centers of every kind, built a major medical clinic, an intake center for children, and hundreds of kindergartens, playgrounds, children’s pools, etc. In spite of the strong will for building projects, there is frustration when it comes to housing. This frustration can be explained by one factor: the settler movement was unknown in Vienna before the war. The movement has therefore found itself in uncharted territory when confronted with the technical, financial, social, and cultural challenges. Architects, however, are somewhat ahead of the curve thanks to the research published in German specialized literature. The housing authorities, on the other hand, tend to reject the movement as something strange and unfamiliar. The people living in settlements are pitied in Vienna. The Settlement Office, built under the pressure of postwar conditions, is only a single office within the building authority, and therefore has no influence and, in fact, is not linked to the building authority but rather to the Housing Office. Faced with the necessity of building twenty-five thousand homes in a short period of time, the building officers and the private architects brought on as contractors looked for inspiration close to home, and pursued the path that seemed to them the only possible one according to the building protocols and conditions of the prewar period: building high-rises. Settlement housing development, insofar as it was supported by the city, was left to the co-ops. Those familiar with the situation can point to another reason why recent settlements in Vienna encounter such difficulty: the stubbornness and inflexibility of the settlers, who do not want to hear about the uniform generosity of the settlement houses and in some cases know [. . .] how to undermine productive work. Politicians have continued their uninterrupted criticism of the building of settlements. It is not to be expected of a politician who has so far concerned himself with general political questions to be better informed about the cultural and technical questions than the relevant building officials and technical experts. The Austrian architectural community has therefore been charged with the political task of building twenty-five thousand apartments with no means to evaluate and improve upon the cultural and social aspects of the project. It should have been particularly easy in Vienna, given the political leanings of the city government, for the architects to exercise some influence on the architectural solution to the problem, if they had only been interested in more than just getting the contract. The politicians and building officials were not the right people to take on the enormous task of overseeing the cultural and artistic aspects of the projects as well as the urban planning. The Austrian architects continue to praise the building projects of the city of Vienna in all the wrong ways. It is the political and financial achievement, not the artistic or cultural work, that deserves praise. The pictures in this volume give an overview of the architectural chaos that is being demanded and promoted in Vienna today. It is hard to escape the thought that great urban planning opportunities have been missed—for the construction of twenty-five thousand new homes in a short period of time is a task of unusual scale, even in urban planning terms.

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Instead of any artistic unity, a variety of specific solutions to particular situations emerged without any internal consistency. As an illustration of how little actual consideration was given to the urban space as a whole, consider for instance the fact that on one street in the Tenth District, three high-rises were built on adjacent lots, designed by three different architects, and each one the architectural opposite of its neighbor. The house in the middle boasts cornices and gutters in deep ultramarine, whereas its neighbor is solid gray stucco and is the only one of the three with gables and turrets. The three buildings, completed at almost the same time, show no signs of having been commissioned together, which would imply some architectural coherence. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case but is quite typical. In another district, two buildings stand opposite each another, each about 150 meters long. It should have been possible to demonstrate some sort of urban planning vision with regards to the street. But the left side of the street has nothing in common with the right side of the street in terms of its architecture: ledge height, window arrangement, buttresses, entrance gate. This could all be explained, and even forgiven, if the city had simply given the architects complete freedom. But the exact opposite is true. Except for the few architects who simply overran the building officials with their own kitschy, small-town aesthetic, most architects have been assaulted and misused, and their projects have been subjected to an endless bureaucratic revision process before they had finally been approved.

7. Anonymous The Ring Road of the Proletariat First published as “Ringstraße des Proletariats,” Die Unzufriedene, August 30, 1930, 1. Translated by Andrew Hamilton. The largest number of municipal building complexes was constructed along the so-called Margaretengürtel—a broad boulevard in the working-class Margareten District which was quickly nicknamed Ringstraße (ring road) of the proletariat.6 Conceived and fashioned as a proud counterpart to the opulent bourgeois ring road surrounding Vienna’s aristocratic Inner City, the Ringstraße of the people, as Red Vienna’s mayor Karl Seitz proudly proclaimed,7 was a grand representative project that marked a shift in power and the beginning of “new Vienna.” Even though not all architects and planners associated with the official building program were pleased with the monumental palaces designed by former students of Otto Wagner and the statement they appeared to make, Social Democratic journals such as the feminist weekly Die Unzufriedene (The dissatisfied woman) proudly celebrated the new Ringstraße on their front page, promoting the endeavors of the municipality and inviting its readers to explore the site on foot. Crossing the Sechshauser Gürtel toward Schönbrunnerstrasse, you come to the Margaretengürtel, where the Gürtelstrasse widens and runs straight to the southern railway line, and there it makes a ninety-degree turn to the right. From as far as the Schönbrunnerstrasse you will see, a few hundred meters off to the left, a veritable forest of towering scaffolding. Thousands of shimmering bricks lie heaped in front of it. 6 Reumannhof,

Metzleinstaler Hof, Franz-Domes-Hof, Julius-Popp-Hof. “Eine zweite Ringstraße in Wien. Der Bürgermeister eröffnet drei Wohnhausbauten am Margaretengürtel,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, June 29, 1930, 9. 7 Anonymous,

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Dump trucks haul dirt away, while large trucks come bearing bricks and other building materials. The closer the curious bystander gets to the site, the greater the noise that surrounds him, and the more people he sees, all watching the construction work with the same eagerness. This massive project is the construction of an apartment complex in Red Vienna. Its appearance seems to resemble the nearby Reumannhof. Not long ago, the square where this new construction is going up was home to hordes of working-class children, and at the same time a dumping ground for discarded lumber, an uncomfortably stark contrast to the park across the street and the sleek, stylish headquarters of the rail workers’ union [Eisenbahnerheim]. The new building rises from the earth like a palace. Thousands of hands are at work to give life to the vision of Red Vienna’s leaders. Adjacent to the site is another building project, where the roof is already being put in place. Directly opposite, but not on Gürtel [street], is the Fuchsenfeld-Hof. On the right-hand side of the Gürtel another public building is going up. In front of this second site is a placard congratulating the city administration and the firm that has already erected several public buildings. Two hundred paces farther along is the Reumannhof, probably the most attractive residential building built by the city of Vienna. Above it, on the right-hand side of the Gürtel, is a newly built park. In the summer, its fresh, green meadow offers the residents of the surrounding buildings relaxation after a day’s work and drudgery. An adjacent area is devoted to games and sports for children and teenagers. A number of children entrusted to female kindergarten nurses are playing happily in the grass, while nearby older children strengthen their muscles on exercise equipment, despite all the objections of Bishop [Johannes Maria] Gföllner. This is truly a happy and class-conscious young generation. Next to the Reumannhof is a housing unit built immediately after the collapse of the empire. Beyond that, one sees a massive complex of public housing dominated by the Metzleinstalerhof. It is almost a small city of its own that has emerged here, and the yellow paint of its facades can be seen near and far. If you ride the streetcar through this district and listen to the passengers, you will hear all around you words of astonishment at what the city of Vienna has achieved. Only now and again will you hear a quibbler, whose snide remarks are born of nothing but hatred and bigotry. The other passengers will usually either enlighten him—or laugh him off. This complex of residential buildings in the modern style represents one of the most beautiful neighborhoods of Vienna. Old Vienna, too, has its lovely stretches, of which the Ringstrasse is the finest. But there are no workers living in those palaces—no, the working class has been condemned to the outskirts of the city. Those ostentatious buildings, representations of the bourgeoisie, look down with cold and arrogant pride on the other buildings. They are mostly inhabited by people who either do not or will not understand the new era and its demands. But outside, on this stretch of the Gürtelstrasse, there are also palaces. Palaces with no pointless ornamentation. Here live the standard-bearers of the new era. They must have light, air, and sunshine, so that a strong, happy, and eager generation can emerge ready for the struggle ahead. The colossuses on the Ringstrasse are gray and arrogant. Those mighty buildings house only a few people who have inherited the privileges of the former nobility. There the bourgeoisie, here the proletariat. There the negative spirit, here the positive one, both in majestic buildings. But it was not long ago that the proletariat had no such buildings to call their own. It was the men from their own ranks, the builders of the “New Vienna,” who finally built them accommodations worthy of human beings.

A wading pool for children in the Fuchsenfeldhof municipal housing complex (ca. 1926). Photo by Martin Gerlach Jr. that was later included in Catherine Bauer Wurster’s Modern Housing (1934). (Courtesy of Wien Museum.)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

ARCHITECTURE Georg Vasold and Aleks Kudryashova

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undertaken in Red Vienna, possibly the most ambitious was the city’s architectural transformation. It was surely the most visible. Within the short span of just over a decade, almost sixty-four thousand apartments in nearly four hundred municipal housing complexes, about two thousand business premises, over five thousand lots for settler homes, as well as a large number of community buildings—kindergartens, schools, public baths, sport facilities, health clinics, libraries, artist studios, and so on—were designed, built, and opened for public use. In response to the dramatic housing shortage that had existed in Vienna for decades, the Vienna Municipal Council launched a building offensive in 1919. It was initially rather modest in scale, but in 1923 a long-term comprehensive building program was implemented to generate modern and inexpensive housing. This impressive project was accompanied by broad media coverage in newspaper articles, illustrated commemorative publications, brochures, and annual statistical reports, in which the city government regularly informed its citizens about the rapid progress of the highly ambitious undertaking—a large-scale planning project that was to have a profound impact on the appearance of Vienna. Nonetheless, what appears in retrospect to have been an unprecedented success story of modern residential construction was at the outset marked by differing political, ideological, and not least architectural viewpoints. Although city officials agreed that effective measures were needed to relieve the unsound living conditions in the city, there were widely divergent opinions on how best to implement this plan. In particular, the Christian Social Party, whose ranks included many building owners, was put off by taxes being specially introduced to finance the project, above all the tax earmarked for housing construction, as well as by the strict tenant protection laws that had been in force since the war. Moreover, they considered the construction of municipal tenant housing an attack on the principle of private property and envisioned collective buildings, as supported by the city, to be heralding a revolutionary and ultimately Bolshevist lifestyle. There was also disagreement among the nearly two hundred architects who had been commissioned by the city administration for the project. Their ideas about what constituted a modern residence differed substantially. On one side were the supporters of the settler movement, who were pushing for the construction of row houses on the outskirts of the city. One of their arguments had to do with food and economics: preference should be given to homes in the countryside, since it would be possible to grow fruit and vegetables in one’s own garden if foodstuff provision became unpredictable—in hungry postwar Vienna quite a valid consideration. On the other side were architects f all the sociopolitical measures

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who supported the building of multistory apartment complexes inside the city. For them, there was no doubt that constructing rental apartments close to the city’s center was not only more progressive but also more economical, since the cost of building settlement houses and providing the needed infrastructure was comparatively higher. The advantages and disadvantages of the various architectural concepts were often debated harshly. But the conflicting models—constructing settlements versus residential blocks (“superblocks”), pitched versus flat roofs, self-administration versus communal management, or individuality versus collectivity—were not new. More often than not, the representatives of both camps looked at the history of architecture, both domestic and international. They were inspired by nineteenth-century British workers’ communities, analyzed contemporary public housing units in Amsterdam, referred to the pioneering texts by Camillo Sitte (who in the 1880s had already emphasized the importance of green spaces in urban areas, recognizing how essential open spaces are for the quality of life),1 or invoked the ideas of Otto Wagner, whose school had produced many of the Red Vienna architects. Wagner himself had thought deeply about the urban geography of rapidly growing cities, especially during his last years. In a 1911 essay written at the suggestion of Columbia University, he declared solving “the real problem of the city plan” was the core task of future generations.2 Building on these ideas, starting in the early 1920s, an architecture emerged in Vienna that was steeped in history and framed by the powerfully eloquent writings of Adolf Loos, Josef Frank, and Otto Neurath. Although there were voices arguing for a radical break with the past, which meant a break with the architecture of historicism and Jugendstil, and in favor of a strict functionalism along the lines of the “New Frankfurt” urban initiative, those voices were in the minority. Instead, Red Vienna was more concerned with finding innovative ways to build on the city’s architectural heritage, that is, the judicious incorporation of new buildings into the historic city structure. This meant, among other things, that the Viennese architects adopted proven concepts and traditional layouts—such as the courtyard, the terrace, the arcade, or the so-called Pawlatsche3— adapting them to the new social needs. What took center stage was not devising typical proletarian forms to serve the New Human but realizing, based on a fundamental respect for the individual, the best possible means for meeting practical housing needs in line with the demands of a new social democratic society. Following the popular catchphrases of “light – air – sun,” “thriftiness,” or “hygiene in the home,” this specifically called for well-ventilated and above all well-lit rooms, running water in all units, on-premise washing machines and dryers, as well as a place for the cost-effective and time-saving preparation of healthy meals. In almost all of the housing complexes, special attention was also given to the construction of club and meeting rooms to promote social activities, something that, according to Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, “was not even discussed in Frankfurt.”4 The uniqueness of the architecture of Red Vienna lies in the fact that within 1 See Camillo Sitte, Der Städte-Bau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (Vienna: Carl Graeser, 1889). 2 Otto Wagner, Die Großstadt (Vienna: Schroll, 1911), quoted here from: Otto Antonia Graf, Otto Wagner. Das Werk des Architekten, vol. 2 (Vienna et al.: Böhlau, 1994): 641; See also, Otto Wagner, “The Development of a Great City,” Architectural Record 31 (May 1912): 489. 3 Pawlatsche, a borrowed term from the Czech language, is an open-air hallway that accesses the upper floors of apartment buildings. 4 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Warum ich Architektin wurde (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 2004), 125.



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a short time, not only was modern and functional living space generated for roughly 10 percent of the total urban population, but that it was designed—often with key references to local building history—as an urban meeting place. In this sense, the Viennese architects anticipated a development that would later be described as the “humanization of the city” (Sigfried Giedion), a process that highlighted “the relationship of the parts to the whole, restoring the contact between the individual and the community.”5 Further reading Blau 1999 Czeike 1959 Hautmann and Hautmann 1980 Tafuri 1980 Weihsmann 2019

1. Franz Schuster and Franz Schacherl Proletarian Architecture First published as “Proletarische Architektur,” Der Kampf 19, no. 1 (1926): 34–39. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. According to the authors of this radical manifesto, Franz Schacherl (1895–1943) and Franz Schuster (1892–1972), to imagine what a proletarian architecture could look like is to establish what it cannot and should not be—a spatial expression of an outdated imperial, clerical, or petty-bourgeois worldview. The responsibility of the architect as the “destroyer of cultures,” they argue elsewhere in the text, is therefore not to “cultivate the old, which is only unclarity, only untruth,” but to promote the “beauty of socialist architecture in all its simplicity, clarity, in all its purity and objectivity” among the masses. The authors’ radical position is reflective of the urban politics promoted by left-leaning architects and theoreticians in Social Democratic Vienna. But their call for clarity, functionality, and simplicity of architectural form in the new age also echoes the formal language employed by major proponents of New Building (Neues Bauen) in Germany. In fact, Schuster traveled to Frankfurt the following year, where he continued to work on his projects under the city’s chief urban planner and founder of the New Frankfurt initiative, Ernst May. What most of the proletariat today still considers a nicely furnished apartment is such a dishonest and false sham that we must do everything we can to spread proper concepts of living in a proletarian way. The officer proudly dressed in his uniform, the worker proudly wearing his shirt, feeling part of the greater purpose at meetings, placing his personal desires below those of the community, his neighbor, his workmate, achieving something only together with him and through him, understanding the power of unity—in his home, he is individualistic to the extreme. But those things he considers individual, personal, are nothing other than the collective expression of a different social circle. For the worker, a middle-class apartment seems something worth striving for, despite how impersonal such 5 Sigfried

Giedion, Architektur und Gemeinschaft: Tagebuch einer Entwicklung (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956), 72.

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an apartment is, how pretentious, how commonplace. He thoughtlessly adopts all these obsolete, dusty forms and thinks he is creating his own culture of living. He fears simplicity, clarity, and objectivity in his apartment, fears that if he furnishes his apartment simply and functionally, all poetry, culture and art will disappear from his home. But he does not notice that in place of a liberating objectivity, he is borrowing forms from a world that has outlived its purpose, one that he otherwise despises, forms that have nothing at all to do with his way of thinking. The top organizer, the union leader, the politician, the organized worker who knows how to speak intelligently and clearly at mass meetings—his apartment is full of the most hypocritical, useless and superfluous trifles of the petty-bourgeois world. His ideal is a cluttered and dusty romanticism. All the lace and coverlets and velvet curtains and curlicued and carved furniture, the vanities and whatever they are all called—he thinks they are important because they are important to a vanishing bourgeoisie trying to preserve an outer splendor that has long since been lost within. Let us be honest! That popular vanity, the three-piece mirror—is it not just a fixture for a shallow movie diva only worried about her looks? The big sideboard you buy at the furniture store, with all its drawers, its multicolored glass doors, its carving—is it not just a dishonest and shabby heirloom of a powerful, yet completely alien and long-gone aristocratic glory? An aristocratic glory whose showpiece once filled the great hall, but now has to stand in the eat-in kitchen. Even if they seem modern, are four-poster beds and lace curtains and ostentatious pieces of furniture not just remnants and mindless imitations of royal glory? And is the style we call Biedermeier—even though its simplicity does have something in common with our simplicity—not a poor copy of an era a century ago? Is it not embarrassing that the furnishings and daily objects in our apartments are from times long past? From worlds and worldviews not only foreign but also hostile to us? Would we not laugh if a worker took a Sunday stroll wearing buckled shoes and a slit jerkin, carrying a sword at his side to top it all off? We would find it ridiculous, and yet it is not different from how workers furnish their apartments, not different at all. The proletarian home should have its own form, its own style and its own culture. A culture of objectivity, cleanliness, and clarity, if only because that is the most economical and liberating arrangement for the housewife. All our efforts to free women from enslavement will fail if we do not clear our minds for ideas leading to liberation from this abominable way of living. What good is it if a woman becomes socially free but remains a slave to a hypocritical romanticism in the home, if she wastes her time cleaning all those nooks and crannies, dusting trivial trinkets, especially when those ostensible ornaments on the dresser have been bought at a dime store? If they were of any artistic value, they would have been too expensive. The proletarian is not afraid of the uniformity of living room atrocities and the shoddiness of furnishings around the world, whether in Paris or Reichenberg, New York or Hanau. He is avoiding the uniformity of purity and cleanliness and objectivity. But those are the things that would move him forward. Members of the working class have the duty to reconsider all this with a socialist mindset. In a sense, architecture is the artistic expression of today’s burning economic and cultural challenges that are at the heart of our needs and planning. Housing and urban development are the issues of the day. What socialists think about these things is not irrelevant. Whether we build settlements or multistoried buildings is not inconsequential. It is possibly not the right moment to discuss this serious problem of urban development, but nonetheless, for socialist development it is a crucial matter. The new goals of city planning, of a new culture of living, of a new technical and economic conception of building are so important that in order to prepare the necessary changes, the urban planner, the architect, and the construction manager need support from all sides.



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Just think of all the pursuits that people are earnestly undertaking today. Regional planning, garden city and settler movements, policies regarding green spaces, the modern construction industry and the like—socialists must be absolutely committed to these programs since they initiate and fulfill important social demands. In the end, proletarian architecture, not interpreted in a narrow-minded way, is part of every major planning task. Of all the arts, architecture is the one most closely tied to our lives. After so much ambiguity, impurity, and dishonesty, we are demanding that our lives become clear, pure, and honest. We must also demand that the proletarian, socialist world, striving resolutely forward, must walk hand in hand with the joyful, honest, and courageous acceptance of a clear, objective, and simple architecture, an architecture that allows progress because it does not close itself off from what is new. We must demand such architecture even at the risk of it being harshly criticized by the broad masses because of their doubts and traditional prejudices—because they do not understand it, not yet.

2. Anton Brenner Settlement House and Tenement Building—Mutual Influences First published as “Siedlungshaus und Miethaus—Gegenseitige Beeinflussung,” Bauwelt: Zeitschrift für das gesamte Bauwesen 19, no. 1 (January 1928): 6–8. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. The intense public debates among architects, planners, and city officials who favored the construction of multistory apartment blocks and those who continued to promote the benefits of low-rise housing of the garden city settlement type have overshadowed some of the continuous efforts to synthesize the two seemingly divergent forms. What distinguishes Anton Brenner’s (1896–1957) contribution is his proposition to assess the benefits and disadvantages inherent to existing buildings thereby creating hybrid, syncretic structures open to new functions. Over the course of his career, Brenner crafted multiple designs for multistory apartment buildings with a series of open passageways reminiscent of terraced settlement houses. As a student of Oskar Strnad, Josef Frank, Peter Behrens, and Clemens Holzmeister, Brenner was strongly influenced by architects associated with the New Objectivity movement. In 1926 Brenner moved to Frankfurt to work for its municipal planning and building office and the New Frankfurt program under Ernst May. After a year of teaching at the Bauhaus School in Dessau, Brenner returned to Austria in 1931, where he continued to experiment with standardized furniture design for the growing number of municipal housing complexes under construction. The issue whether—in economic, residential, and cultural terms—living in a settlement development is preferable to living in a multistory building can hardly be resolved today, since no comparable structures have been built yet that would justify either position. Very few housing units meet the demands of a modern home, neither from a residential and cultural viewpoint nor from an economic viewpoint, given the cost of rent and furnishing and most people’s income. The efforts of architects and housing reformers, such as at the Weissenhof Settlement in Stuttgart, are always directed toward people of their own or higher social status. They have no appreciable effect on remedying the shortage of housing for the masses. [. . .] If, instead of debating the advantages and disadvantages of these two types of housing—a debate nearly as futile as comparing pitched and flat roofs—an attempt were made

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to discover how settlement houses and multistory buildings might complement each other, then we would come closer to solving the issue of small homes. If a home must be kept clean without servants, there need to be considerable restrictions on its size as well as the number of rooms and their dimensions. Such restrictions are less common in settlement houses than in tenement apartments, and thus settlement houses will be less attractive to housewives, since managing a house with three to four floors (basement, ground floor, upper floor, and attic) requires significantly more work. But the head of a family will prefer a settlement house because of the relatively greater independence it gives him. Today, whether children grow up and play together outside, in natural surroundings, has less to do with the type of housing than with how a residential area is laid out. In fact, the spacious landscaped garden courtyards of modern apartment buildings, equipped with wading pools, sandboxes, and playgrounds, can in some cases offer more outdoor play options than the separate flower and vegetable gardens of settlers. Since each settlement house needs its own staircase, a great deal of floor space is lost. Moreover, life and living is divided between the ground floor and the first floor, between day and night, a luxury that is not an option in very small apartments. With simple folding beds, it should be possible to use bedrooms during the day. And at night, living rooms can be used as bedrooms. If the advantages of the tenement apartment—with all its rooms on the same floor— is applied to the plans for ground-level settlements, then these should aim to have a common wall with the neighboring house that is as long as possible while limiting the width of the house. Since both living rooms and bedrooms need windows that open to the outside, the kitchen can be equipped with a large skylight to guarantee well-lit work surfaces; ventilation can also be provided above the bedroom ceilings, which are lower in relation to the larger living areas. Although the basement of a house with only half a cellar offers enough space for dividing it into a laundry, bathroom, and storage room, it is nevertheless recommended, as in modern apartment blocks, to have separate communal machine laundry and bathing facilities. Under these conditions and living standards, it is most practical to have the shower and sink—for everyday bathing and washing in the morning or after work—in the same room as the toilet. Not everyone wants to live in a settlement house and grow a garden. Many people want to be close to the city, to have the advantages that come with living in or near a city. And certainly, tenement blocks will still be built for a long time to come. That is why, when building small apartments, it is better to search for the most economical and culturally appropriate solution for this type of housing, rather than just condemning it and rejecting it as obsolete and unhealthy. Just as the advantages of tenement apartments were the starting point for the new design of ground-floor housing settlements, conversely, how we build settlements can influence the construction of apartment blocks. In order to have as many apartments as possible on one flight of stairs without relinquishing the cross-ventilation considered essential in apartments, it is necessary to resort to a system of corridors. Just as people living in settlements step out onto the pavement when leaving their homes, residents of apartments can step out onto an outdoor corridor, a walkway on each floor that leads to an enclosed staircase. This is an ancient form of housing. It was common practice in old Austria, and such buildings are still being built in Budapest today. Here and there you can still find this old kind of open corridor building in Vienna, and especially, and charmingly so, in small towns along the Danube. As things developed, this corridor was glassed in, and later only a few windows remained from a hallway. The size and arrangement of the apartments stayed the same; lavatories and water faucets were arranged along the common hallway. The advantage of



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not having to step outside to reach the lavatory and water tap, as was the case with the open corridor, had the drawback that now the kitchens were at one end of the closedin hallway and thus received only indirect light and hardly any ventilation. Since the overwhelming majority of the Viennese population still lives this way, even the apartments now being built by the city of Vienna that only have a single room with an added kitchen are a great cultural improvement. Although the size of the rooms is not much different from those in the old corridor apartments, now all tenants have a lavatory inside their own apartment.

3. Ernst Toller In an Apartment Building in Socialist Vienna First published in Austria as “In einem Wohnhaus des sozialistischen Wien,” ArbeiterZeitung, March 20, 1927, 17. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. In January 1926, the German expressionist playwright Ernst Toller (1893–1939)—a political activist who briefly served as president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic (1919)—came to visit Vienna on his tour across Europe. This article, originally published in the Berlin-based magazine Die Weltbühne (no. 23, 1927), summarizes some of Toller’s observations during his journey. Toller focuses on one municipal housing complex in particular—the Winarskyhof (1924–1926), located in Vienna’s Twentieth District, Brigittenau. The monumental project was designed by nine likeminded prominent architects as an architectural ensemble of spatially adjoining, albeit distinct, segments.6 While praising the achievements of the city of Vienna, Toller criticizes the bare, functionalist style promoted by the architects of the complex who were willing to sacrifice the pleasure and distraction provided by florid decorations for the ascetic, simple forms advanced by the New Objectivity proponents. The architects, he argued, projected their own rarified tastes onto the working class, ignoring the workers’ claim to comfort and bourgeois lifestyle. I also recently saw what is being achieved by the Vienna Municipal Council, which has a strong socialist majority. What this radical German socialist saw materializing wiped away the depression enveloping him in one fell swoop. It is clear why the Communist Party is so unimportant in Austria. Radicals stick to the socialist party [SDAP]. Culturally, only Russia is in the process of achieving anything close to what is happening in Vienna. Apartments are taxed based on their layout and the number of rooms. For small apartments, tenants pay ridiculously low rents and taxes (since rents are also regulated by laws protecting tenants). In contrast, someone who rents an eight-room apartment has to pay three hundred shillings a month just for taxes levied by the city. In the last few years, funds from the housing construction tax paid for the construction of public housing for workers, children’s playgrounds, maternity clinics, temporary homes for orphans and abandoned children, workers’ colleges, public baths, and other buildings. From 1919 to the end of 1923, the city government built 7,259 apartments. A major housing construction project involving 25,000 apartments was decided upon in September 1923 and has 6 The Winarskyhof was designed by Peter Behrens, Karl Dirnhuber, Josef Frank, Josef Hoffmann, Grete Lihotzky, Adolf Loos, Franz Schuster, Oskar Strnad, and Oskar Wlach. The second part of the complex, on the opposite side of the Winarskystraße, was later renamed Otto Haas Hof.

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now been carried out. Thus, altogether some 32,000 apartments have been built. The best architects have been commissioned to design these buildings as well as the apartment interiors. The Winarsky-Hof, named after a deceased socialist worker, is one of these big complexes, a compound of a number of buildings connected by airy, tree-filled courtyards. Some 3,400 people live in the 800 rental units of this complex. Of these, 1,500 are members of the Socialist Party. (The city of Vienna has 330,000 registered socialists.) The smallest apartments consist of a room, a kitchen, and an entry hall. Most of the apartments have two rooms and a kitchen. Every room has parquet flooring, and each building has central washing and drying facilities, as well as a municipal kindergarten, a library, an assembly hall, a cinema, and a meeting room. Consider what it means for workingclass women to be able to leave their children at home while they are at work, to put the laundry into an electrically operated washing machine in the large laundry room, and in a few simple steps to do a job that would otherwise take one or two days. I take a look at the library, whose tables and chairs were designed by Peter Behrens. I open the fiction catalog at random and see listed under the letter “F”: Flake, Flaubert, Fontane, France, Frank. I go into the building’s cinema, a large hall that can be converted into three smaller rooms by mechanically lowering the walls. The children from the nearby school are watching a nature documentary that explains petrology clearly and concisely. The evening program features the Russian film The Bay of Death and the film Les Misérables.7 From time to time, good concerts, lectures and theater performances are held in the cinema’s hall. Only when you consider the conditions in which Viennese workers used to live does the scope of the city’s achievement become clear. Affixed to each building, to the delight of the rich, is a plaque embossed with the unambiguous words, “Built from the proceeds of the housing construction tax.” Architecturally, there are various types of buildings. Those constructed a few years ago (the Fuchsenfeldhof, for example) have a more palatial and decorative appearance on the outside, whereas more recently constructed buildings are dominated by a stricter, more purposeful sobriety. For me it is important to note that workers generally like florid decorations and have no appreciation for the new simplicity of modern architecture. Why is that? The modern architect has arrived at this simplicity coming from an abundance of florid luxury. Having outgrown this luxury, he retains only those elements that are relevant to his new style. The worker comes from deprived circumstances. Everything was gray and monotonous in his old home. Luxury was his dream and ideal. Consider his fondness for movies that play in splendid homes. Although he is longing for a little adornment, something he only knows in the form of florid decorations, he now has to face sober simplicity once again. Since he does not sense the qualitative difference between this form of simplicity and that of his former life, his discomfort is understandable. It thus seems that for the worker of our generation the current principle is for him to walk the false path paved by the middle class. Only after doing this for some time will he yearn to fight it. Certainly, small squabbles break out in such large buildings. This is because there is little collective consciousness among the people moving in. One woman is unhappy that another woman is peering at her laundry in the central laundry room, while another 7 The original title of the Russian film is Bukhta smerti (dir. Abram Room, 1926). The German title for Les Misérables (dir. Henri Fescourt, 1925), Mensch unter Menschen, was misspelled by Toller as Menschen unter Menschen (People among People).



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woman claims that a neighbor is keeping tabs on her. But it is possible for an observer to notice that these quarrels, which are settled by a specially formed building committee, are becoming fewer and fewer, that a collective consciousness gradually sets in. If a tenant loses his job, the neighbors help him out with a fine sense of solidarity. Another question is whether such residential palaces or housing blocks are the best solution for housing shortages in large cities. I honestly confess that despite my admiration for what has been accomplished, to me the settlement house seems more sensible. (There are also a number of well-equipped settlements in Vienna.) But a belt of settlements around a city is only possible if good and fast transportation connections are available. Otherwise, a worker loses two to three hours a day traveling to and from the factory. Nor do I fail to recognize the danger that people who have been brought up and educated in our times will become petty, quarrelsome philistines in settlement houses. They will plant their cabbage, quarrel with their neighbors, desire peace and quiet, and will no longer bother with their work comrades. We encounter the same difficulty again and again: Although we have to create new structures, we must be aware that the same old Adam is moving into these new buildings. Only gradually, through benevolent coercion, will his stunted communal instincts be reawakened.

4. Gustav A. Fuchs The Fuchsenfeldhof First published as Der Fuchsenfeldhof, ed. Wiener Magistrat, I., Rathaus (Vienna, 1923), 3–9. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. Between 1924 and 1932, the city of Vienna published dozens of brochures to celebrate and promote the achievements of the official building program, especially the municipal housing complexes such as the Fuchsenfeldhof (1922–1925) in Vienna’s Twelfth District, Meidling.8 These short booklets typically included information about the original site and the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who worked on the project as well as detailed descriptions of the new buildings. The booklets were often richly illustrated with sketches, layout plans, and an array of photographs, showcasing different aspects and angles of the buildings. The housing complex, introduced here by the senior city counselor for urban development (Oberstadtbaurat) Gustav Adolf Fuchs,9 was one of the first projects funded by Vienna’s housing construction tax and built according to the city’s new building guidelines on the Margaretengürtel, also known as the Ringstraße (ring road) of the proletariat. The complex was designed by the architects Heinrich Schmid (1885–1949) and Hermann Aichinger (1885–1952) as part of a larger residential area which included another monumental superstructure—Am Fuchsenfeld (1924–1926). An outstanding example of the residential construction activities of the city of Vienna is the Fuchsenfeldhof. It is located on the grounds of the former “Fuchsenfeld” in the Twelth District of Meidling, bounded by the Längenfeldgasse, Murlingengasse, Aßmayergasse, 8 See Neubauten der Stadt Wien, Bd. 1, Die Wohnhausbauten, ed. Josef Bittner (Vienna, Leipzig, New York: Gerlach and Wiedling, 1926). 9 See Gustav A. Fuchs, “Der moderne Wohnungsbau,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, August 23, 1924, 9.

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and Neuwallgasse. This residential building complex was constructed in two stages based on the plans of the architects Z. B. H. Schmid and H. Aichinger. The first part was opened in the spring of 1923 and the second part has now been completed. The two parts of the complex have 211 and 269 apartments, respectively, and thus a total of 480 units. The twenty-four stairwells lead from the large, landscaped courtyards to the floors of the buildings. In the first courtyard, which has an area of 1,500 square meters, there are two playgrounds for the children living in the buildings. The second courtyard, with an area of 1,200 square meters, has a flower garden on the roof terrace of the laundry room, which is built partly underground, and a small pavilion. The third courtyard, which—like the first—is about 1,500 square meters in size, has a wading pool that can be used for ice skating in the winter and, next to it, a large playground. The fourth courtyard has a seating area and some terraces. Ample seating is provided in all four courtyards. In the arrangement of the apartments, attention has been paid above all to principles of residential hygiene. Great care has been taken to assure that every apartment has one room with direct sunlight, so there are no apartments facing only north. There is not a single room with indirect light in the entire complex. Even the lavatories and rooms with sinks have windows onto one of the large courtyards or onto the street and not, as is usually the case, into an atrium [Lichthof]. The only exception are the apartments’ entry halls, which actually serve only as a buffer against cold and noise. As the floor plans show, each floor has three to five apartments. It is striking that there are absolutely no “corridor windows” [Gangfenster], as they are known. This is explained by the fact mentioned above that all rooms have a window to the outside. For one thing, this lack of corridor windows is very conducive to concord in the buildings, since possibilities for gossiping are thus reduced considerably. It also means that there are none of the otherwise so unpleasant kitchen smells in the stairwells. From the staircase landing and through the entry, one enters the kitchen or a living room. The kitchens are all designed as live-in kitchens. [. . .] They range in size from 16 to 20 square meters and have a seating niche at the window. Its table serves as a dining table for the family, as a work table for the housewife, and as a place where the children can do their homework. The cooking area has a gas stove with an oven, a warming cabinet, storage shelves, and a plate warmer. This eliminates the annoying nuisance of soot, ashes, and smoke. At the sink, which is accessible from the kitchen, vegetables and meat can be cleaned and the dishes washed. For this purpose, there is a single or double-bowl sink with a faucet. The lavatory with the water closet is accessible from the sink area. Having running water and the lavatory inside the apartment averts the quarrels that often arose when they were in building hallways, as used to be so common. Most of the kitchens, like the adjoining living rooms, have three-part windows whose dimensions are up to one tenth of the room’s size. All living and auxiliary rooms have electrical lighting. Gas and electricity meters have been installed on the stair landings in their own niches with lockable doors. The employees of the two municipal utilities companies can thus read the meters and see how much has been consumed whenever convenient without having to rely on the tenant being at home. This arrangement saves both the tenant and the municipal company employees a great deal of time. So as to spare the installation of the many laundry rooms and drying rooms that would be necessary for such a large number of apartments, a central laundry room has been built. In this facility, the building tenants can wash, dry, and iron their laundry. The laundry room is outfitted with everything found in a modern steam laundry. The housewife is provided with warm water for washing and boiling laundry; washing machines and laundry centrifuges are available for use. To dry the laundry, steam-heated cabinet



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dryers are available. For finishing the laundry, in addition to garment steaming devices, electric irons are available. For each of the twenty wash stands there is a steam-heated double boiler. The wash basins have faucets with cold and warm water. The ten washing machines and laundry centrifuges have electric motors. With the help of the cabinet dryers and electric irons, housewives can do four weeks of laundry for four persons in four hours, and after half a day, they can bring the ironed laundry home. A bathing facility is also connected to the boiler. Part of this facility is located in the basement between stairways 4 and 5, another part between stairways 13 and 14. The complex is divided into a men’s bath and a women’s bath and contains ten shower stalls with dressing rooms, and eleven tub stalls. The costs for using the laundry room are based on the same ratio as the building operating costs, which are shared according to the actual calculated expenditures. A separate fee is charged for using the bathing facilities. For the children living at the Fuchsenfeldhof, in addition to the above-mentioned playgrounds and the wading pool, there are two children’s playrooms. The larger of the two is 18.2 meters long and 10.9 meters wide. It directly adjoins the playground in the third courtyard. Other rooms available for the children are an apprentice workshop and a reading room. In the small workshop, young people who are too old for school are taught, under the guidance of skilled men, the love for work and the joy of creating things. The reading room should not only invite children to use the small and respectable library but also provide them a place to do their homework in peace. The management of this facility as well as the supervision of the children is undertaken by volunteers recruited from all of the tenants. The Fuchsenfeldhof is built entirely of bricks. Each floor is 3.2 meters high. All of the ceilings are made of reinforced concrete. The steps are of reinforced concrete with artificial stone casing. Terrazzo slabs have been used to pave the stairway landings, hallways, and cooking areas. The floors of the living rooms and the kitchens are made of oak boards, the entry halls have plank flooring. [. . .] The Fuchsenfeldhof was built under the direction of the Municipal Planning and Building Office [Stadtbauamt] by the companies that offered the best bids for individual jobs. Most of the building materials, including bricks, lime, sand, cement, iron bars, glass, paint, and the like, were also provided by the office. The Fuchsenfeldhof is an eloquent example of how the administration of the city of Vienna is not only building accommodation for the homeless. Housing construction also provides valuable unemployment relief—by creating employment opportunities. And lastly, this complex also shows the city’s desire, despite all frugality, to raise the extremely low level of workers’ housing in Vienna.

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5. Anonymous A Short Guide for Tenants in People’s Apartment Buildings First published as Merkbüchlein für Mieter in den Volkswohnhäusern, ed. MagistratsAbteilung 17 (Vienna: Gewista 1928), 19–23; 35. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. Published by the city of Vienna, the seventeenth administrative department responsible for housing, construction, and management of buildings (Magistratsabteilung 17), this fifty-page brochure was designed to provide guidelines to tenants who may experience difficulties adjusting to their new home and to remind them of their responsibilities toward the larger community. This guide to everyday life in the municipal housing complexes included a programmatic description of the new housing policies introduced by the city government, a set of instructions on how to use electricity and gas and where to place radio antennae, information about lavatories, laundry facilities, and public baths, as well as general advice on how not to annoy the neighbors. Although the booklet sought to address all tenants, a particular emphasis was placed on the housewife. Several sections thus appealed exclusively to women as home keepers and custodians of the domestic and by extension public space shared by the tenants and their offspring. “Orderliness makes the home” as the old saying goes. In a wider sense, this applies to municipal apartment buildings as well. Every tenant has the right to enjoy his apartment and all of the community facilities without being disturbed. That is why every tenant is also obliged to be considerate of the other people living in the building, to be mindful of being quiet and tidy, and to keep things neat and clean. If everyone does not work together, the living conditions in the building will soon become unbearable and the building impossible to manage. The more self-discipline each tenant can muster and the more conscientiously they follow the building rules, the more everyone will enjoy their own apartment and all the communal facilities. If self-discipline is lacking and an individual disregards his neighbors, the building administration will have to proceed, if necessary, with utmost strictness. The administrators will be happy to be spared the need to do this. Therefore, observe the building rules. You will find them posted in the hallway! What every tenant must know! (A few words for the housewife) The building you live in was built by the municipality from public funds in order to fight the housing shortage. You should thus feel like a trustee of the public good. Take care of the apartment that has been entrusted to you so its value is maintained, and also ensure that your children use the building and courtyard with care. You must pay for any damage that is caused. Keep your apartment clean. Sweep it daily and do a thorough cleaning at least once a week. As the proverb says, “The doctor goes where the sun doesn’t shine.” For this reason, let daylight into your rooms and do not shroud them with dark curtains and draperies. Ventilation and heating. Almost the third of your life is spent in bed. That is why you should air the bedroom adequately. Weather permitting, sleep with the window open. You sleep better and more



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peacefully in fresh air than in used, oxygen-poor air. Especially in a new building, to maintain both your apartment and your health, the most important requirement in the first years is careful ventilation. [. . .] The floor should be the pride of every housewife. The condition of the floor conveys one’s cleanliness and penchant for tidiness. [. . .] Consideration of your neighbors. Do not disturb the peace and quiet of the other residents in the building. Abstain from singing and music after 10 o’clock in the evening, and be otherwise considerate of your fellow tenants in the same way you would like them to be considerate of you. Take care of the garden areas, hedges, lawns, seating, etc. Also encourage your fellow tenants and the children in the building to be careful when using the playgrounds, wading pools, recreation rooms, courtyards, and staircases. To be effective, set a good example and use your words wisely.

6. Otto Neurath Single-Kitchen Building First published as “Einküchenhaus,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, June 2, 1923, 6–7. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. The single-kitchen building (Einküchenhaus), a multiunit building with a single centralized kitchen,10 represents an interesting yet isolated experiment advocated by Austrian architects such as Oskar Wlach,11 and activists such as Käthe Leichter and Therese Schlesinger.12 The idea of cooperative housing with communal facilities was by no means novel at the time, dating back to the nineteenth century and the early stages of women’s movements. Despite considerable interest generated by feminist journals such as Die Österreicherin, only one project of this type was realized in Vienna at the time: the housing cooperative Heimhof in the Fifteenth District, Fünfhaus.13 The apartments were rented out to families and young working couples, but only few could afford to pay the rent and cover the additional costs of the services provided by the centralized facilities and their staff. Opponents of the project were quick to criticize the concept which threatened to destroy the nuclear family by liberating women from their daily chores. Otto Neurath (1882–1945) defended this reformist model of living as a true expression of the proletarian spirit and an inevitable sign of technological progress.

10 Also

widely known as a Zentralwirtschaftshaus, a building with centralized household facilities. See Oskar Wlach, “Zentralwirtschaftshäuser,” Die Neue Wirtschaft, January 17, 1924, 11–12; and Anonymous, “Einküchenhaus-Projekt von Oskar Wlach,” Der Architekt: Monatshefte für Bauund Raumkunst 22 (1919): 120–23. 12 See Therese Schlesinger, “Genossenschaften und Großhaushalt,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, June 1, 1921, 5–6. 13 See Anonymous, “Das erste Familien-Einküchenhaus in Wien,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, February 14, 1922, 7. The building was designed by Otto Polak-Hellwig, who took inspiration from similar prewar initiatives. It was the subject of the educational short Das Einküchenhaus (dir. Leopold Niernberger, 1922). 11

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The capitalist period shattered the great feudal organizations and guilds. The society of overlords and vassals, of master, apprentice, and journeyman, was supplanted by great numbers of individual entrepreneurs and workers who gradually came together. This process of gathering together has led the working class to develop a new social feeling based on class solidarity. Necessity forces workers to entrust their children to the street, which is where working-class solidarity first emerges. As soon as these adolescents are embraced by the Children’s Friends [Kinderfreunde] youth organization, a community of young people is consciously shaped. That is how a new youth community is being developed. And what about the adults? Until now, working-class families have lived an individualistic petty-bourgeois life. Working-class families have been crowded together in large tenement barracks without any real community developing other than the community formed by corridors and courtyards. Technically, this cluster of individual households is quite flawed. Think of what it means if everyone cooks the same meal in a building with one hundred separate kitchens. One hundred housewives bring home one hundred baskets of potatoes, sauerkraut, meat, flour. Yet we know that in a kitchen the size of a working-class kitchen or even smaller—as every military kitchen or dining car kitchen demonstrates—one or two cooks can prepare meals for one hundred people or more. The solution is obvious to an expert: construct a building with a centralized kitchen. The common kitchen, the common dining room, both bright and clean, are on the ground floor. Communal playgrounds for the children are on the flat roof. The labor movement representative can be satisfied. The woman is relieved. As a coworker, she can be an ever better comrade to man. No longer burdened with housework, she can also devote her evenings to her education and enjoy improved free time. Centralized economy, technically advanced living. A new life for those who are married, a new refuge for those who are single. But what does this look like in reality? The majority of the working class rejects single-kitchen buildings—regardless if they are married or single. At the same time, we see the fast-growing garden and settler movements that pander precisely to proletarian longings. Today, buildings with central kitchens are mainly used by middle-class intellectuals with a good income. How can this be explained? Mental inhibitions are having an influence. To start with, let us consider single-kitchen buildings for singles. A building of this kind will all too easily become an old people’s home or a madhouse [Narrenturm]. Most bachelors are eccentrics. And it is eccentrics who continue living in such buildings until they get old; the average young person will have floated away into marriage. All sorts of bickering and business disputes become unduly important. In general, this also applies to buildings for single women. Certainly, much speaks for such buildings as a fallback for single people, but no one can really be happy in them. That would be possible, for example, if the residents were to agree on a common belief, as was the case in monasteries. But today there are few people who desire such a home. And until now, working-class families have also avoided buildings with centralized kitchens. Middle-class families often decide to live in such buildings to spare a housemaid, out of pure expediency, or perhaps occasionally because it is “modern.” This is consistent with the fact that thus far, single-kitchen buildings have been built according to middle-class taste and are quite grand. What should be done? Centralized domestic management is surely the future. Could an ad campaign for single-kitchen buildings for the working class ever succeed? Unlikely. It would be best if the city were to construct single-kitchen buildings provided that it



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considers multistory buildings absolutely essential. That would allow us to gain a great deal of useful experiences. But the path to centralized domestic management will probably be different. Bringing strangers together [under one roof] does not conform to the spirit of the workers’ movement, which is pushing for solidarity. How can solidarity arise within us that will lead toward technically perfect centralism? One example is the settler movement. Workers create cooperatives and form real communities, communities that gradually forge a bond by working together, living together. Initially, in a quite petty-bourgeois spirit, most workers want to live in separate houses surrounded by a yard. But the lack of sufficient funding as well as various practical considerations demand the construction of row houses. And now, there where small gardens are supposed to be set up, the spirit of planned, large-scale development becomes apparent. In exemplary settlements, such as the Hoffingergasse, the gardens, albeit set up separately, are nevertheless part of an overall design. Consideration has been given to the shadows and roots of trees. The fencing is all the same. The long, structured residential buildings built in a uniform style have an architectural appeal that is entirely in line with the spirit of solidarity. The middle class has withdrawn into their houses. There you can still find the usual, mostly badly decorated interiors; only occasionally do you find furniture designed specifically for a new house, or built-in cupboards for clothes or dishes. Every home has its stove and laundry cauldron. But the kitchen is smaller and technically more perfect than in the past. It has become a kitchen corner in a large live-in kitchen, or a mini kitchen (kitchenette), as seen at the last allotment garden exhibition. Such mini-kitchens, adapted to any task, lead to technical thinking. They take so little space that they can be eliminated without much more ado. Their dismantling is not far off. Cooperative buildings and common laundry rooms will follow not long after. There will soon be joint mealtimes for single people and those who have difficulty preparing a meal at home. In particular, having children eat together, such as school meals, is an obvious step. Technical centralism is quite attractive to a real community. Settlements are showing how a new central organization is gradually being created by a technically more perfect and planned community. It is conceivable that even in large buildings, the living forms of the future will develop not from without but from within. Perhaps the first steps toward the future must be taken by tenant councils or tenant cooperatives, groups that create real solidarity. Homes for young, unmarried organized workers that double as educational collectives can also become real communities. The isolation of the petty bourgeoisie will not be overcome by constructing single-kitchen buildings as long as they result in mere superficial coexistence. Fostering communal life among proletarian groups and establishing collective children’s homes and youth centers are preparatory steps for the centralized technology of the future. A common kitchen, children playing together, and shared recreation is only possible in communal living conditions which are foreign to the middle class of today but familiar to the worker. There is already an immediate sense of the future when communal living begins to operate within the structures of the working class. And thus, the single-kitchen building and the settlement can both be expressions of the workers’ movement. Central kitchens, central children’s homes, central after-school care for adolescents, and attractive working-class community groups are therefore the first step into the future. Now it is up to the architects to arrange, from within the workers’ movement and in close collaboration with organized labor, all these centralizations, all this orderliness.

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7. Adolf Loos The Grand Babylon Hotel First published as “Das Grand-Hotel Babylon,” Die Neue Wirtschaft. Wiener Organ für Finanzpolitik und Volkswirtschaft, December 20, 1923, 10–11. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. The Austrian architect, designer, and critic Adolf Loos (1870–1933) first introduced his series of drafts for a terraced multistory hotel in 1923 at the annual Salon d’Automne exhibition in Paris. Akin to other projects Loos devised over the course of his career, the Grand Hotel Babylon was a programmatic attempt to synthesize two competing forms: the settlement-type house (Flachbau, or flat-roofed building) which provided access to an adjoining private garden and the residential high-rise apartment block (Hochbau) with integrated amenities and shared facilities. To Loos’s dismay, the project was never realized, but the idea of terraced gardens functioning as a binding element between interior living space and exterior public space continued to resonate with architects and city planners in Austria and abroad. Ten years ago, I built the villa of Dr. Ing. Gustav Scheu in Hietzing near Vienna. It caused a lot of headshaking. People thought such a structure appropriate for Algiers but not for Vienna. When designing the house, I had not thought in the least of the Orient. I had only imagined how very pleasant it would be to be able to step onto a large common terrace from the sleeping quarters, which were on the first floor. Anywhere: be it in Algiers or in Vienna. In any case, this design, which is duplicated on the second floor—a rental apartment—was something unfamiliar, extraordinary. An interpellator in the Municipal Council demanded that this type of construction be banned by the Municipal Planning and Building Office. One has to ask, why have terraces been common in the Orient for millennia but not used in our climes? The answer is simple: with the building techniques known until now, flat roofs and terraces could only be built in frost-free regions. Since the invention of the wood cement roof (gravel roof, crushed stone roof) and since the use of asphalt, flat roofs and terraces are both possible. Architects dreamed of flat roofs for four centuries. It was a dream that came true in the mid-nineteenth century. But most architects didn’t know what to do with a flat roof. Today one can say: since the flat roof is the best kind of roof there is, the cheapest and most durable, it can be used to gauge whether you are dealing with an architect or a decorator for the theater. It has always been my desire to build a terraced structure as an apartment building for workers. The fate of working-class children from the first year of life until they enter school seems particularly harsh to me. For the children, who had been confined by their parents in apartments, the communal terrace, which provides neighborly supervision, would be the key that unlocks their domestic dungeon. When I was invited by the Salon d’Automne in Paris to show my work, I had the choice between exhibiting a terraced building project for workers or a terraced hotel, which would receive a lot more attention. There is a widely read novel by Arnold Bennett: The Grand Babylon Hotel. So I had a name. Every hotel must be tailored to the needs of its location. I decided on the Riviera, which I knew very well. And every hotel should also be tailored to a specific social class. But these requirements are made impossible by structural shortcomings. Even in a luxury hotel, the rates for dark rooms on the courtyard have to be lower. A terraced hotel does not have any rooms on a courtyard, all its rooms face outward [. . .]. In addition, with the



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structure something like a cross-beam, the sunny east and west sides are elongated. But the most important thing is that every room has an adjacent terrace. Only the vertical north wing does not have terraces. The length and width of this wing make it possible to use its horizontal roof surface as an aircraft station. [. . .] If we liken the project to two joined pyramids, we can speak of two huge burial chambers, the core of the pyramids [. . .]. One burial chamber should be designed as an ice palace, the other as a large ballroom. Between the two pyramids, the hall is covered by a skylight, although instead of a glass roof, which would offer an ugly view of the inner terraces, this should be a water basin with a floor made of Luxfer glass tiles. If the proposed site is secured, the hotel can be built. The fifty commercial premises, some inside the hotel and some on the street front, at the extraordinarily high rents normal in the locality in question, will secure the building an interest yield of 5 percent that is independent of the hotel’s management and all other factors. But it can also be assumed that a hotel with a thousand beds (700 rooms) will certainly make a profit.

8. Josef Frank The Public Housing Palace: A Speech Not Delivered on the Occasion of a Groundbreaking First published as “Der Volkswohnungspalast: Eine Rede, anlässlich der Grundsteinlegung, die nicht gehalten wurde,” Der Aufbau: Österreichische Monatshefte für Siedlung und Städtebau 1, no. 7 (1926): 107–11.14 Translated by Andrew Hamilton. A prolific writer and a pioneering figure in modern architecture and interior design, Josef Frank (1885–1967) was committed to the idea of a garden city and the settlement-type housing experiment. While acknowledging that municipal multistory apartment blocks served as a necessary compromise in times of housing shortages, Frank criticized the small, isolated apartments financed by the city as a barely acceptable improvement over prewar housing conditions and standards of living. The following essay, originally published in Franz Schuster’s and Franz Schacherl’s influential yet short-lived journal Der Aufbau, is an excellent example of Frank’s acerbic, polemical style. The text can be read as an attack on Hubert Gessner, one of the most renowned architects of Red Vienna as well as on the generation of architects trained in the school of Otto Wagner. Frank satirizes their predilection for imperial grandeur and outer splendor and their striving for obsolete forms of monumentality and pathos in architecture which they considered an expression of modern (working-class) culture. Dear Mr. President, dear Mr. Mayor, dear honor guests! The city has now fulfilled its grand promise to build twenty-five thousand new homes. In spite of all the difficulties, in spite of all the gloomy prophecies, during Vienna’s time of crisis we have achieved something not considered possible even in our finest hours. We cannot do enough to honor those who have achieved this, nor those who have helped. Then let it fall to me, on the occasion of the groundbreaking for this public housing palace, which will contain the twenty-three thousand six hundredth to the twenty-five 14 First published in English in Josef Frank: Writings in Two Volumes, ed. Tano Bojankin, Christopher

Long, and Iris Meder (Vienna: Metroverlag, 2012), 1:254–67.

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thousandth new homes, simply to state two wishes for the future. The first: may all that we have seen so far be only the bold beginning of our city’s new undertakings! The second: may this be the final public housing palace built in the city of Vienna! This is no contradiction—it only appears to be when I read the words “public housing” and “palace” together as one. I have the feeling that two things have been joined together here, which ought not to ever have had anything to do with one another, and whose union cannot help but do disservice to one of them. And it is a lesser harm if this disservice should fall to the palace. [. . .] But when we hear the word “public housing,” we immediately imagine a certain idea, and a certain ideal, which is a long way from a palace. We see a home, light, airy, easily managed; light colors, sun, flowers; we see the simplest furnishings, the products of our industrial and artisan workshops, arranged in all different ways according to the taste of the occupant. And as for the palace! [. . .] I look in my Brockhaus encyclopedia and I find written there: “A palace is a structure built as a peacetime residence for princes and lords. In times of a modest citizenry (in ancient Athens, in the Roman Republic, in the German cities of the Middle Ages) no palaces were built. In Vienna large apartment buildings are also called palaces, even if only one floor is finely outfitted for the owner.” So it seems we have always been the most generous in handing out the title of palace even if only in the sense of the grocer who calls any customer who buys more than a quarter kilo of plums by noble titles. Today we see all sorts of palaces: industrial palaces, dance palaces, ice palaces, savings palaces, all nothing but establishments that tell us by their titles that they want to look like more than they are. Their exterior facades and fancy décor, mostly reminiscent of Calafatti,15 are only meant for the most superficial consideration. This was, to be sure, often the case when princes were building palaces, owners who understood more about pomp than about art, and spent their money accordingly. You need only look at the living quarters in Schönbrunn palace. This exterior gaudiness testifies to a disposition that ought to be more distant for us today than any other. The houses from the time of the “modest citizenry,” on the other hand, point to the honesty and objectivity which, even for the very wealthy, marks for us the transition toward public housing. [. . .] The sights of Vienna today largely consist of these old palaces. It is no wonder that their influence on us has lasted so long, since it is much easier to have an enduring ideal than an unknown one. [. . .] Who does not still remember the descriptions we heard of those speculator’s properties, that always included, however badly designed the buildings were, the house rules posted in elegantly carved imitation oak frames? Enough of that! Enough of the endless descriptions of these apartments, we have thousands of them and still not enough! As you know, our housing reforms have fought against them for half a century, but without achieving their goal. There can be no uncertainty about what the goal of our housing reforms are: a raising of living standards, light, air, space, sun, etc. And now to that we must add the need to outfit the residents with the necessary furnishings to fill the modest rooms in the public housing palace. Behind this word (and the world became flesh, and dwelt among us) we see an entire ethos rear its head, that of the ethos-less petty bourgeoisie. An ethos emanating from the base of the palace, which has salvaged its entire urge for representation at the expense of today’s standards of living. To be sure, we could go no other way. Our model was the noble palace, the only valuable architectural monument in Vienna, but it contains a culture that is not our own, imposed from above, not built up from below, and lacking in any foundation. The home of the worker is likewise borrowed from the petty bourgeoisie. That is not its 15 A

statue of a giant Chinese at the Vienna Wurstelprater.



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fault, but rather that of the circumstances and ideas of culture possessed by building speculators. Before 1920, the Viennese simply did not know what an apartment could be, since in Vienna it had only ever consisted of a corridor divided by walls into rooms. The standard single-family apartment in Vienna consisted of a small kitchen and one larger room. The kitchen was the family’s actual living room, while the other was for sleeping and entertaining, since, as the saying goes, you cannot bring guests into the kitchen. To quote another expression, if a man once began with the Baron, now he began with a polished bedroom. Decoration became its own purpose. This layout of the apartment was the result of inaccurate hygienic prejudices, which had no use for an open window. Today we know that an open window, especially the one right under the roof, brings the air of the room into contact with the whole earth. And we know that the majority of civilized humanity lives in the kitchen. Not in the cramped spaces we have now, but in the so-called “live-in kitchens.” We know that while higher ceilings make a room costlier to heat, they do nothing to make it easier to live in. Whoever does not grasp these ideas is in the thrall of palace thinking. We also know that the English building codes, which in this domain are much more advanced than ours, define the ceiling height in homes at two meters and forty-four centimeters, even though the English are on average larger and wealthier than the Viennese. But there are so many prejudices that must be overcome, and Rome was not built in a day. Neither will the new Vienna be built in five years. We have the whole future before us. [. . .] The apartments of this palace before us are described as follows: “The march of progress can also be clearly seen in the apartments themselves. The new housing complex in Floridsdorf will bring into being an entirely new type of home. The trend is clearly away from the live-in kitchen. Even the smallest apartment will have an entryway and its own kitchen.” This statement, submitted with satisfaction, means nothing less than that the attack on the old living ideas has hereby been successfully averted. The live-in kitchen, the great achievement of our new housing settlements, is being dismantled, and we are turning contentedly back to our old speculator’s point of view, which is what most of these new types of home consist of. [. . .] We are surely all aware that this new apartment is not a goal but a compromise between necessity, lack of culture, and bad will on one side, and skill, progress, and communal spirit on the other. The success has shown how meaningful this first step was. But we cannot give up, even if we have been closer to our ultimate ideal in housing than we are today. That ideal is the settler’s house. It cannot be emphasized enough that single family houses are the foundation of our entire modern architecture, and of our urban planning. [. . .] The Englishman says: “My house is my castle,” which we can take to mean: my house is my fortress, or, to translate more freely, my palace. And that means that in his house he can do and have done what he wishes: that the feeling of independence is the essential thing, a feeling that gives him pride and self-confidence, such as other forms of housing cannot give him. We know today that the primitive construction of the settler homes—thin walls, thin roofs—are not a liability, but a way of making the individual homeowners look after one another. This encourages the kind of communal spirit that the American pioneers have long known, and which is the reason why they no longer surround their property with fences. Whoever tries today to tell us that we have not come so far, he is just like the ones who say that we are also not ready for a republic and would like to force us into another couple hundred years of monarchy. For our own good. No one in an apartment building would call his home a palace, not even the landlord or the caretaker. Our new palace looks completely different.

Live-in-kitchen in the Fuchsenfeldhof, modestly furnished and flooded with natural light, ca. 1923. The photo was first published in a brochure by Gustav A. Fuchs, Der Fuchsenfeldhof (Vienna 1923) and then used by the Social and Economic Museum alongside other photographs to celebrate the achievements of Red Vienna. (Courtesy of Wien Museum.)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

INTERIOR DESIGN Aleks Kudryashova

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s the Austrian capital gradually recovered from the immediate aftermath of World War I, the city began to show signs of rapid renewal. The transformation of the urban landscape observed by many prominent contemporaries from abroad, such as the German writer Ernst Toller (1893–1939),1 were accompanied by no less profound changes within the domestic spaces hidden behind the building facades. The newly established settlements and thousands of new apartments erected throughout the city demanded novel, functional solutions in furnishing and a modern approach to interior design. Artists, architects, designers, and other experts were tasked with devising ideas on how to improve the living conditions of the working class. Organizations such as the Advice Bureau for Interior Design and Domestic Hygiene (Beratungsstelle für Inneneinrichtung und Wohnungshygiene, BEST) of the Austrian Association for Housing Reform (Österreichischer Verband für Wohnungsreform) showcased models of domestic interiors and supported new tenants in their search for appropriate furnishings. They also sought to educate the masses through lectures and publications in the belief that modern architecture and industrial design would help to advance the new social order and foster a new, authentic culture of domestic living (Wohnkultur) which the Viennese seemed to have lost during the war. Innovative interiors equipped with clever technical solutions were also meant to liberate the working class—and workingclass women in particular—from the burden of household work by creating light, airy, healthy spaces which were easier to maintain and did not require constant supervision on the part of the housewife. But before new interiors and furnishing could become affordable and widely available to the public, they had to be simplified, standardized, and set into serial production. To that end, the Austrian Werkbund brought together architects, designers, industrialists, and artisans to experiment with modern materials and construction methods and to produce contemporary, inexpensive furnishings that could be modified to fit the individual apartments. Some architects, such as Anton Brenner (1896–1957), even designed model apartments—machines for living (Wohnmaschinen), as he referred to them—with compact built-in closets and cupboards, folding beds, and small fitted kitchens.2 1 See

chapter 21. project sparked quite some interest among the populace, as is evident from the following report: Anonymous, “Das Haus mit den eingebauten Möbeln: Plan einer Zweizimmerwohnung,” Illustrierte Kronen-Zeitung, August 19, 1925, 3. 2 Brenner’s

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The quality of the kitchen facilities presented another major problem for the city. The conditions in most Viennese homes were inadequate and often unhygienic, irreconcilable with the demands of the time. The arrangement of the kitchen workspace proved to be inefficient and impractical, requiring a lot of unnecessary movement and much hard work on the part of the housewife. Faced with a choice between the traditional livein kitchen, a slightly less spacious eat-in kitchen, and an economically more viable work kitchen (Arbeitsküche) separated from the living and eating areas, Anton Brenner and Grete Lihotzky—who assisted Brenner with his work on the municipal housing complex in the Rauchfangkehrergasse (in Sechshaus, back then part of Vienna’s fourteenth district) while developing her own ideas—opted for the latter, not least for hygienic reasons. Inspired by Frederick W. Taylor’s system of scientific management,3 their rationalized, labor- and space-saving designs of an urban modern kitchen signaled a breakthrough in domestic design and household management. The local press was thrilled to present the functional solutions to their readers. Various motion diagrams quantified the efficiency of these meticulously organized work-only kitchens and compared them to typical prewar domestic settings.4 Other professionals, including prominent figures such as Adolf Loos (1870–1933) and Josef Frank (1885–1967), defended the traditional livein kitchen type (Wohnküche) which combined the living and kitchen space and was, in their view, more reflective of the everyday habits and domestic rituals of the working class. The open, multifunctional space of the live-in kitchen also served a social function: it allowed the women to remain visible as they attended to their daily chores instead of being isolated from the rest of the family in a separate cooking area. One of the challenges faced by the “architects of the interior” associated with Red Vienna—many of whom were women—was that working-class consumers were not as enthusiastic about letting go of their prized possessions, however outmoded or impractical these household furnishings were. For proponents of functionalism and the New Objectivity movement, exemplified by the Bauhaus school of design in Germany (1919– 1933), this posed a serious problem. They lamented the fact that although the means of production have changed drastically over time, the form of most commodities produced en masse remained the same. And because people prefer to buy what is familiar to them and above all affordable, old-fashioned furnishings and household objects continue to dominate the market. The future, they maintained, belongs to simple, straightforward, clear forms. Modern furniture must do away with individual embellishments and take on a technical, objective form. Not all progressive thinkers and artists agreed with this radical position which seemed to privilege the tastes of the intellectual elite rather than acknowledge the workers’ needs, dispositions, and personal sentiments. Opponents of the functionalist discourse, albeit not opposed to the new aesthetic, thus remained skeptical of the principles promoted by the radical avant-garde. Instead, they defended the residents’ right to make their own creative choices to treat pieces of furniture as “independent beings,”5 to appropriate the spaces available to them by combining functionality with individuality in a homely atmosphere. The architect, as Frank emphasized, “can only offer a scaffold or a framework for an apartment” but the interiors themselves are 3 Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1911). 4 See Anonymous, “Arbeitsersparung in der Küche,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, May 24, 1924, 12. 5 Oskar Strnad, “Neue Wege in der Wohnraumeinrichtung,” Innendekoration 33, no. 10 (October 1922): 324.

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“never unfinished and never finished”—they live and are alive with the people who inhabit them.6 The history of interior design in Red Vienna is only one chapter in a much more complex history of domestic architecture, applied arts, and industrial design. The architects, designers, and activists presented here were part of an international network; many—such as the multitalented Liane Zimbler (1892–1987)—operated successfully both in Vienna and abroad. Those who were forced to flee Europe took their ideas to the United States, Sweden, Great Britain, or the Soviet Union, where their influence can be felt to this day. Further reading Blau 1999 Brandstätter 2003 Brugger 1999 Hanisch 2018 Lefaivre 2017 Long 1997–1998 Plakolm-Forsthuber 1994 Spechtenhauser 2005

1. Adolf Loos Learning to Live First published as “Wohnen lernen!,” Neues Wiener Tagblatt, May 15, 1921, 8. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. Even though Adolf Loos’s (1870–1933) name is often associated with turn-of-the-century Vienna modernism, his career as an architect, designer, critic, and leading theorist of his time extends far beyond the early 1900s. Loos’s plans, drafts, and theoretical writings exerted a lasting influence on the development of architecture and interior design in the interwar period. In 1921, Loos took on the position of architectural director of the Settlement Office of the City of Vienna tasked to regulate the settlers’ activities and to provide counsel and assistance where and when needed. In this capacity, Loos frequently gave public lectures and published his ideas as part of the educational mission of the Settlement Office. His notion of the Viennese culture of living (Wiener Wohnkultur) which emerges from these writings was by no means limited to issues of domestic architecture, its form and function, but—as the following text demonstrates— closely tied to everyday practices, cultural habits, lifestyle choices, and even culinary preferences of the Austrian working-class set in stark contrast to Anglo-American notions of domesticity. People who live in their own [settler] homes have two floors. They divide their life into two distinct parts. Into life during the day and life at night. Into living and sleeping. Now do not imagine that dividing one’s life between two floors is uncomfortable. But a bedroom in our sense of the word does not exist. For that, they are too small and 6

Josef Frank, “Die Einrichtung des Wohnzimmers,” Innendekoration 30, no. 12 (December 1919): 416–17.

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unhomely. The only piece of furniture is a bed made of iron or brass painted white. You will search in vain even for a nightstand. And there is no wardrobe at all. A “closet,” a cabinet in the wall, literally a closed space, replaces the wardrobe. These bedrooms are really only for sleeping. They are easy to tidy up. But one thing about them is better than our bedrooms: they have only one door and can never be used as a walk-through room. In the morning, all the members of the family come downstairs at the same time. The baby is also brought downstairs and then stays the rest of the day with its mother in the living quarters. Every family has a table around which the whole family can gather for meals. Just like farmers. In Vienna, only 20 percent of the city can do that. What do the other 80 percent do? Well, one sits next to the stove, another holds a pot in his hands, three are at the table, the rest occupy the windowsills. And now, every family that gets their own home should be given a table like a farmer’s table, a table to put in the corner of the living room. Again, just like farmers. That will cause a nice revolution! There are voices for and against. “Nope, nope, that’s not somethin’ we’re gonna do! I saw them farmers in Upper Austria doin’ that. Sittin’ ’round the table and all of ’em eatin’ outta the same bowl. Nope, we’re not used to that kinda thing. We eat by usselves.” And a worried father says, “What, seated around a single table? My offspring will become accustomed to going to the pub!” When I tell people this, they laugh. But inside, I am dejected. We will not argue about the table. People will soon figure out that eating breakfast together saves money. A Viennese breakfast—a sip of coffee while standing next to the stove and a piece of bread eaten half on the stairs, half on the street—means at ten o’clock you need some goulash, something to trick the stomach. And since the goulash has a nice handful of paprika in it, you need a pint of beer. This meal, which the British and Americans have never heard of, not even its name, we call a fork-breakfast, apparently because only the knife sees any action. You’re not supposed to eat with a knife—“But how are you supposed to lap up the sauce?!” As long as the paterfamilias has to content himself with a sip of black coffee at home, he will be allowed to treat himself to this second breakfast. But his wife will soon find out that for the same amount of money, the whole family can enjoy a splendid American breakfast, so filling they will not be able to eat again until noon. In American families, breakfast is the nicest meal of the day. Everyone is refreshed after their sleep, the room is comfortable, freshly aired, and warm. The whole table is covered with food. First, everyone eats an apple. And then the mother serves oatmeal, that splendid dish to which America owes its energetic people, its grandeur, and its prosperity. The Viennese will make long faces, however, if I tell them that oat means Hafer, and meal means Speise. Nonetheless, we will make American-style oatmeal porridge for the day-trippers to Lainz and hope to convert all Vienna to eating oats.7 What good are the beautiful oat-eating horses we are so proud of! The people around here should also have “dry” well-contoured heads and expressive faces. Whether rich or poor, millionaire or pauper, oatmeal is never missing at the breakfast table in America. Everything else, whether cheap fish or an expensive veal cutlet, is a matter of circumstance. Of course, tea and bread are also served—curiously, also for lunch and dinner. Lunch is a very simple affair. The father is not at home; the mother has been busy all morning working around the house, since housewives do not have servants. This lack 7 Lainz

is part of Vienna’s Thirteenth District, Hietzing.

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of a domestic spirit in the household results in food being prepared in the living room, since the woman of the house has a right to spend her time in the living room, not in the kitchen. This arrangement, however, means that there are two sides to cooking. The work is divided into two clearly separated parts. One part is the work at the hearth. The other part involves the preparation and washing the dishes. The first part is done in the living room, where the stove is standing. This means, however, that the stove has to be hidden as much as possible from the residents’ sight. What has not been invented in America to solve this problem! Only recently I saw a photograph in a journal, or rather, two photographs. One showed a stove in a wall niche, the other, a desk in the same niche. With the push of a button the whole thing, like a tabernacle, revolves as needed, electrically. But such an arrangement requires more than just technology. It calls for people who are not afraid of cooking. All of us who are slightly horrified by cooking, a feeling that farmers, Englishmen, and Americans do not share, are quite surprised that these exotic people are offered dining rooms in hotels where food is cooked right in front of the dining guests. During the war such a room was called a Rostraum, now it is called a grill room again. But the simple settler will call it a live-in kitchen or a cooking room and will be as noble as an English lord. Or as uncouth as an Austrian farmer. Anyone who wants to be a settler has some learning to do. We have to forget about life in tenements. If we want to live in the countryside, we have to take some lessons from a farmer to see how he does it. We have to learn how to live.

2. Hans Ankwicz-Kleehoven Simple Household Goods: On the Exhibition at the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry First published as “Einfacher Hausrat: Zur Ausstellung im Österreichischen Museum für Kunst und Industrie,” Der Architekt 23, nos. 11–12 (1920): 81–83. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. In the immediate postwar years, faced with new challenges that resulted from an acute housing shortage, Vienna’s leading artists, architects, and designers focused their attention on finding viable, practical, and above all cost-efficient solutions. Their designs included proposals on how to improve individual living conditions by adapting any available living space to modern needs and standards. To that end, the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry organized a competition, followed by an exhibition, with the aim to present and popularize models of domestic interiors alongside everyday domestic objects and basic, easily adaptable furnishings which, in the near future, could be put into serial production and thus become available to the wider public at lower cost. Written by the art historian and librarian Hans Ankwicz-Kleehoven (1883–1962), this short review of the exhibition outlines the ideas behind the displayed individual designs of working-class interiors while addressing some of the shortcomings of the architects’ collective endeavor. The directorate of the Austrian Museum and their specialist adviser, the architect Prof. Karl Witzmann, deserve credit for having organized an exhibition of “simple household goods” just at a time when transportation is extremely difficult and the prices for

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materials and wages are increasing. The exhibit aims to provide, on the one hand, an overview of the current status of the housing reform movement and, on the other hand, practical advice in acquiring household goods that are simple yet artistically perfect. The curators of the exhibition left no doubt whatsoever that given the great difficulties facing the furniture industry today, no overall satisfactory solution can be expected for all problems. As stated in the foreword to the catalog: “The last word on these matters has not yet been spoken and there are many other possibilities. Continuing earlier efforts of the Austrian Museum, as most recently seen at the International Housing Congress, it has been demonstrated again and ever more urgently that the goal should be to generate simple prototypes.” Although we have not succeeded in finding “simple prototypes” for everything, the steady attempts to harmonize the form and materials of the most important household items not only with their purpose but also with the limited resources of today’s living conditions, are nonetheless an important step forward and will guarantee the exhibition’s lasting impact. A regrettable drawback is the fact that the prices of even the most modest furnishings could not be lowered to a level affordable by normal working- and middle-class households. This will likely have a major impact on the exhibition’s practical application. But by no means does this call the whole thing into question, since it is not just a marketing show. Its primary purpose is rather to give the large number of viewers an awareness of quality products in order to safeguard them from purchasing worthless and poor goods from dealers. [. . .] The second part presents forty-eight interiors, most of them quite tastefully done. They are typical examples of the few types of interior design that come into question for workers and the middle-class today, people who must use rooms in the most economical way possible. Furnishings for the entryway, kitchen (live-in kitchen), bedroom and living (and dining) room have been reduced to their simplest forms and are usually made of softwood. Special thrift also limits the size of the living quarters, taking hygienic requirements into account of course. Not only are the dimensions restricted to the absolute minimum in all of these interiors—which are still quite comfortable despite the savings—also the height of the rooms is lower without their seeming cramped in any way. Reducing the room height from the usual 3.2 meters to 2.5 meters is a savings of 70 centimeters. In a three-story building, that is equivalent to nearly an entire floor. In the same vein, individual pieces of furniture have been stripped of all superfluous ornamentation. Making knobs, handles, and fittings out of wood or iron is just as good as those made from brass or bronze, and similarly, lamps have been made from the simplest and most inexpensive materials. Most of the furniture is just painted, not polished, although one might have wished for a bit more color. In some cases the edges have been rounded to prevent the paint from wearing off too quickly. A prime example of this simplified furniture style, which takes the needs of today into account, are the pretty white furnishings (in rooms 39 to 42) produced by Frana & Co. based on the well-thought-out designs of the architect Prof. K. Witzmann. It is not without reason that the Biedermeier style has recently received quite a lot of attention. That was also a period when hardships similar to what we are experiencing now led to utmost simplification, the result being those simple yet sensible forms still so appealing today. A revival of the Biedermeier spirit can often be found in Witzmann’s work. Also, it is hard to overlook deliberate references to the attractive furniture forms of our great-grandfathers in the work of some of the other interior architects. In contrast, the architect Hugo Gorge follows a very modern path. He has sought to bring a more personal touch to a living room and a bedroom made by the company R. Lorenz. He often comes up with very original results, albeit, on occasion, they

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seem somewhat forced. An exceptionally good impression was made by the live-in kitchen and bedroom for an existing worker’s home (in rooms 18 to 20) designed by the architect Prof. Dr. Josef Frank. It is from one of the workers’ colonies in Lower Austria that have been built by the concrete construction company Diss & Co. using the Immobiliar Adutt hollow structure system. Already the moderate price is remarkable: the whole little house costs only 100,000 kronen, complete with furnishings, a sum that would even be affordable—especially if paid in installments—for less well-off circles in the working population. It is an amount that would certainly be happily spent if it seemed possible to own a parcel of land as well as a small home in the foreseeable future. Given the present circumstances, however, such possibilities can probably only be realized in settlements. Carrying them out successfully will hopefully bring a favorable solution not only to many economic and social issues but also to the urgent problem of housing reform. The exhibition Simple Household Goods is quite inspiring and instructive in this regard.

3. Ernst Lichtblau Aesthetics Based on a Spirit of Economy First published as “Ästhetik aus dem Geiste der Wirtschaft,” Die Ware: Eine Zeitschrift für wirtschaftliche Bildung und Qualitäts-Produktion 1, nos. 3–4 (1923): 70. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. Ernst Lichtblau (1883–1963) was one of the few students of Otto Wagner at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna who embraced contemporary modernism, moving gradually away from the monumental designs of his teacher. Lichtblau worked as an independent architect and interior designer and was closely associated with the Vienna Workshop (Wiener Werkstätte), a collaborative project that brought together a diverse group of progressive artists, designers, and craftsmen. He was a key figure and the founding member of the Austrian Werkbund—an association of architects and manufacturers—and served as the director of the Advice Bureau for Interior Design and Domestic Hygiene. The organization, located in the Karl-MarxHof, functioned as a permanent exhibition space and information center for tenants seeking advice on how to efficiently organize and furnish their apartments in the newly erected municipal housing complexes. The emphasis was placed on simple, innovative yet reasonably priced, if not always affordable, solutions reflective of the new socioeconomic order. In this short piece, written for Die Ware, a magazine for economic education and quality production, Lichtblau presents his vision of this new aesthetic while underscoring the intrinsic connection between style, form, and function. The goals of a workshop for arts and crafts must be above all of a social nature. They should liberate the great masses of consumers from that demon of formlessness which has, until now, prevented artists and consumers from a mutual understanding. Nature provides a cue for people’s household needs, a cue that can guide the artist when searching for forms organically linked to how objects are used—for a tangible understanding, so to speak, of their function. Only if the objects in our environment have clear forms do they come alive, do we become attached to them through our senses, do we enjoy and breathe life into them, as it were. Comprehensively analyzing the functions of all objects we use is a task of the greatest importance for the household. The future of our economic life depends on whether it is

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possible to persuade consumers to place ever more aesthetic demands on objects of everyday use. This would liberate them from the oppression of conventional formlessness. We are less concerned with new and unusual forms being created than with qualities that actively communicate something about their true nature. Thus, if the artist adapts to the economic demands of our times, it may be possible to create aesthetic forms with a style based on a spirit of economy.

4. Josef Frank Kitsch for Fun and Kitsch as a Problem First published as “Der Gschnas fürs G’müt und der Gschnas als Problem,” in Bau und Wohnung, ed. Deutscher Werkbund (Stuttgart: Akad. Verlag Dr. Fr. Wedekind, 1927), 48–57.8 Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. Josef Frank (1885–1967) is rightly regarded as one of the most influential and extraordinary figures of Red Vienna. A nuanced thinker, committed to improving the living and housing conditions of the working class, Frank staked out a position that was often at odds with the city administration which favored the construction of large apartment blocks over more generously dispersed settlement areas. He also rejected the functionalist designs promoted by the radical avant-garde and their attitudes toward the proletariat whose penchant for decorative forms was often frowned upon. Instead, Frank repeatedly highlighted the importance of a continued relationship between modern design and the forms of the past. Among Frank’s writings from the interwar period, this essay particularly stands out in terms of its combined reflection on applied arts, industrial design, and the role of Social Democratic reforms in carving a new cultural identity. In his typical acerbic fashion, Frank problematizes the issue of ornament while refuting the austerity of functionalist style as practiced by the Bauhaus school of design. The herald of modern culture says (as part of his ABCs): “Someone who travels by train, automobile, or airplane cannot possibly, upon returning home, lean back in a Louis XIV/XV/XVI armchair without being aware of an inherent falsehood, without feeling ridiculous. Our times need objectivity, simplicity, authenticity, mechanical work. If these demands were generally met, this would develop into an all-inclusive culture, a culture like the Negro supposedly still enjoys today. Why drag all that old junk around? Monuments to tastelessness, witnesses of failure, dust collectors and the like. And that at a time (unlike last year) when we realize there is a chance to redesign everything?[”] [. . .] It is very easy to reform the world through applied arts. The fine arts need personality and ingenuity, they need an idea. Applied arts do not need that at all. They need a system supported by taste and the kind of skills almost everyone has; every system, if carried out consistently, will have an effect for a certain length of time. Anyone who deals with usable objects can make this happen. Nothing new is being created; what we already have is merely being altered in various ways so the producer or owner can display his own 8 First

published in English in Josef Frank: Writings in Two Volumes, ed. Tano Bojankin, Christopher Long, and Iris Meder (Vienna: Metroverlag, 2012), 1:288–99.

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personal taste. This is something to which the general public attaches great importance. People would sooner be accused of murder and robbery than of bad taste. And it is clear that the less opportunity one has at work to satisfy a sense of zest in life, all the greater is the need to undertake something stylish. The reason applied arts are being taken up to such a large degree today is because there are so many educated people who have nothing to do. After all, it is work that requires some thinking and is always stimulating (in contrast to accounting or the like). And it can be carried out without any special talent. In fact, it is the ideal occupation for all humankind. Everyone would be happy to produce nothing but applied arts. But if someone today were to ask the intellectually progressive public their opinion, they would be greatly surprised to hear that such people have no need for arts and crafts at all. They want nothing in their environment that might disturb their personal and individualistic vanity. People want and need objectivity and an impersonal space so they can present themselves to best effect. Applied arts are produced for the sake of being produced, not for the sake of being used. But once they are here, they are forced on people. For us—people with no traditions and a young culture who have to use antiques as inanimate decorative objects—there is a need to find substitutes for those things that are so important to one’s emotional life. Morris already aimed at enhancing daily life with a Japanese aesthetic.9 This ideal still exists, but we are moving toward it along another path than he did. We do need machines to work for us, something he fought against. There will always be old things, and some are good and some are bad, after all not everyone is a master craftsman. It is therefore very useful to promote amateurs in such a way that everyone is able to get involved in our mechanized world in a leisurely and tasteful way. This will hopefully mark the end of the current hubbub about applied arts. The emotionally sensitive person who needs a sentimental environment wants to be able to relax when he gets home from work, to feel as if someone is taking care of him. It is a feeling that begins with dusting and ends with elaborate embellishments. These embellishments represent peace and quiet, because they involve a superfluous and playful activity that goes beyond what is necessary. The more embellished the object, the more of a calming effect it seems to have, provided we have enough time to look at it in detail. A waiting room must have an open and simple floorplan so a person can get easily in and out, but you never get tired of looking at a Persian carpet. Those who are demanding bareness are chiefly those who think all the time, or at least can do so sometimes. They are people who are able to find comfort and relaxation in other ways. For them, entertainment is of a more intellectual nature. They own books and paintings given to them by artists they know. They do not need fun decorations. All they need is a farmer’s writing table, a bent chair, a work lamp, all of which are but sketches of objects that are, as such, real; any further work on them (which is the purpose and aim of applied arts) leads them into the inauthentic realm of imitation and restatement. This is also the case with works of art, which is why sketches by less important artists are more tolerable than their finished works, since they at least express some personality. Although not “beautiful,” an attic and an iron staircase are real, since it is self-evident that they have been developed out of necessity and thus have some value. Continuing to work on completed things, however, is an activity that will never end, since there are infinite numbers of variations. This is where the modern movement butted in and said: “Oddly enough, our environs have not developed in the same organic way as 9 Frank

is referring to William Morris (1834–1896), a Victorian writer, designer, and political activist associated with the arts and crafts movement.

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our clothing, ships, pipes. Something must be done about this.” Applied arts have become a problem. It is one of the annoyances of our times to see problems everywhere; this has destroyed the whole point of the objects being designed, has made them pathetic and hence useless. Formerly a pleasant radiance emanated from their comfortable, trouble-free existence, an existence that could have gone on forever. Today we pretend to be seeking the basic object: the basic chair, the basic carpet, the basic lamp, things that for the most part already exist. But in fact, what we are really looking for is a chance to redesign them. [. . .] New forms are offered up daily as sacrifices to the machine, which today is celebrated with divine honors. Since the machine is simply a tool that can make anything, forms are not created with the machine in mind. But out of anxious tenderness for that beloved object—oh, not to overstrain it!—straight lines, functionality, simplicity, uniformity are being decreed. There is an ulterior motive behind this (and only so it is possible for the prophets of modernity to gaze calmly into their eyes): to get to the same old stuff again by entering through the back door. Have one of our modern artisans design the modern shoe. He will immediately invent a functional form so it can be produced by a machine. He will take two tubes and attach them together, one vertical, the other horizontal. A single shoe for all, for the right foot and the left foot. If it doesn’t fit, then put in some padding! And the machine breathes with relief and can relax. Yes, a chair made of straight dowels is acceptable if it has to be produced in the cheapest way possible—even at the cost of comfort. But if you stick to this for reasons of form, not usefulness, it is like the man who builds his house without lights or a bathroom so he can afford a Gothic bay window. What is important is not the amount being spent, but how it is distributed. Our life today is rich enough that we can accept much of what we are accustomed to, also if it comes from an earlier stage of development. In earlier times, people were restricted in their movements and so they had to be modern about everything. You can use anything at your disposal. If something becomes unusable, it is discarded ipso facto. Today it is not possible to ride in the chariot of Achilles any more than in Napoleon’s. But you can sit on their ornate armchairs. So who has the more modern attitude: the person who accepts these things as they are, or the one who preserves their fading aspects by modernizing them? The city hall of New York was built in 1802. Unlike the other facades, the north side was not clad in marble, since no one thought that houses would ever be built behind it. Today it stands at the southernmost end of the city. That will be the fate of our reformers. They always defend themselves against attacks from the Right without realizing that they are already leaning right.

5. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Efficiency in the Household First published as Grete Lihotzky, “Rationalisierung im Haushalt,” Das Neue Frankfurt, 1, no. 5 (April–June 1927): 120–23. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000) is perhaps best known for her internationally acclaimed design of a prefabricated fitted kitchen, the “Frankfurt kitchen”—a true milestone in domestic design. Trained as an architect under Heinrich Tessenow and Oskar Strnad, Lihotzky first began to experiment with industrial kitchen design while working for the Austrian Association for Settlements and Allotment Gardens (1922–1924) alongside Josef Frank and Adolf Loos with whom she later collaborated. After Lihotzky arrived in Frankfurt am Main in 1926, following an invitation from the city’s director for urban development,

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Ernst May (1926–1930), she continued to further develop her drafts. As increasingly more women joined the workforce, the demand grew steadily for inexpensive, compact yet versatile and above all technologically efficient kitchen furniture and equipment that would streamline the housework and thus liberate the women from their double burden. The article, published in the New Frankfurt magazine which was edited by Ernst May, addresses the women’s reluctance to accept technological advancements and invites them to revisit The New Apartment and Its Interior Design exhibition showcasing Lihotzky’s model interiors. Every thinking woman must be aware of how backward household management used to be and recognize that this has severely inhibited her own development, and thus also that of her family. Today’s hurried city life demands much more from a woman than the placid life of eighty years ago. But with few exceptions, she is condemned to run her household the same way her grandmother did. Making the work of the housewife more efficient is important for almost all classes of the population. Middle-class women often do household chores without any help, and working-class women frequently have other work to do as well. Being so overburdened with work cannot be without consequences for the general public health. [. . .] But how can we reduce the usual waste of labor and time in the household? We can apply the principles of labor efficiency and economic management to housework, principles that have led to unprecedented increases in productivity in factories and offices. We must realize that there is always a best and simplest way to do every job, and thus a way that is the least tiring. Three groups of people—housewives, manufacturers, and architects—have the important and responsible task of working together to identify and facilitate the simplest methods for doing every kind of housework. Among housewives, women who are educated will always work more efficiently. With the help of the right appliances and machines and with the proper layout of the home, she will soon discover the most efficient way to do her work. Among manufacturers (except for furniture manufacturers), there are already many today who are responding to the new demands of our time and bringing useful, laborsaving appliances and machines onto the market. But home furnishings are still by far the most antiquated. When will the general public finally comprehend what kind of home furnishings are the most sensible and best? The German Werkbund and individual architects, through countless articles and lectures, have spent years of effort to promote clarity, simplicity, and functionality and to convince people to turn away from the traditional kitsch of the past fifty years. It has hardly helped at all. Going into apartments, we still find the old trinkets and the usual awful “decorations.” The reason all of these efforts have had virtually no success is mainly because of women, who are strangely enough not receptive to the new ideas. Furniture dealers say that customers always want old styles. Women even prefer to take on extra work in order to have a “cozy and comfortable” home. Today most people think that simplicity and functionality are synonymous with austerity. The municipal planning and building office [Hochbauamt] of the City of Frankfurt has tried to convince people of the opposite by erecting a fully furnished model home at the The New Apartment and Its Interior Design exhibition taking place at the Frankfurt trade fair. It attempts to show that simple and functional objects not only save labor but are also serene and beautiful if made from good materials and suitably shaped and colored. In a special part of the exhibition, the Frankfurt Housewives’ Association highlighted the importance of an efficient household. This part of the exhibition, “The modern

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household,” dealt primarily with the problem of the labor-saving kitchen. As a particularly instructive example of how steps and movement can be reduced, a fully equipped dining car kitchen and sideboard was shown first. Another three kitchens, complete with built-in furnishings, showed how the correct choice and arrangement of furniture can make work easier. About three thousand of the first two kitchens have been built in Frankfurt. Here, three types of kitchen layouts were considered: 1 The household without a domestic servant (up to an annual income of about 5,000 marks); 2 The household with a domestic servant (with an annual income of about 10,000 marks); 3 The household with two domestic servants (with an annual income of more than 10,000 marks). In addition to these wooden kitchen furnishings, a small kitchenette made from metal for the single-person home was shown, as well as a kitchen built with washable cinderblocks. Both kitchens demonstrate attempts to find new materials that are less sensitive to external influences than wood. To facilitate work, the kitchens are small and completely separated from the living room. The old form of the live-in kitchen seems to have gone out of fashion. Also presented were good examples of freestanding, commercially available kitchen furniture that significantly help to facilitate housework. Signs in different colors indicate which household and kitchen utensils are good or bad—that is, whether they waste or save labor, are easy or difficult to clean. Kitchen utensils that have a proven track record with housewives abroad include draining racks for bowls, plates, and cups that make the chore of drying china unnecessary as well as funnels that allow a certain amount of flour to flow into a bowl. Electrical appliances and equipment were given particular attention. Although still out of reach for the less well-off, we know that the electric kitchen is in the foreseeable future. Models of centralized electric laundry facilities, which should be installed in every large housing complex, demonstrate to women how doing laundry can be made easier. This should encourage women to ask for laundry facilities, which are cost-effective even for low-income families, in sufficient numbers. In a central laundry facility in Frankfurt a. M., in addition to electric washing machines, the owner, at the request of the tenants, also installed manual washing machines. Now, after a year, the manual washing machines stand idle, since all the women only want to do their laundry with the other ones. A bathroom measuring 1.65 by 1.35 meters—“the smallest bathroom in the smallest space”—is proof that the call for “a bath in every apartment” is no longer an unrealistic ideal. A 1:10 model of an apartment showed that it was possible save space by inserting a “wash and shower stall” between two bedrooms that measured 1.6 square meters. Taking a shower, with its constant flow of water, is more efficient than washing up in a tub. A model of a single-family house fully equipped with gas demonstrated how gas can be used throughout the house. The exhibition also emphasized the importance of good lighting in the home. How much money can be saved merely by choosing the right wallpaper, wallpaper that enhances a room’s brightness! For the health of the family, how important it is to direct women, who are the majority of buyers, toward proper and technically sound work lamps so they do not continue mindlessly to purchase those little ornate floor lamps with dark, dust-collecting silk shades.

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6. Else Hofmann A Residence and Workspace for a Professional Couple: A Design by the Architects Liane Zimbler and Annie Herrnheiser First published as “Wohn- und Arbeitsstätte eines berufstätigen Ehepaares: Eine Schöpfung der Architektinnen Liane Zimbler und Annie Herrnheiser,” Die Österreicherin 2, no. 10 (December 1929): 4–5. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. The typical working-class apartments allocated by the municipality of Vienna were relatively small and often hardly suitable for single professional women and working married couples who required privacy to do their work from home. And even though attempts had been made to provide single women with appropriate living spaces through housing cooperatives with shared facilities such as the Heimhof apartment building inspired by the ideas of feminist activist and social reformer Auguste Fickert (1855–1910), Red Vienna officials were far from meeting the need for suitable homes.10 Possible solutions to women’s struggles to attain a higher living standard were a popular topic in magazines targeted toward women, such as Die Österreicherin (The Austrian woman), a journal published by the liberal National Council of Women–Austria. The journalist Else Hofmann was a regular contributor who strived to popularize the work of women architects such as Liane Zimbler. Zimbler, née Juliana Fischer (1892–1987), was a prolific, multifaceted architect, fashion, furniture, and interior designer, teacher, and public speaker. She established an office in Vienna and later, with the aid of her associate, Annie Herrnheiser, in Prague. Zimbler’s innovative, elegant designs for small one-bedroom apartments and studios proved to be particularly successful among the middle class. With ever more women aspiring to take on jobs over the last decades, especially since the war, apartments for single working women have become a major issue for modern architecture and social welfare. Residential complexes for working women, such as the exemplary “Heimhof” established in Vienna by Fickert, or the marvelous female student dormitory in Charlottenburg (designed by the architect Emilie Winckelmann) offer various fitting and tasteful solutions for the problem of one-room apartments for the single working woman. These solutions, allowing visits of both a private and professional nature, include sofa beds, built-in washing alcoves or bathing cubicles, kitchenettes and so on. The new designs of the architect Grete Schütte-Lihotzky for the residential complexes under construction by the Frankfurt municipal planning and building office [Stadtbauamt] also give careful attention to apartments for single working women, although this experienced architect does not want residential complexes just for women; rather she wants these complexes to house apartments for both single women and married couples. It is understandable that leading women and social politicians first turned their attention to the welfare of the single professional woman. But over the course of time, most married women have also begun to work and must live in modest apartments together with their husbands and, in some cases, with a child. If the husband has a profession that binds him in whole or in part to the home (doctor, writer, salesman, or the like), for 10 See

chapter 12 and chapter 21.

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such couples, the conventional apartment with a bedroom and dining room is absolutely impractical. But the more modern type of apartment, with a bedroom and a living room, is not suitable either. A married professional needs a room to which they can retire without disturbing their spouse, a room that fulfills their living and working needs. But the apartment should also offer the possibility for a modest social life. The interior decorators, the architect Liane Zimbler and Annie Herrnheiser, have designed an apartment in Prague that offers some successful solutions. Within the limited space of a two-room apartment, with entry, pantry, and side rooms, they have very skillfully created a residence for a married couple with culturerelated professions (a music teacher and a writer) that takes into account their personal preferences and needs. The bedroom, which also serves as the music room, contains two modern types of beds. One, placed in a niche created by cabinets and the wall, can be closed off with pretty curtains made of English cretonne fabric; the other is a sofa bed with a small, low table. Armchairs and floor lamps are part of a charming reading corner at the window. The critical problem of a bed in a woman’s professional room is thus perfectly resolved in two ways, with both solutions enhancing the room. This bed-/living room—with its light yellow walls and Japanese red molding, buffed varnish cabinets, colorful curtains, sand-colored covers on the comfortable walnut armchairs, and a simple dark brown carpet—combines, in an unusual way, discrete restraint and repose (within the color spectrum of yellow, cream, and brown) with the bold highlights of the crimson molding. The room includes a living room space, an area with the piano, and an entire bedroom, with the cozy bed niche separated from the rest of the room by an enormous wardrobe, which is extraordinarily practical since it can hold the woman’s entire wardrobe. The adjoining dining/living room—the husband’s study—has bookshelves and a writing desk, as well as a sitting area with a pull-out dining table. The sideboard, made from medium brown oak, is extremely convenient since the central section has a leaf that opens to the front (an innovative and very useful idea borrowed from the secretary). Leaving the interior otherwise closed, this provides serving racks and a folded-down serving tray. Since the walls are the same as in the bedroom, the room is quite bright. This is subdued by the calm, dark oak furniture as well as by the dark blue and brown striped upholstery and cream-colored curtains. A large Persian carpet covers the entire floor of the room, its deep rich colors standing out against a burgundy background. The whole interior is carefully thought out and is characteristic of the sensible temperament of its creators. The entry is divided into a hallway and a cloakroom by a wall unit containing the husband’s wardrobe. In the hallway there is a bench made of burnt spruce. In contrast to the dark wood and white walls, the colorful cushions and striped portiere curtain fabric look cheerful and modern without being garish or flamboyant. This two-room apartment for a professional couple provides a good solution for the problem of the working married woman. Today, this is as important as designing apartments for the single working woman. It has been undertaken energetically and competently, as well as with something else that is not unimportant: limited resources. Also, other interiors designed by Zimbler and Herrnheiser have cleverly and neatly arranged living spaces and floor plans. Their layout of kitchen, bath, utility room and pantry, coat closets and so forth is always excellent. Expert architectural minds combined with a housewife’s knack for organization have resulted in something exemplary. These abilities have made it possible to solve, with tact and energy, the important issue of designing a “professional home for the married woman in modest circumstances.”

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7. Franz Schuster A Furniture Book: A Contribution to the Problem of Contemporary Furniture Extended second edition published as Ein Möbelbuch: Ein Beitrag zum Problem des zeitgemäßen Möbels (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1932), 3–6. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. A student of the internationally acclaimed German architect and urban planner Heinrich Tessenow and a strong advocate of the urban garden movement who joined the Austrian Association for Settlements and Allotment Gardens shortly after the war, Franz Schuster (1892– 1972) was committed to finding the means to alleviate the social housing crisis and the shortages and discomforts associated with it. Frustrated with the configurations and furnishings of standard apartments at the time and faced with the lack of viable and above all affordable options, Schuster began to draft his own designs. The results were advertised in his Möbelbuch (Furniture book), a slim volume which contained over one hundred illustrations of so-called modular furniture (Aufbaumöbel) alongside detailed layout plans of different apartment types and suggestions on how to organize the available space and furnish the rooms. Schuster divided his designs into four basic categories (G, K, L, R) according to their form and function.11 Once these simple, straightforward forms—the basic vocabulary of his modular furniture system— were established, it was possible to combine the individual elements in different variations and thus create new configurations based on the same simplified, standardized elements. The Basics [. . .] Furniture, like clothes, shoes, and household items, has always been an object of daily use, but it is a sign of general uncertainty and confusion when things that are straightforward must be repeated so often, or when they must be depicted as new verities. When men wore neck ruffs and embroidered tailcoats, trousers with ribbons and shoes with buckles, their furniture was congruent with those things. The form they took always agreed with all other forms, their attitude, with the entire attitude of the era. As our overall situation has changed, so have our requirements regarding functionality, which in turn has spawned new forms. The forms of objects of daily use and clothing correspond to new production methods and our new circumstances. It has become self-evident that the pens we use, or our hats, or all the other necessary things we ordinarily need in our lives, do not have to be made individually for each person. It is obvious that if they were, they could not be produced in the required quantities or at reasonable prices. This is not any different for furniture: there are factories that only produce chairs, others just tables, and still others make the same kind of bedroom or living room furniture year in and year out. This furniture is produced according to the new methods of our century, but the design is usually from bygone eras. This is why altered and bowdlerized imitations of baroque or Biedermeier furniture is often mass produced. It is inexpensive and so it is also bought by the masses, who, with the weakness that is human, seek in these styles a substitute for 11

G = Gestell, a frame or a kind of stand; K = Kasten, a cabinet or a box; L = Lade, a chest or a drawer; and R = Regal, shelves.

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inner values that have been lost in harum-scarum development. An era that appreciates and overestimates outer riches in any form, even if those riches are only apparent, is also inclined to overlook the make-believe in the outer riches of form in the case of furniture. Such superfluous add-ons are neither missed nor needed in all those things having to do with new discoveries and possibilities. Radio and dirigible, railroad, and automobile—the thousand new things of our times have their own self-evident, intrinsic forms. We find them beautiful just because they fulfil a clear and simple job. It is only these things that give a special character to our times; they are the precursors of future things. Their inherent value and inner wealth of new possibilities, whether put to proper or improper use at any given moment, is the wealth of our times. They do not need to borrow anything from other eras. This abundance of new possibilities in our outer lives is now being faced by an emptiness in our inner lives. Overcoming this is a goal and obligation for the coming years. But this longing for inner wealth will only find the proper path if we shape the tasks of our times in such a way that they provide a broad and uniform foundation for times yet to come. Mass-produced furniture, as an object of daily use, must reject all references to handmade, individual forms; it must be given a technical and objective form, like the forms we take for granted for pens and radiators, bathtubs and cookware, as well as all the other objects we use or work with. The value of such a new form will lie precisely in its fundamentals and significance, with which it considers and complies with the methods of production and the demands concerning its use. There is no need to fear that human qualities will come up short; they will merely have a different impact than when the emphasis is on ornamentation. The hats and caps we wear are all the same; it is the person wearing them who gives them their individuality. The furniture we buy is made by the thousands, thousands that are all alike; its adornments and seemingly individual forms do not make it special. If all furniture has an objective form, then it is people who will have to give individuality to apartments again. It will become apparent that most people lack individuality, and that this lack of inner wealth is what embellishments are supposed to cover up. It is for this very reason, not only because it corresponds to our times, that we must seek and promote objective forms so they blaze the trail for the times to come. For the time being, simple furniture is still rare, and thus it costs more than massproduced goods, which are on average cheaper. Since apparent wealth is confused with real wealth, as well as simple forms with being poor, people think that simple, plain furniture must be the cheapest. But under the same conditions, plain furniture will always be more expensive, since the materials and craftmanship must be better than with the decorated furniture, where faults in the materials or poor construction can be hidden by trimmings. At a time when manufacturers and buyers prefer decorated furniture—the proportion to simple, plain furniture is about a thousand to one—it is particularly difficult to create the conditions that could lead to mass production and thereby to plain furniture becoming cheaper. Since ornate furniture is mass produced and the industry has no interest in cultural undertakings that bring no profits, there is a great deal that stands in the way of simple furniture being generally introduced. The result is the familiar cycle: most people can only buy cheap furniture, and since the cheapest furniture has the most decorations, that is what people usually purchase and is therefore what can be mass produced. Plain pieces of furniture, not being mass produced, are more expensive and so they are not bought very often. For this reason, they cannot be ordered in large quantities and so cannot become cheaper. Modular furniture is an attempt to break this cycle; if all of the above remarks are taken into account, it provides a path toward contemporary functional furniture.

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8. Fritz Czuczka Ten Commandments for Furnishing a Home First published as “Zehn Gebote der Wohnungseinrichtung,” Die Unzufriedene, November 12, 1933, 13. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. Social Democratic newspapers and magazines, especially those targeting female consumers such as Die Unzufriedene (The dissatisfied woman), featured regular columns by architects, interior designers, and other contributing artists and writers on how to decorate and furnish modern Viennese apartments. The short articles—like the one below written for the “Mein Heim” (My home) section by the architect Fritz Czuczka (1893–1967)—provided general guidelines on the ways in which small, cramped apartments filled with antiquated ornaments and fancy upholstery can be transformed by their inhabitants into light and airy, functional, and above all homely spaces. An emphasis was placed on affordable furnishings and simple, only slightly accentuated forms as practical and time-appropriate alternatives to more traditional, cumbersome furniture still popular among the masses. 1. Especially when furnishing an apartment, remember that the apartment is there for you and that you must retain your freedom of movement. That is why you should never have too much furniture. If you do, you will not have enough space for yourself. Too many pieces of furniture reduce the size of the rooms, rooms that are usually not very big to start with. 2. Do not purchase “room furnishings” made up of “matching” pieces. They give the room where they stand a character that is too obvious—you then have a “bedroom” or a “dining room.” Rather, use modern pieces that do not “match” but give the room that certain homely look. 3. Precious wood is not the only thing that decides the value of furnishings. If it is practically arranged and has simple, unadorned forms, furniture that is made of softwood, is painted, has surfaces made of waxed plywood panels, or is made of larch wood can also furnish your living space beautifully. (Good workmanship will give you lasting pleasure.) 4. It is important that your tables are the correct height, and that the seats and backrests of your chairs have the right dimensions. Your cupboards should not be too high, nor should they be too close to the floor. In a word, every piece of furniture should have a size that corresponds to the human body. 5. Even kitchen furniture does not have to match. This is where you especially need practical and functional objects that save time and labor, which is why everything should be best suited to your personal habits. Moreover, in a small kitchen, think carefully about where you place the needed furniture so you have a suitable seating area, or perhaps a place for eating. 6. Look for a suitable place in the apartment to store cleaning equipment. Find a place where you can store all the things you rarely use, and a place to keep your winter clothes during the summer. This is advantageous because then such objects are out of the way, but you know where to find them. 7. Paint your apartment in bright, friendly colors. Do not decorate the walls with complicated stencil patterns, because objects in rooms look better against plain walls. Paint the ceiling and walls a single color, since that makes a room even cozier.

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8. Use lamps that give you the best light. You need good light to work, read, eat; sometimes you will want to light just part of the room, other times to illuminate the whole room. Therefore, choose lighting fixtures that are best suited for your purposes, and do not let uncalled-for flourishes lead you into the temptation of buying something impractical. You will certainly find floor and hanging lamps that will give you the best lighting. 9. Do not have curtains, upholstery, and cushions made based on models of long bygone times. Do not expend effort on decorations—most are tasteless anyway—but choose modern, simple motifs. This will also save you work. Colorful cushions will give your apartment a quite friendly look. 10. Do not be tempted to furnish your apartment the same way someone else has just because their apartment appeals to you. Every apartment should reflect the character and idiosyncrasies of the people living there. Give free rein to your personal desires and furnish your apartment the way you want, not the way your neighbors might have furnished theirs.

Part VIII Cultural Politics

Double-exposed group portrait of the Department for Ornamental Morphology of the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule), with Erika Giovanna Klien, Elisabeth Karlinsky, Otto Erich Wagner, Marianne/My Ullmann, Walter Hanisch, and Franz Cižek (rear right) among others, ca. 1923/24. (Courtesy of Wien Museum.)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

FINE ARTS Georg Vasold

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he year 1918 marked a dramatic turning point for the fine arts in Vienna, as it did in Austria as a whole. Vague and isolated intimations of impending epochal change had been felt even before that point, but when faced with the actual collapse of the political order these misgivings coalesced into a genuine sense of crisis. This feeling was only exacerbated by the deaths that year of some of the leading lights of the Viennese art world: Gustav Klimt, Otto Wagner, Koloman Moser, and Egon Schiele had all passed away within months of one another. The lack of direction that subsequently blighted the art scene ran deep. It affected artists, critics, and cultural politicians alike. Uncertainties and disconcerting circumstances abounded; art historian Hans Tietze referred to it as “chaos.”1 Among his many concerns were the demise of venerable institutions such as the Vienna Secession, whose building had been used as an emergency hospital during the war; the severance of ties or cooling of relations with other international artists (the Secession lost sixty-seven foreign corresponding members in the first year after the war); the uncertain fate of the imperial collections, which came under threat from restitution claims, principally from Italy; the politically volatile but nevertheless open question as to whether or not the nascent German-Austrian republic with its wealth of artistic treasures was to be regarded as the legitimate heir to the Habsburg empire; and, last but not least, the insistent demands from many in the cultural sector for increased state funding for the promotion of modern art. The latter was another controversial issue. The city of Vienna had to decide whether its artistic profile would be modern, contemporary, and futureoriented or whether it should instead opt to present itself as a grand, former imperial metropolis for the sake of the tourist industry. Red Vienna had no coherent answer to these questions. For years, party political publications featured endless debates about what might constitute a modern, Social Democratic arts policy. And there were parallel debates about the purported existence of a typically Austrian style. Initially expressionism seemed to furnish a positive answer to this question, for a number of reasons. First, the positive profile of artists such as Oskar Kokoschka meant that expressionism could be presented as an artistic development that had been interrupted by the war and could easily be associated with the good old days before it. Second, the painterly qualities of expressionism could be cited in constructing an art historical narrative that dates back to the baroque era. In this vein, 1

Hans Tietze, Lebendige Kunstwissenschaft: Zur Krise der Kunst und der Kunstgeschichte (Vienna: Krystall-Verlag, 1925), 35.

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native Austrian expressionism was described as a form of baroque “transposed”2 into the present. This had the advantage of lending it local specificity and inscribing it into an authentically Viennese cultural tradition. Third, though, expressionism also had a strong vitalistic component. Pervaded as it was with cubist and futurist elements, its late phase was still regarded as innovative. Contemporary critics invariably spoke of growth, life, and vitality. And after the experience of war, these qualities generally had positive connotations. By around 1925, however, the potency of expressionism was spent; it became clear that Vienna was in danger of losing touch with foreign artistic developments. Some artists, and especially those associated with the New Objectivity movement, sought to make contact with Paris and Berlin in particular, and several intellectuals made parallel efforts to resituate Austrian art within a more explicitly international context. But the politicians had little sympathy for these endeavors. Anxiously keeping their distance from the cosmopolitan avant-gardes, they privileged the promotion of local traditions and put art into the service of popular education and political propaganda. The fact that postwar Vienna remained a major innovator in the arts and, at least for a short time, became a bridgehead between the avant-gardes of eastern and western Europe was largely due to the active engagement of a handful of progressively minded thinkers, many of whom were not native Austrians. Perhaps the most important group in this regard was the circle of artists who had fled Hungary and came together around Lajos Kassák to champion a radically expanded conception of art on the pages of the journal Ma. Already banging that drum was the abovementioned art historian Hans Tietze, who frequently drew attention to the inadequacies of official arts policy and warned of creeping provincialism in Vienna. In order to counteract these tendencies, he and Friedrich Kiesler from Czernowitz organized the International Exhibition of Modern Theater Techniques in the fall of 1924. The exhibition brought together constructivism and futurism, promoted film, and advocated the recognition of a modern machine aesthetic. A somewhat different tack was taken by designer and art educator Franz Čižek, whose youth art classes sought to uncover the creative potential of children and young people. His approach to teaching art, which corresponded to the sociopolitical ideas of Red Vienna, achieved international recognition. Čižek’s classes, which were well attended by girls and young women, are now regarded as the incubator of so-called kineticism (an Austrian variant of futurism). Many of his students went on to exhibit in England, the United States, and Canada in the 1920s and 1930s. All of these activities, which together constituted a highly diverse picture of the fine arts in Red Vienna, were accompanied by the often pioneering theoretical work of the Vienna School of Art History. By further developing the methodological principles that had first been laid down around the turn of the century, the so-called second Vienna School set about modernizing the very foundations of art historical research. On the one hand, this entailed a broadening of horizons: the study of “world art.” On the other hand, researchers and academics established connections to neighboring disciplines such as sociology, psychoanalysis, and gestalt theory. Many of the approaches that were developed in Vienna back then would only be fully elaborated and introduced to the canon of art history later on, in Britain and the United States, since many of Vienna’s art historians were of Jewish origin and were forced to emigrate in the late 1930s. 2 Max

Roden, “Faistauer †,” Volks-Zeitung, February 14, 1930, 1.

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Further reading Bertsch 2015 Bogner, Bogner, Hubin, and Millautz 2017 Fuchs 1991 Laven 2006 Platzer and Storch 2006 Wood 2000

1. Stella Kramrisch Sofie Korner First published as “Sofie Korner,” Die bildenden Künste: Wiener Monatshefte 3 (1920): 104–7. Translated by Jonathan Blower. Sofie Korner (1879–1942) epitomizes the emergence of female artists in Vienna in the years between the wars. Trained at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (the Academy of Fine Arts first admitted female students in 1920), a member of the Austrian Association of Women Artists (est. 1910) and Robert Müller’s Federation of Cultural Workers (Bund geistig Tätiger, est. 1918), she soon gravitated toward expressionism and thus broke into an unambiguously male-dominated sphere. In this article, the young Stella Kramrisch (1896– 1993)—a student of the controversial (because of his racism) art historian Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941), and subsequently the first female professor of art history at the University of Calcutta—tried to find adequate words for the formal and coloristic qualities of Korner’s paintings. Attempts to poetically reproduce manifestations of the fine arts in this way had long been a beloved preoccupation of expressionist art writers, although such attempts to make the visual and the verbal coincide would soon find a harsh critic in Otto Pächt (1902–1988). Sofie Korner stands forever in time, way up ahead, where today becomes tomorrow, although the sun has never quite come up, or, if it has, a mountain stands before it. The form that emerges in her midst she records quietly and diligently, impressing her being upon it. This gives each of her paintings an assurance that calmly elevates the anguish of the search and the vexations of visibility above itself, making her work taken together appear perhaps a second too late. That is why it has the bitter ring of melancholic fulfillment, why it knows nothing of the madness of the empty reach for eternity and the fanatical self-congratulation of fabricated faith. It is still in her paintings; to the moment of repose—meek and weary after hardwon battles—they lend the permanence of evenness. So the landscapes are stormless, though a trembling from within bends the trees and houses and streets. They have made their peace with that now and have since discovered their real life, inseparably bound into one. So too are her figure paintings. The sitters might still be young, but all are already long-lived and all of them, such as they have become, have suddenly seen themselves and known themselves—in this moment, the moment of the painting—both as self and as destiny. Individual and supra-individual power become the body of one pictorial design in a portrait. And if the paintings feature two or more figures, these figures are nothing but the meadows and waterways of one landscape. Korner knows neither part nor counterpart, nor the self-assured will of the individual; in every figure

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she sees both the reality and the demon, and, in their coexistence, the oppressive and uncannily sure force that moves from life to life, silent and mighty under the dreadful law of an almost clarified sky. Korner’s intentions find their purest expression in the landscapes. The individual objects in the depicted portion of space grow together in a mighty towering tumult of firmly interlocking planes of color; they cease to exist as individual objects and stand there no longer isolated in space but as one indivisible organism which, in the to-and-fro and the driving force of upward aspiration, finds a new life that lifts it, breath held in airless space, at once trembling and apparently spellbound. [. . .] Houses and trees are her preferred landscape elements. Mountains and hills also have their place. Fields, water, valleys, and streets, by contrast, appear to have no constituent value in themselves; they are required only as additional, corresponding elements. It is the growing, aspiring form that is productively reevaluated here, positively accommodated by the dynamism of the upward movement on the one hand and the planar character of the vertical figure on the other. This is also the source of the planar and spatial design of the picture. It is intrinsically dynamic, an expressionism of agitated, delineated color planes that make the picture into a living organism. The character of the painting is not dependent on depth for direction; the inner movement of each object and surface fills the picture front and back. If the objects are handled in this way, as a continuum of moving planes whose colors contain atmospheric hues and local lights, then the expanse of the sky can do nothing but be still and, almost without gesture, absorb into itself the sounds and wills of things, and bring them to rest. The imperceptible oscillating movement of planes and lines continues, liberated from the object and dissolved into the pale shimmer of the ether.

2. Lajos Kassák Foreword (from Book of New Artists) First published as Ludwig Kassák, Buch neuer Künstler (Vienna: Ma, 1922). Translated by Jonathan Blower. After the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in August 1919, many of the country’s leading artists—among them Béla Uitz, László Moholy-Nagy, and Lajos Kassák—fled to Vienna, where they quickly resumed the work they had started in Budapest. The journal Ma, which was founded by Kassák in 1916, went on to become the leading Viennese organ for avantgarde tendencies in eastern and south eastern Europe. It was here that the Hungarian emigrés published their many manifestos and ideas about new art in a new society. These ideas tended to coincide with those of Red Vienna, though there was very little actual contact between Kassák and the Viennese artists. At the peak of his endeavors, Kassák published the programmatic Buch neuer Künstler (Book of New Artists) together with Moholy-Nagy, who was already living in Berlin by that point. The foreword, which reads as a radical settling of accounts with the entire history of art, was followed by a long series of illustrations, the first of which shows two transmission towers—a symbol of Kassák’s longing for an “age of constructivity.” In submitting this book to the public from among the slogans of political demagogues and the lamentations of sweet-talking aesthetes, we write with the simple force of conviction:

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These are the heroes of destruction, And these the fanatics of construction.

We see the life of humanity seeping away from a thousand cuts and, though it may look like an eschewal of action, we step into the light to point out the differences between men and men in the flux of time. For there are irreconcilable differences between them, both mentally and physically. The evolutionary and revolutionary upheavals of our age are determined by these differences, and their only real criterion of value is creativity. All creativity is the revelation of a higher power. Art is the highest form of creativity. [. . .] The new human and his creativity as an end in itself is a corollary of an ever-expanding self-awareness; his tendency is a new, collective, and vital tendency that helps the new human to express himself. The collectivity of the Christian epoch was essentially resignation; the collective vital tendency of the scientifically educated man is based on the concept of acquisition. The man of the present sets himself no imaginary aims; he does not want to lose himself in the crowd in order to shake off, as it were, the burden of his ego. On the contrary: he wants to find himself. Centuries of history and an elevated sense of humanity have taught him that the world will only ever attain a higher degree of happiness in him and as a consequence of his sense of responsibility. This sense of responsibility is an unconditional requirement; it lends meaning and an almost superhuman quality to the revolutionary life and the primordial creativity of our generation. There are disillusioned titans and idiotic would-be titans who now question the legitimacy of art. They preach the bankruptcy of our creative powers and fail to acknowledge that there has never been an epoch comparable to ours; an epoch in which mighty legions of illuminated minds were drawn in so many directions in search of new forms; an epoch in which so many people shared the same fanatical will and burned with flames from which the new generation would be born with a scream. When we take a look around us, we see that our lives do have meaning; at the very least it consists in struggle itself. Just as our struggle with the past has been imposed upon us, so too the compulsion to create will be necessary for the future. Art is creativity. [. . .] The periods through which mankind has passed since the dissolution of the Christian social order and the pseudo-gothic of Christendom constituted a more or less conscious quest for a new equilibrium, both socially and art historically. But the man who longs for absolute form with a compulsive and regenerative will, for the repose of unity as the eternal aim of his vital energies, such a man must first be liberated from enfeebled and over-developed forms. Our generation has already made history, both socially and art historically. World-changing wars and revolutions have played out within us and around us. Whole generations have perished alongside us from one day to the next; from one day to the next the scales of time-honored truths have fallen from our eyes, allowing our anguished and wanton souls to act and express themselves. The revelation of this will to act for ourselves coincided with the first opportunity for new developments in art and the first battles between tendencies that created and killed

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one another. The initial result was a merciless negation of the uncertainties of unbounded chaos as opposed to the affirmative forms of the existing order: a negative as opposed to a positive. Futurism: the liberation of a raw and as-yet aimless force from the fetters of classical aesthetics. Mainly an action of muscles and tendons, and the spirit as before suspended in a dreamy stupor over the much-maligned lagoons of Venice. Momentum without bearing. Destination without force. Under the watchwords of freedom and heroism the futurist trumpeters with the strongest lungs blindly steered a course right down the throat of the greatest and greediest devourer of men: the World War. Only one thing really distinguished their art from the superficiality of impressionism: the intoxicated gesture. Expressionism arose as a direct reaction to futurism. The grand phrases fizzled out, a decade was illuminated by a handful of impassioned people, then with renewed vigor came the last efflorescence of the sentimentally inclined petty-bourgeois soul, fatally enamored of every psychological ailment. An aesthetic reflection of primitive Christian art, albeit without seeking or finding God with the primordial faith and force of their forbearers. In place of the church spire pointing heavenward, these sensitive souls gave birth to “absolute painting” and “absolute poetry.” Their “creations” are puddles of sentiment spilled in the moonlight. There can hardly have been a single artistic tendency that achieved its aims more quickly and was put to rest with fewer objections than the expressionism that slumbers in the gilt frames of our galleries and in the trinkets, crochets, and tapestries of our middle-class living rooms. Cubism was the first artistic movement of the modern era to acknowledge the fundamental unity of form and content. In contrast to the arbitrary play of color and line in expressionism, cubism set out in search of a unified style, the only distinguishing feature of creativity, to find compositional forms grounded on firmly established laws of causality. I emphasize composition here, for whether they like it or not, modern artists will only ever be able to find compositional laws in the past. Cubism was an analytical art form, and though it was the first revelation of our age to trace things back to the very deepest fundaments of a new beginning, it was inevitably crushed by its own analytical method, its emphatic vital rhythms forfeited to inherited compositional endeavors. The whole movement ground to a halt and came to rest in a colorless stasis even before it could discover itself and the new laws. Dadaism is like a tragic scream let out by society as a whole. It gave meaning to the bankruptcy of cubism and the wholesale collapse of the existing order. Cubism came to build for a renewed humanity but forgot that the rooms were still stuffed full of yesterday’s ruins. It was opportunistic, wasted its energies on salvaging what was left, so Dadaism had to step up as its challenger, to clear a path and to make sure the aircraft would not have to carry the corpses of forbearers along with the freight of functionality. From cubism we inherited a faith in the hunt and a longing for purity. What we affirm in Dadaism is the fanaticism of destruction. The greatest heroes of our age, redolent as it was with a longing for artists, were without doubt the Dadaists, creative spirits who sacrificed themselves to the toppling of old idols. Their work was the most revolutionary act; they took it upon themselves not in order to make their own lives better but because they could no longer bear to live in this world under such conditions. Our forbearers’ pursuit of romantic aims became a self-evident consequence for the Dadaists. In their wake they left virgin territory, and the real work of the new master builders. [. . .] Our age is an age of constructivity. The productive forces that escaped this transcendental atmosphere compelled practically minded men to set about the social construction

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of classes through class struggle and with the necessity of a common objective; they struck the precision scales of aesthetic judgment from the hands of the artists so that their strength and spirit might at last give rise to architecture, the new unity of a fragmented world. Art, science, and technology converge at a single point. Change must come! And it must be created, for movement means creativity. Movement must be brought into equilibrium, for that is the way to form. The new form is architecture. Clearing the decks. Strength of will. The simplicity of a sense of security. But like the innocence of a child, the new art is simple, categorical, and triumphant over all content. Vienna, May 31, 1922

3. Leopold W. Rochowanski The Contemporary Will to Form in the Applied Arts First published as L. W. Rochowanski, Der Formwille der Zeit in der angewandten Kunst (Vienna: Burgverlag, 1922), 8–51. Translated by Jonathan Blower. Writer, publisher, curator, librettist, and dancer Leopold W. Rochowanski (1885–1961) was the mouthpiece and chronicler of the so-called Vienna youth art class. Under the direction of Franz Čižek (1865–1946), this institution existed as a department in its own right at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts; its stated aim was to organize art education according to modern principles. Čižek, who had the backing of political education reformer Otto Glöckel (1874– 1935) and maintained contact with the likes of Maria Montessori (1870–1952) and German reform architect Heinrich Tessenow (1875–1950), was convinced that the conventional practice of copying from precedents needed replacing with an approach that would foster the free intrinsic creativity of every individual. The text reproduced here is taken from Rochowanski’s richly illustrated book Der Formwille der Zeit, which was designed and laid out by the author himself. It presents the pedagogical principles of the youth art class and connects them to some of the key terms from the art theory of the time: rejuvenation, energy, rhythm, new vision. . . . in Professor Franz Čižek’s department at the School of Arts and Crafts there is youth, modernity, strength! Heart, eyes, and ears reside in the mind, forming a strong will! Čižek’s most sacred principle: teach nothing, learn nothing! Let them grow from their own roots! There are no walls here, no barricades against the incursions of the age; the way is open, and all the senses are ready to receive and redistribute it! Eternal festival of gifts! A growing edifice! Pupils are allowed to find themselves, know themselves, fortify themselves with that knowledge. The pupils’ only possession: their inheritance. Be it great or small, it can never be disavowed; every piece betrays it. Their ever-valid heritage: the compulsive driving force (the Gothic); the heritage of earnest equilibrium, resounding repose (Classicism); the exhilarating, the animating (the Baroque).

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The art of the teacher: to rouse new forces. Rousing feelings (expressionism), Rousing the mind (cubism), Rousing the eyes (kineticism). New perception, new thought, new vision. [. . .] There is no work by a Čižek pupil in which you cannot find the air, the ideas, the driving forces of our times. Instruction (that old word!) begins with the demand that pupils submit themselves to existing energies, unreservedly and with unfettered wildness. The result: chaos. But the very next lesson: come back to your senses. And the next level: order. Even these assignments are a probing test of the pupils’ capabilities. Expression is the discharge of possessions and their transfer into the possession of another, says Rubiner.3 What follows is a prodigious, perpetual discharge of the self. First the projection of certain feelings: joy, sadness, envy, desire, sublimity, coldness, warmth. All superlative passions. The exploitation of dynamic energies: skewering, pressing, driving, bursting, aspiring (this also brings out varying degrees of linguistic sensitivity and makes it controllable). Perceptions of the eye: light, darkness. Of the ear: street noise, thunder, music. A combination of psychic, aural, and visual impressions: thunder and lightning. Of the nose: the scent of flowers, fire. Forces for and against engender struggle. The struggle of order against disorder. (Even though people prefer the struggle of disorder against order, and that is understandable in these times, for even disorder has its order, and we have always hated the order of order. For some pupils—Professor Čižek says so with a smile—it will be the struggle of disorder against sloppiness.) Eternal play of forces, back and forth, overrunning, jostling, hard versus soft, good against evil, light against darkness. Rhythm. New rhythm. Its purely emotional exploitation lends music a conducive significance. This is why music is almost never absent from his classes. Not only are pieces of music drawn and little orchestras assembled from violins, flutes, horns, and cellos; the rhythm of sound flows in every lesson. [.  .  .] Music. Rhythm. It flows through the pupils’ bodies, and when they are drawing a human figure it is not the body but its rhythm that they draw, and when they subdivide space they do not do so arbitrarily or according to the old rules of geometry or aesthetics but by spiritual processes [. . .]. Cubism, says Professor Čižek, is the crystalline expression of the compulsive urges of formative energies. There is nothing apolitical about this cubism. It seems to me that it is actually social in that it studies and depicts the space in which its bodies live, and only the furthest differentiation leads to the representation of the body itself. In this search for the cubic existence of all things, the cubist himself again becomes dependent on space, on the landscape that his body and soul inhabit. The observer becomes aware of his close affinity to the expressive dancer. [. . .] Kineticism: from χινειν = to move. Until now everything has been still life, not just the turnips, heads of cabbage, apples, ham, and wine glasses that are still served up for us; the people too. Now we need life and movement. The movement of objects: earthquake,

3 Ludwig Rubiner (1881–1920), expressionist poet from Berlin; worked for Franz Pfemfert’s periodical Die Aktion and had links to many artists and art theorists, including Carl Einstein, Marc Chagall, and Kees van Dongen.

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tempest, the turning wheel. Next, our movement through these objects (which are themselves dynamic): riding through the streets with hurrying people. [. . .] At Čižek’s school, the application of modern art to the decorative arts—a desire once expressed by Ehmcke—was realized for the first time.4 But here we like to be more specific. Decorative art is an externalization of artistic principles. There is a distinction to be made between this and applied art. Here we are not concerned with decorative art but with the useful application of the rhythms discovered in expressionism, cubism, and kineticism. Its origins are in painting and sculpture. There is still uniqueness here. Even ceramics tend to invite multiples, and this ought not to happen. The extreme case would be wallpaper. Wallpaper drawn by an artist is still an artistic concern. What makes it disagreeable to us is the thought of its commercial reproduction. Nothing has been overlooked. Wallpaper, poster design, book binding, architecture and theatre, lacework, embroidery, ceramics—all have been rejuvenated by our newfound rhythmic forces. There is universal amazement at the inexhaustible abundance of form that flows from these newly tapped sources of energy. This is amply clear from the absolute sculptures without objective content. The theater has become brilliantly animated, as Harry Täuber’s designs show: his setting of Franz Werfel’s Mirror-Man has already withstood the ultimate test—at the Burgtheater in Vienna.5 The cubist cinema of Ludwig Reutterer is a fantastical space for the future.6 The kinetic dome strikes every eye, millions of eyes, with the colorful word cinema; at the doors I see an iron man with perpetually spinning arms hurling colorful lights, in his mouth plays a gramophone record, hugely amplified, blaring out the current program over the hellish noise of the metropolitan asphalt, over vast urban squares and skyscrapers. Those who always complain about having been born into such a deplorable age are to be pitied. Of course, those people are the ones who only ever think of eating and do not like working. We live in the finest of times, in a storm of stress, in a beatifying battle. We are not world-weary pensioners; we are called to action, to reanimation. We will stride over death and annunciation and on to resurrection! We are not condemned to live a moribund life in others; we can be ourselves at last!

4. Hans Tietze Municipal Policy and Modern Art First published as “Gemeindepolitik und moderne Kunst,” Der Kampf 20, no. 8 (1927): 373–78. Translated by Jonathan Blower. Hans Tietze (1880–1954) was a Viennese art historian of Bohemian extraction. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who struggled to find their footing in the postwar world, he 4 Fritz Helmuth Ehmcke (1878–1965), German graphic designer and architect; taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich and the Gewerbeschule in Zurich; achieved international renown for the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, 1912. 5 Harry Täuber (1900–1975), student of Franz Čižek, Josef Hoffmann, and Josef Frank; set designer for stage and screen in Vienna and Berlin. 6 Ludwig Reutterer (1893–1985); after an apprenticeship as printer and bookbinder, Reutterer studied with Čižek and remained in contact with him until Čižek died; he painted fragmented cubist views of the city and kineticist pictures of rhythmically moving bodies.

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realized that the changed circumstances also presented opportunities. As a university lecturer, Tietze was one of the first to acknowledge the social aspect of art. As a conservationist he was responsible for reorganizing the museums of German Austria. As a champion of modern art, organizer of major exhibitions, founder of journals, and author of countless articles for newspapers such as the Social Democratic Arbeiter-Zeitung, Tietze was one of Red Vienna’s leading intellectuals. Despite his strong ideological affinity for the Social Democrats, he was highly critical of their municipal arts policy. In this article, he condemns the policy as reactionary, parochial, ignorant of contemporary art, and unjust in its distribution of means, creating intolerable conditions that risked an exodus of Austria’s most capable artists. Satisfaction with your own achievements is never a good sign; those who do not stop striving will always want to determine the relationship between aspirations and attainments. So let us draw up a balance of the last few years of socialist municipal administration. In the aspirations column, we count everything that could not be realized because of the unfavorable economic circumstances and other sources of resistance. In the attainments column, we chalk up everything attributable to natural or axiomatic development and everything that, after the interruption of the war, inevitably came to pass all the more turbulently. The resulting balance is cause for gratification and optimism, and rightly so. Besides the many success stories—confirmed as they are by the judgments of sympathetic and critical foreigners whose warm remarks go well beyond the mere attestation of hospitable politeness—there remains the impression of a renewed vitality whose ramifications extend in every conceivable direction. Regardless of where you stand politically on the methods and means of Vienna’s current administration, this willful vitality is undeniable; you can perhaps disregard it as unhealthy or untimely, or even just disconcerting, but you cannot overlook the fact that the manifold activities of the city are now pervaded by a new social consciousness and a new sense of responsibility to the broadest possible sections of the general public. Actually, it seems self-evident that a republican capital and former imperial residence, a Social Democratic city and a previously Christian Social city, ought to form a contrast like black and white or black and red.7 Yet this contrast is not quite so complete as one might have thought. Although Vienna makes great strides in other areas, as an artistic capital it is at a standstill. Progressive in every other field of intellectual, cultural, and material endeavor, it is reactionary in the very area where it perpetually praises its own particular talents. Here Vienna relies only on its past; as a living artistic city it is internationally insignificant. I regard it as my duty to say so clearly and pointedly. Glossing over inadequacies and bestowing undue praise will be of no benefit to present-day Vienna and its heartfelt notions of social and cultural progress. Honest criticism will. And so I repeat: as an artistic city, Vienna is the shadow of bygone centuries; as a vital element, it is nonexistent. A city of art, as I understand it, can only mean the sort of polity that provides opportunities and support to the living. Instead of confining itself to narrow local interests, it should promote artistic values with international validity. The outlook of a living artistic city must be both modern and international. It almost goes without saying that neither can be said of present-day Vienna. Nowhere are attitudes so unashamedly retrospective; nowhere is artistic interest so stubbornly parochial. [. . .] Vienna’s cultural milieu, more so than Austria’s, is a phenomenon 7 Tietze

is invoking the colors of the two major political parties here: black for the Christian Social Party and red for the Social Democratic Workers’ Party.

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all of its own. It oscillates with the energy of manifold individual forces. There is but one Imperial City—even without the emperor. Given the vital importance of history and place for the cultural substance of the city, rejecting both—as periodically required and recommended by certain charlatans of cultural therapy [Eisenbarten der Kulturtherapie8]— would be self-negation and committing suicide of sorts. We remain welded to our sense of place and the past—whether blessing or curse, it is a part of us—and even the socialist mindset has to come to terms with the fact that this stream of sensibility may be carrying a few pieces of reactionary flotsam along with it. And so it seems comprehensible that even the present city administration should want to devote careful attention to these memories and roots. But this dutiful custodianship cannot be allowed to absorb resources to the point where the living and the contemporary begin to suffer. [. . .] Just because Beethoven died here a hundred years ago and Waldmüller could not abide it here a little while later, Vienna puffs itself up as a city of culture and forgets about the artists of today.9 Those ties that connect us to time and place—the bonds we regard as the highest honors of the Viennese cultural tradition—begin to militate against culture, they become the expression of a philistinism that neglects today’s tasks in favor of narcissism and adulation of the past. The refrain of the former Imperial City will be lost in the sentimental spirit of spit-roast chicken and the musty stupor of the suburban vineyard. [. . .] It is no wonder that Oskar Kokoschka, as Viennese as any man or artist could hope to be, vehemently refuses to exhibit as an Austrian or to be called an Austrian. And although Kokoschka is an extreme case, he is by no means the only one. Wiegele is more than half at home in Zurich, Floch and Harta have moved to Paris, Hammer is now in Florence. Adolf Loos, that archetypal Austrian, grumbles on in front of packed Parisian lecture halls. I know of many others who are still in Vienna only because they have yet to find anything else or because family or material ties keep them here. But they all want to leave. Vienna has become a center of gravity from which they all want to escape. Nor has this centrifugal effect and the migration of so much talent helped those who are left behind. Aside from those with the life preserver of an official position to keep them afloat, all struggle with material deprivation, and struggle more desperately still with the universal apathy and indifference. [. . .] The fact is, measures taken by modern states in support of the arts have generally been entirely fruitless, whereas municipalities have often proven beneficial to the living arts. Several German towns and cities have seen positive results in recent decades. [. . .] The city of Vienna has not yet subscribed to such a view. Whether out of necessity or not, it has put aside the artistic requirements of its building program, from an architecture as well as urban planning viewpoint; as far as I am aware, it has still not acquired for its collections a single modern artwork of anything more than local value and instead confines itself to collecting the sort of local commemorative kitsch that everyone else regards as the hallmark of parochialism. And of the many commissions it awards, only a few ever go to above-average artists ([Anton] Hanak); the majority are handed out to the 8 The

author refers here to the Bavarian traveling doctor Johann Andreas Eisenbarth (1663–1727) and his often lethal medical treatment method. The once popular charlatan has been immortalized in numerous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poems and satirical songs. 9 Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793–1865), Austrian painter and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, where his progressive ideas were not welcome.

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mediocrity. For the most part, Vienna’s support for the arts can be designated as trade promotion; propping up a languishing branch of industry rather than striving for great artistic achievements. The hardships of the immediate postwar years, when rapid and urgent action necessarily had to be taken, should by no means be underestimated, but I do not think it is unfair to say that the municipal administration does not regard the promotion and acquisition of outstanding artistic achievements as an essential part of its mandate. Although it provides the public with the highest qualifications and most modern innovations in domestic hygiene, healthcare, schooling, transportation, popular education, and so on, it does not see fit to provide the best of contemporary art. It is content—though this is certainly not devoid of merit—to support existing production, which is often just byproduction. It has no time for great art.

5. Eduard Leisching Municipal Policy and Modern Art: A Response First published as “Gemeindepolitik und moderne Kunst: Eine Entgegnung,” Der Kampf 20, no. 9 (1927): 418–25. Translated by Jonathan Blower. Tietze’s criticism found support from the likes of Oscar Pollak (1893–1963), then foreign political correspondent at the Arbeiter-Zeitung, but it did not go unchallenged.10 A few weeks after the publication of Tietze’s article, Eduard Leisching (1858–1938), founder of the Vienna Association for Popular Education (Wiener Volksbildungsverein) and longstanding art advisor to the city of Vienna, published a response to Tietze that revealed the inadequacy and timidity behind the Social Democratic arts policy. Leisching’s article precisely demarcates the fault lines in Red Vienna’s divergent conceptions of art. While Tietze had called for cosmopolitan openness, Leisching argued for restrictions on migrant artists; while Tietze had championed the avant-garde, Leisching warned against making overly intellectual demands of the public; and while Tietze urged the city to meet its financial obligations and demanded more funding for the arts, Leisching delegated this responsibility to the state, which he accused of not providing enough support for artists. Hans Tietze’s article, published under the above title in the August edition of Der Kampf, demands a response, both on account of the subject matter and in view of the author. He has a right to be taken seriously; we should reflect upon everything he says and draw our conclusions accordingly, but we should also correct the misunderstandings and mistakes he has made. This strident and spirited man, genuinely concerned as he is with the progress of our cultural life, stands above any suspicion of having to be right under all circumstances or of being impervious to objective considerations. As a former art advisor to the city of Vienna and an old campaigner for the promotion and recognition of modern art, I feel doubly obliged to respond. In this field of cultural work, I have fought many battles with those above and to the right of me. And so I am entirely on Tietze’s side and I share his wishes for Vienna’s public collections—which as a whole are splendid representations of the city’s recent and distant past yet are forced 10

See Oskar Pollak, “Warum haben wir keine sozialdemokratische Kunstpolitik?,” Der Kampf 22, no. 2 (1929): 83–86. See also chapter 26.

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to neglect the vigorous, vital, and pugnacious creativity of the present because of the lack of means and stubborn resistance from official and officious circles—to be put in a position where they are able at last, before it is too late, to fill those deplorable and dangerous gaps in their collections. Nonetheless, in this respect, too, I am of the opinion that we need to stress the systematic unity of the present, whereby things that are authentic and have quality (but only if they have that) should also be accommodated, even if their forms and expression are not absolutely modern. Not everything that elicits displeasure from this or that person, however insightful they may be, deserves to be summarily condemned as decadent kitsch. Alongside things of absolute validity, if such things exist, our ever-changing galleries of contemporary art, like our art museums, really ought to exhibit competent, faithfully observed, technically flawless work of average quality as well. When it comes to demonstrating historical development, one-sidedness in the selection of sources will always be a bad thing. [. . .] Tietze’s own experience [. . .] proves that it is difficult to convince the public and the press to get behind modern-day ventures. But this source of resistance—if we are apportioning responsibility for all the extrinsic failures of recent times—is less significant than the general circumstances in which we live and under which we suffer. The daily cares and struggles that weigh down on people at every level of society, the pace at which our lives are played out, the relatively high prices of tickets and exhibition catalogues truly are sufficient grounds to deter many people from visiting exhibitions, particularly those who would need to see them most. [. . .] The tours that are meant to bring in interested parties are organized almost exclusively by the teaching organization and the popular education associations, which are sponsored by the city of Vienna. [. . .] It is evident [. . .] that those who are not burdened with literary backgrounds, those who have never been exposed to traditional art, actually approach novel and innovative work with naïve, honest, and open hearts—if only it can be made clear to them in plain terms that such creations arise from the spirit of the age. The issue of popular artistic education has therefore by no means been ignored, and the city of Vienna has made an indisputable contribution to gradually solving that problem. [. . .] So there can be no question of the city of Vienna being unaware of its obligations or reluctant to provide assistance. If things are far from how they ought to be, and if the new conception of art rises only gradually through those sections of the population that have formerly been far from it and were kept far from it, then there are psychological reasons for it. Someone who knows the soul of the people as well as Tietze does will not ignore those reasons. [. . .] If we return to the real intention of his remarks, which are less of a deep sigh than a loud accusation, the harsh reproach that stands out from everything else he presents is that the municipal collections only acquire works of local value and that the city of Vienna has no time for great art, that it confines itself to promoting mainstream art, which Tietze does not hold in particularly high regard. But given the dreadful destitution of our artists, the municipality can hardly be blamed for concentrating on mainstream “mass-produced” art. Since the funds that the state does have at its disposal are so meager that it is hardly able to provide any relief to artists at all, the municipality has to step in to a significant extent. Though it is unable to help all those who need help to scrape by and persevere with their work, it does do what it can. And you can rest assured that, among those artists who are occasionally considered for support, there are some highly regarded names who will always be deserving of honorable mention. [. . .]

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It is pointless and unfair to expect the municipality to eliminate the extreme poverty that prevails in artistic circles today; even its warnings against migration have no power or influence to halt the unnatural and unbridled proliferation of artists who then inevitably find themselves in competition with one another. Bringing this situation under control is something that has yet to be discussed. The fact is that before the war, when times were not so hard, many of those who qualified as artists went off to other countries, and Vienna’s various art schools are now training almost twice as many young artists as they were then. Anyone who is genuinely concerned about arts policy ought to urge our state institutions to be extremely strict about ejecting weaker candidates even after they passed the entrance exams and the first academic exams (provided that those students are still young enough to choose another career). And we should never stop insisting that public commissions funded from public and private sources should only be awarded to outstanding, mature artistic talent and that decisions should never be swayed by personal favoritism. The cultural aspect of our city would be quite different if professional critics such as Tietze were to mention all these circumstances with the same emphatic candor at every possible opportunity. Critics are called to do more than just censure or praise things that have happened and cannot be changed; they ought to be aware of their responsibilities and they need to support and contribute to the work of education which, as far as art is concerned, has been in a sorry state in this country since time immemorial.

6. Josef Luitpold and Otto Rudolf Schatz The New City First published as Die neue Stadt (Berlin: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1927). Translated by Jonathan Blower. One of the artists who did receive plenty of support from Red Vienna was painter and printmaker Otto Rudolf Schatz (1900–1961). Indebted first to expressionism, then to New Objectivity, he produced more than fifteen hundred woodcuts, many of which focused on facets of urban life and the modern world of work. In 1927 he published Die neue Stadt together with the poet Josef Luitpold Stern (1886–1966), here credited as Josef Luitpold, rector of the SDAP’s Workers’ College and former director of the Central Office for Workers’ Education. This large-format atlas celebrated the beneficent achievements of the Viennese city government. The typography was particularly ambitious, but the book as whole was conceived as a propagandistic Gesamtkunstwerk to showcase the productive cooperation of male and female artists, writers, and composers. Stern’s text was set to music by Paul Amadeus Pisk (1893–1990) and premiered in Vienna at the Konzerthaus on November 12, 1926, as a traditional ballad opera (Singspiel). But the pathos-laden piece was not a huge success; Karl Kraus (1874–1936) would ridicule Pisk and Stern’s “housing block cantata” as kitsch just a few years later.11 The New City As you sink silent stone into silent ground, to stone and soil who will raise a voice in sound?

11 See

Karl Kraus, “Die Wohnbaukantate,” Die Fackel, nos. 820–826 (October 1929): 57–64.

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The poet’s messenger steps up to have his say, perhaps he will find the right words for today. Hark and bear witness as from his earthen breast a new psalmist’s spirit to free itself wrests. Blessed are those who build for the people of Earth. Blessed are those who toil for the homes of men. O, bitter life of dismal, dimly wretched forebears. O, meager pleasures, uncertain rest, beset with dangers. In kraals and camps, In dolmens and caves, In rickety tents of cane and fern, in huts on posts over swamps. Who in good conscience could drink and be merry, When serfs and servants, Prey of the mighty, Bed down in damp vaults of fortress and palace With rancor in their souls and curses on their lips! But lost three times ye cheated Paupers of the poor quarters In cellars and chambers in crumbling damp, In filthy holes, in despicable nests of pestilence. O, innocent prisoners of rotten rental barracks, O, helpless prey of the lease. Blessed are those whose hearts are angered By the mean senses of the sated. Blessed the masses when they begin To turn the world into a home for everyone. Not troubled by the smiles of the indifferent, Not fazed in their zeal by incomprehension, Not inflated by initial success. Their life’s joy is building for all, Their Sunday laying cornerstones of homes, Or opening the gates of towering buildings to the thankful amazement of dwellers. Blessed the man of days to come. He knows not the stony canyons of evil streets. He knows not the horrors of lightless breath. For the span of a life that’s all too short He’ll be at home on an Earth now habitable. The city will appeal to his gaze As symphonies please the ear. Each gateway a portal of beauty, Each window a vision of prudence. The globe will preach planning and order. Sunrise and sunset, foliage and birdsong, A daily summer’s blessing for all. And by winter the lights of the ballrooms and book halls Light the hearts of the studious masses. Not a soul without sunlight and greenery, Space for work, space for pleasure, Space for games, space for leisure.

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No more lords of the manor. Each a fraternal fellow custodian of the household of the community. The new city. The New Human. O, sweet childhood of a golden age. Blessed, blessed be the human race, As it begins to see, As it begins to design, Sublime cityscape’s nobler future. O hark and bear witness to the psalter’s spirit Wresting itself also from our time and breast. The voice of the future has spoken to us. Now sink the stone into the sacred ground. This psalm was written by Josef Luitpold, Cut in wood by O. R. Schatz between 1926 and 1927, And printed from the blocks at the Buchdruck-Werkstätte G.m.b.H. in Berlin.

7. Otto Pächt The End of Illustrative Theory First published as “Das Ende der Abbildtheorie,” Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur 3, no. 1 (1930–31): 1–9. Translated by Jonathan Blower. With the unexpected death of Max Dvořák (1874–1921), the venerable Vienna School of Art History was plunged into a crisis of methodology and leadership. The next generation of art historians turned to neighboring disciplines as they sought to move on. Gestalt psychology proved particularly productive; its amenability to Viennese art historiography was recognized by Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984) and Otto Pächt (1902–1988). Pächt, a friend of Robert Musil (1880–1942) and Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), was one of the leading lights of the Vienna School from an early stage of his career. He was a regular contributor to Kritische Berichte (Leipzig and Vienna) and was editor of the Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen (Berlin), a journal that was admired by Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996).12 The crux of Pächt’s argument in this article is his absolute insistence on scientific objectivity. For Pächt, objectivity was indispensable to the future of the discipline, but it could only be achieved once the relationship between word and image had been clarified (his argument turns on the word “translation”). This would allow for an understanding of perception based on the gestalt psychology of Kurt Koffka (1886–1941). There is a manner of describing works of art that inevitably creates the impression that they have been reproduced by poetic means, illustrated in words. In fairness one has to concede that this approach has contributed no small amount to the popularization of 12 See Walter Benjamin, “Strenge Kunstwissenschaft: Zum ersten Band der ‘Kunstwissenschaftlichen

Forschungen,’” first and second versions [1932], in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 363–74; and Meyer Schapiro, “The New Viennese School,” Art Bulletin 18 (1936): 258–66.

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art history. And although that might be a dubious merit, one can nevertheless say that it must have met a vital need of our times. In contradistinction to the high regard that poetic description enjoys, its theoretical foundations are decidedly shaky, for it necessarily presupposes a conception of scientific truth—truth as a faithful reflection, an imitation of reality—that has been rendered untenable by the advent of modern epistemology.13 The primary aim of every science is to comprehend its objects in words. But words are not substitutes for or illustrations of the objects of scientific observation. They are signs and symbols that have to be chosen in such a way that they also make comprehensible something of the essence of the designated object. Anyone who is really serious about reproducing a work of art by literary imitation essentially intends nothing other than the transposition of artistic content from one aesthetic medium to another. First of all, such a translation is a purely artistic problem; it presupposes a rare poetic gift and calls for production, not reproduction. It expects science to rely upon chance poetic inspiration and the blessings of fortunate moments for one of the most basic and quotidian of its tasks. Here we are entirely disregarding other unavoidable difficulties such as the delicate issue of how subjective interpretations can be avoided and how the irrevocable postulate of scientific objectivity can be maintained in the course of transposition into a necessarily heterogeneous style. And we shall make just one more observation: What is the transition from the visual to the linguistic sphere supposed to achieve in any case? Evidently this: it gives the artistic content a form in which sense and meaning are easy to grasp. Those beholden to rationalist prejudice are now apt to believe that a literary product is more readily accessible to critical reflection because its means of expression—language—is also the vehicle of critical understanding.14 [. . .] The most recent period of art historical scholarship can be divided into two camps when it comes to the problem of description.15 One camp wants to derive the terms of its description from the individual object and believes that this is the only way to do justice to the full range of the concrete visual content of the phenomenon. The other camp wants to arrive at a description, albeit merely an approximate one, via the differentiation of a few basic concepts obtained by deduction. Description in this case entails identifying the position to which the particular object should be assigned within a clearly defined system of classification. The first approach appears to possess the advantage of adequacy to the object, though it is still not entirely clear how it is supposed to attain the heights of really rigorous conceptual interpretation and how concepts gleaned from numerous individual descriptions could be brought onto one and the same plane of reference. Up until now this has been regarded as a necessary prerequisite for most operations in the histori13 Original note: See Moritz Schlick, Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1925), 55ff; and further, in direct reference to this specifically historico-theoretical problem, see Alfred Vierkandt, “Gesellschafts- und Geschichtsphilosophie,” in Die Philosophie in ihren Einzelgebieten, ed. Max Dessoir, vol. 2 of the Lehrbuch der Philosophie (Berlin: Ullstein, 1925), 919. 14 Original note: If its full implications are grasped, the correct idea that hides behind this prejudice necessarily leads to the discovery of the inner contradiction between poetic description and its half measures. The very act of “illustrating” is only possible because words—including those that are based on aesthetic intentions—have a conceptual core even if the conceptual content is indefinite, hazy, and changeable. Illustration by linguistic sounds alone would be impossible. Hence any attempt to illustrate visual art through music is entirely futile from the very outset. 15 Original note: On which see the study by Hans Sedlmayr, “Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft,” Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen 1 (1931): 7ff.

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cal and comparative disciplines of the science of art history. The other method—which proceeds from a fixed plane of reference—has secured this scientific form from the very outset, though it struggles to overcome a certain distance from the object. And since history, according to received wisdom, has primarily to do with singularity, there is a danger here that it falls foul of a priori constructions, of being unhistorical, whereas the opposing camp will have to accept that its statements will not be regarded as scientifically binding. We need to get beyond this rigid binary opposition of the two views. The fact that the opposition between the two approaches has become so pointedly contradictory is only due to the circumstance that most adherents of unsystematic description regard it as their duty to be uninhibited and free from any reflexive attitude so that they can allow the work of art to affect them in a completely pure and unadulterated way. Confronting the object of study naively and with complete impartially is, however, an unfulfillable wish. It implies a denial of the nature of perception in general and of the comprehension of works of art in particular.16 The adherents of free description would be right to shut themselves off from all intellectual influence if, in the act of perception, their objects were drawn out for them as though on a blank piece of paper. Then it would make sense to keep the sheet perfectly white, the mirror quite clean, so as not to obscure the image as it presents itself. But things are rather different in reality. We would be incapable of apprehending an object—or indeed anything in the external world—if we did not bring to it a certain attitude, a certain predisposition for forms and figures. Crucial to the presentation of a phenomenon and codeterminant of its ultimate form are not just the external objective data (the constellation of stimuli [Reizkonstellation]) but also, fundamentally, the state of the receiving apparatus, which is heavily influenced by prior experience, that is, both external and internal conditions. If this applies to mere things in the external world, how much more importance must be attributed to the central factors in the perception of a work of art, which requires a specific predisposition if it is to be transformed from material substrate (art object [Kunstding]) into artistic composition.17 Different attitudes will give rise to quite different phenomena (of quite different quality) on the basis of one and the same object. And a high-quality phenomenon (one that allows for a good description) is only possible when it elicits the appropriate attitude. To be sure, all attitudes are adaptable, and the work of art itself will prompt a very specific interpretation, so that the ultimate phenomenon emerges from a permanent interaction between central and peripheral factors. But there is no guarantee that the passive behavior of our original disposition—a disposition that is necessarily arbitrary in relation to the object of contemplation—will achieve this end without our involvement. Any science is duty bound to actively pursue its proper disposition, that is, it must earnestly concern itself with the methodological problem of developing specific procedures that will favorably influence the act of perception. Those who resist the attempt to systematically 16 Original

note: The following arguments are no more than a condensed presentation of the theory of perception as elaborated by gestalt psychology; see primarily Kurt Koffka, “Psychologie,” in Die Philosophie in ihren Einzelgebieten, ed. Max Dessoir, vol. 2 of the Lehrbuch der Philosophie (Berlin: Ullstein, 1925), 559ff; and Kurt Koffka, “Zur Theorie der Erlebnis-Wahrnehmung,” Annalen der Philosophie 3 (1923), 375–99, which provide crucial insights for this and many other methodological problems of art history. The fundamental importance of modern gestalt theory to the evolution of art-historical thinking was first recognized by Hans Sedlmayr, who was also the first to apply its views and findings to our discipline. 17 Original note: Hans Sedlmayr, “Fischer von Erlach: Gegenwärtige Erkenntnislage,” Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur 1–2 (1927–28): 118.

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improve aesthetic receptivity because they see in it a danger of rationalist distortion must be clear that they are not maintaining their impartiality, as they wrongly suppose; they are holding on to prescientific, vulgar psychological views, that is, generally held notions that have filtered through from an earlier state of knowledge. It is with this obsolete and inadequate attitude that they react—without being aware of it—to the objects that are presented to them.

Poster by the Social Democratic Arts Council (Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle), celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Republic with a Workers’ Symphony Concert, with works by Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern as conductor, 1928. (Courtesy of Wien Museum.)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

NEW MUSIC Wolfgang Fichna

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Viennese music scene of the 1920s was given an added dimension through its relations with the cultural policies of the Social Democrats, something that can also be seen in some of the city’s most prominent musicians. Although Arnold Schoenberg considered himself a member of the bourgeoisie, he was nonetheless convinced that his work was part of a historically determined process. He also had special friendships with several politicians influential in Red Vienna’s cultural and educational policy. In turn, the most sociocritical works of the Second Viennese School were the operas Wozzeck and Lulu by Alban Berg. And the person most closely involved at the institutional level of Red Vienna was Anton Webern, who, as conductor and curator of some of the Workers’ Symphony Concerts series (Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzerte), had close ties to the Social Democratic Arts Council (Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle). In the quest for a new sound aesthetic for the modern age, composers such as Ernst Krenek combined the atonality and twelve-tone technique of Schoenberg’s circle with other new sounds, particularly that of jazz. The main person involved in the cultural program of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) was David Josef Bach (1874–1947). The schoolmate and close friend of Schoenberg worked as a writer, journalist, and music critic for the daily Arbeiter-Zeitung. In 1918 he became the editor of its arts and literary section. Bach had already introduced the Workers’ Symphony Concerts in 1905 with the goal of exposing the proletariat to classical music and giving them opportunities to visit leading Viennese concert venues such as the Musikverein and Konzerthaus. Not least because of the success of this concert series, Bach became the director of the Social Democratic Arts Council when it was founded in 1919. The objective of the council was cultural education of all kinds, with the Workers’ Symphony Concerts series serving as a model. Bach was a staunch supporter of modern music, as was his fellow party member, the musicologist and composer Paul Amadeus Pisk (1893–1990). Both were important functionaries in the International Society for Contemporary Music and worked with Theodor W. Adorno on Musikblätter des Anbruch, a journal dedicated to new music. Pisk was also a board member of the Schoenberg circle’s Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen) and served as its pianist. Bach in particular was accused by Karl Kraus of holding a fundamentally bourgeois attitude toward music, and thus that his mediating work was imposing bourgeois culture on the working class.1 SDAP comrades such as Josef Luitpold Stern and Fritz Brügel he

1 See

Karl Kraus, “An die sozialdemokratische Kunststelle,” Die Fackel 27, nos. 706–11 (1925): 66.

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even went further. They advocated music that was truly proletarian—protest and workers’ songs, folk-like music with simplified harmonies and clear structures such as the works of Sergei Prokofiev’s Soviet years, pieces that would fulfill a social mission. And not unexpectedly, conservatives and nationalists criticized modernist concepts of art. Their criticism was marked not only by anti-Semitism but also—in the case of jazz—by racism. This ultimately led to the artistic denouncements by the Nazis that culminated with lasting effect in the propaganda exhibitions “Degenerate Art” (put on display in Munich in 1937 and in Vienna in 1939) and “Degenerate Music” (Düsseldorf 1938). The ideas of Bach and Pisk influenced the cultural politics of the Social Democrats to a considerable degree, despite the fact that their modernist notions of music were not necessarily suitable for the masses. Their ideas corresponded rather to the Austro-Marxist programmatic plan of leading the working classes to artistic modernism. Moreover, Bach’s ideas of what constituted “folkloric”—clearly distinguished from the notion of “popular”—were combined with Adorno’s musical-sociological perspective that considered the advances in new music to be analogous to abstraction in painting. According to Bach, and the Schoenberg circle as well, this development could only be achieved by systematically teaching the proletariat about classical music and imparting a basic knowledge of prominent musical figures—from Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven to Gustav Mahler. In addition to the Workers’ Symphony Concerts series, Social Democrats funded workers’ music education at popular education centers and the Conservatory for Popular Folk Music (Konservatorium für volkstümliche Musikpflege) where interested workers could take singing, piano, and other music lessons—orchestral, jazz, and folk. In 1924 the first Music and Theater Festival was held, directed by Bach. Although some complained about that modern music was overrepresented, most criticism had to do with the festival’s finances. It nevertheless became the model for the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen) first held in 1927. The representatives of new music rarely let themselves be drawn into the service of Social Democratic cultural politics directly, claiming the independence of their artistic output. The closest relationship between a prominent representative of modern music and the Social Democrats was the collaboration of Anton Webern with Red Vienna’s cultural institutions. He and the composer Egon Wellesz, together with other important intellectual and cultural figures such as Alfred Adler, Sigmund Freud, Hans Kelsen, Alma Mahler, Robert Musil, and Franz Werfel, also signed a manifesto entitled Rallying Cry of Vienna’s Intellectuals (Eine Kundgebung des geistigen Wien), published in 1927 in the Arbeiter-Zeitung. The final words of the piece read: “The essence of the intellect is first and foremost freedom, which is endangered at present, and which we consider our responsibility to protect. The struggle to elevate humanity and the battle against lethargy and barrenness will always find us at the ready. And at this very moment, too, we are ready.”2 Further reading Beniston and Vilain 2006 Fichna 2019 Krenek 2012 Schoenberg 1984 Steinert 1989 Zapke 2019 2 Arbeiter-Zeitung,

April 20, 1927, 1. See chapter 34.

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1. August Forstner The Transport Workers at the First Workers’ Symphony Concert First published as “Die Transportarbeiter im ersten Arbeiter-Sinfoniekonzert,” Kunst und Volk: Mitteilungen des Vereines “Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle,” 3, no. 2 (October 1928): 4–5. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. The monthly journal Kunst und Volk (1926–1931), edited by David Josef Bach, was published by the Social Democratic Arts Council as a forum to discuss ways to organize culture for workers, although it was primarily used as a medium for socialist art criticism and art theory. Special attention was given to music. August Forstner (1876–1941), a member of the National Council but formerly a coachman, was an atypical contributor to this journal. Here, he provides an eyewitness account of the first Workers’ Symphony Concert at Vienna’s Musikverein, where works by Beethoven, Wagner, Weber, and Wolf were performed. Even though the affordability of cultural events for the proletariat was a much-discussed matter, Forstner focuses rather on everyday problems such as time management and clothing regulations, basic problems that confronted interested workers if they wanted to go to an elite bourgeois concert venue. When the first Workers’ Symphony Concert was announced in the Arbeiter-Zeitung on December 28, 1905, it was clear to the men working in the horse stables and on the street, the transport workers and furniture movers, that if a concert was being organized by workers then they had to go. The party would be counting on them being there. So they decided to go to the concert, come what may. The unionizing of transport workers had already progressed beyond its infancy. Gone are the times when meetings always had to be followed by dance music with harmonica, when I not only had to get the transport workers to come—men who during the week worked so hard from early morning to late at night—but I also had to go to employment offices and engage dancers, servant girls and the like. No, the next stage of their unionization had already arrived. By that time, I had long since described the splendors of the world to my comrades, had shown them at meetings that there are things even lovelier than playing cards or sitting in smoky, stinky, and dank taverns. By reading them the classics, I had awakened their desire to see greatness on the stage. At first, of course, I had to read them stories that were amusing. Later, I turned to more serious stories. That was what I had to do for operas too. First, I read them The Broken Jug, The Bartered Bride, Tsar and Carpenter—later came William Tell, Wallenstein, The Robbers, The Ancestress and many pieces by Anzengruber. Then we went to the Burgtheater and the Opera. Just when the Workers’ Symphony Concert was announced, we had been planning to go see some operas by Wagner at the Opera and the Volksoper. Prepared in this manner, we could set out for the first Workers’ Symphony Concert. But one major difficulty had yet to be overcome. We could go the theater on Sunday afternoons or evenings after the horses had been fed and watered, but the Workers’ Symphony Concert was scheduled for a weekday evening. Although the day’s work would be over, there would not be enough time to wash up or change our clothes since the horses still had to be fed and watered. What could we do? The transport workers did not want to go to the Musikverein in their work clothes, and the horses had to be taken care of beforehand as well. After facing a lot of reluctance, I was finally able to persuade

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the transport workers to go to the concert in their work clothes after all. The coachmen simply rolled up their blue aprons, the transport agents, loaders, and furniture movers their white ones, and hid them under their waistcoats. Other workmates fed the horses. I was only able to convince them to go by saying that since the concert was for workers, the other people at the concert would also be workers—people who would not be offended if a worker didn’t have time to change his clothes and went to a concert in his work clothes. But they still insisted on stashing a nicer coat for the evening with a pub keeper they knew. In fact, some of the other concertgoers did look up in astonishment when the transport workers entered the concert hall one after another, walking slowly with their heavy boots at the side of their wives, holding their crumpled caps in their hands. The younger wives wore pretty hats, but the older ones still wore their timeworn, folded cloth “Gugel” hood. Some of the coachmen’s rolled-up aprons had slipped down over their thighs without their noticing. During the concert, our workmates listened attentively to the performance. In some places they did get a little restless, so it was apparent how much the music was affecting them. Later on unionization had some success and work hours could be shortened. That means that nowadays, at a Workers’ Symphony Concert or the theater, the only way you might notice that the person sitting next to you is a transport worker is when you shake his worn and calloused hand to say good-bye. Aside from that, they are no different from any other worker. They also have an eight-hour day, come home between five and six o’clock in the evening, and have time to change their clothes. To be sure, even transport workers know what is appropriate: you dress up to enjoy classical art. And even though fancy clothes are no longer black salon coats—thank God, something that has finally gone out of fashion—fancy clothes still means a Sunday suit. Nonetheless, the transport workers still remember that first Workers’ Symphony Concert to this day, the moment when workers felt they were transformed from mere enslaved beasts of burden to human beings enjoying better times. The young transport workers of today hold their heads much higher than the older ones. They have joined the ranks of the great cultural institutions of our time. Whatever culture and art the party offers to the workers, they go to as many events as they can get. The young men of today no longer know how difficult that transition was, because they live in better times, times in which the working class has actually grasped some freedom of movement.

2. David Josef Bach Why Do We Not Have a Social Democratic Art Policy First published as “Warum haben wir keine sozialdemokratische Kunstpolitik?,” Der Kampf  22, no. 3 (1929): 139–48. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. With the founding in 1919 of the Social Democratic Arts Council, the SDAP’s art and cultural policies were institutionalized for the first time and its activities financed by the entertainment tax (Lustbarkeitsabgabe). This kindled debates, also among Social Democrats, about how to position and implement these policies. In an article that appeared in 1929 in Der Kampf, the party’s publication for theoretical matters, Oscar Pollak, later editor-inchief of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, criticized the approach of the Social Democratic Arts Council

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as being bourgeois and inefficient.3 He called for policies based on the model of sport for workers and for overcoming the culture of the elite. In response, the next issue of Der Kampf contained an editorial by the head of the council, David Josef Bach, which appeared under the same title as Pollak’s article. It used to be a sensation when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was performed at a Workers’ Symphony Concert. The chorale finale was still sung by bourgeois choirs, since at that time it would have been considered presumptuous to demand that Vienna’s best workers’ singing groups perform. That demand has long been fulfilled. We have come so far in Social Democratic cultivation of the arts, at least in some areas, that both the performers on the stage and the listeners in the hall are members of the same working class, united by the same love of socialism and the arts. For the Republic celebrations in 1928, the Workers’ Symphony Concert included a work by Schönberg and one by Gustav Mahler, both sung by four hundred workers. Both the initial performance and an encore performance sold out, and now two more performances were added just for the unionized book printers. And so these two works—one which to this day was considered nearly unperformable and the other which was booed twenty years ago at its premiere—have been received with enthusiasm by at least seven thousand workers in one year, scoring, together with their fellow workers, a triumphant victory for a union of the arts and the people. And so one could really ask: “Why aren’t we successful with Social Democratic art policies in Vienna?” I initiated these art policies, which I consider Social Democratic, many years ago (I do beg the reader’s pardon, but although my name is not mentioned, the comrade being referred to in the article is indeed me). I initiated them before there was an Arts Council, even before the first Workers’ Symphony Concert performance, which preceded the Arts Council. At that time, I did not look around because I had to fight. But when I look around now, I realize that the masses have come along with me. In fact, the bourgeois coffee houses are surprised and rightly so. Although comrade Pollak’s mockery of the “rarefied listeners” at such symphony concerts is unjustified, it should still be remembered that music, especially art music, is always restricted to a certain circle of people. And so one other task of Social Democratic art policies is to increase the number of listeners, to awaken hidden energies in the proletariat. Indeed, in this we did not miss the mark. [. . .] Proletarian festival culture. This leads us to a new task for Social Democratic art policies—using the proletarian festival for developing a closer relationship between the workforce and art and artists. Today we are at a turning point regarding this type of festival culture. New efforts, new developments are asserting themselves, efforts that by their very nature sometimes reverse earlier ones. But there has been a festival culture in the last eighty years as well, although its form, as I would like to point out, has endured a number of difficulties. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was already performed at the party’s Schiller commemoration events of 1905, at the Weigl on the edge of town,4 and at the 1911 election victory celebrations, the party delegates of Vienna listened enthusiastically to all of the Egmont music. At the 3 Oskar Pollak, “Warum haben wir keine sozialdemokratischen Kunstpolitik?,” Der Kampf 22, no. 2 (1929): 83–86. See chapter 26. 4 Presumably the event location “Weigls Dreherpark” in the Twelfth District, Meidling.

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time, that was by no means something self-evident. And if it has become so today, then it is thanks to Social Democratic art policies. And now someone is asserting that, firstly, such policies do not even exist, and secondly, if they do, then in any event they have not been successful. The form of the “academy” has gradually become established for party events, whether large or small. It works well or not so well depending on the circumstances. But it was within the framework of such an academy that the ceremonial hall of the Hofburg was actually opened for the International Transport Workers’ Congress, and to the strains of the “Internationale.” And for several years on May Day, it has also been an academy that has presented the Philharmonic playing Strauss and Lanner for the political leaders of Vienna in the great ceremonial room of Vienna’s city hall—a symbolic appropriation of Vienna’s artistic heritage by the city’s new citizens. These May academies at the city hall were organized by the Arts Council, not by someone else. The programs of the events organized by the Arts Council for groups both large and small fill several volumes in our archives. Nearly all of Vienna’s most important stage artists have performed for the Viennese workers at these events, not only in large concert halls and great ceremonial ballrooms but also in the people’s houses [Arbeiterheime] and small party meeting rooms, even the tiniest. The number of these academies has decreased in recent years, for economic reasons but also because the party has expanded so much. Although central leadership is still possible, strictly centralized management is hardly feasible. Any experienced school official knows that more people come to a lecture on education if it has been organized by a local section, not centrally by the district. Furthermore, the current new development mentioned above is part of the reason. The point of such events is not just their clear political character, but also that they draw on the artistic potential of the working class itself. This development has been positively influenced by the art policies of the Arts Council. A few aspects have already been mentioned. In addition, among other things, a specifically proletarian artistic form has developed—the speaking choir of the Arts Council. It has existed for more than five years and has become an integral part of the party. It has even produced some offspring, especially in the youth organizations. Added to this are the efforts to promote so-called folk instruments such as the mandolin, zither, and guitar, which are often played very well by the proletariat. These instruments are not only in the curriculum of the aforementioned workers’ conservatory but are also part of the Arts Council’s work plan. Just the last issue of the association’s journal Kunst und Volk, which thousands of people see as promoting Social Democratic art policies, was dedicated to these programs supporting folkloric artistic skills. [. . .] Artists and the party. He [Oscar Pollak] cannot be seriously referring to the Arts Council when he says it has not been possible to get artists to go to the workers. It is quite wrong to reproach artists for this. You cannot always demand that artists do something; you have to give them something too. You won’t have any art at all if you don’t give artists opportunities for creative work. The Arts Council can rarely provide creative artists the materials they need, but it does help artists doing re‑creative work, in other words, conductors, soloists, actors, etc. In this, the Arts Council has truly fulfilled its duty. It did not wait to see if this or that person was already famous enough; it just took note of their accomplishments. The path of the Arts Council has not been guided by self-importance, obsession with renown, or the desire to discover a new talent every day but rather the true socialist conviction that a community needs artists. If it had gone the other way, its audience would

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have been led down the road of snobbism, of sensationalism. It is not always easy to avoid this hazard. But the Arts Council and the editors of the arts and literary section of the Arbeiter-Zeitung have always been assertive in supporting the rights of living artists, despite the risk that these artists are not always easy to deal with. Complaisant mediocrity is easier. The Arbeiter-Zeitung has fought for people who are actively creating and has been able to introduce certain artists to the public and into the proletarian consciousness. It has also been possible to find, encourage, and promote proletarian poets through these art policies. Of course, to be fully effective, to have the power that corresponds to the size of our movement, such socialist art policies cannot be limited to the Arbeiter-Zeitung or the Arts Council. It is not a coincidence that the first attacks on Social Democratic art policies, in fact, doubts about whether they exist, have been directed at the Arts Council. This is because the Arts Council is the front guard in the sphere of the arts. It is thus natural that its artistic director is the most exposed. But the drawback of this position is also an advantage. Whether good or bad, the Arts Council and its policies cannot go unnoticed, although it is easier and quicker to notice what is bad. It would be regrettable, however, if the contribution of party comrades and the entire public sphere of the party were limited to positive or negative criticism. I believe that Comrade Pollak’s conclusion—“We have no Social Democratic art policies in Vienna”—is incorrect. He has set forth a misjudgment based on inadequate factual records. To conclude, I would like to repeat: Social Democratic art policies are part of the power of the Social Democratic Party; they are the means for its financial, organizational, and moral strength.

3. Paul A. Pisk Can the Worker Find a Close Relationship to Contemporary Music? First published as “Kann der Arbeiter ein inneres Verhältnis zur zeitgenössischen Musik finden?,” Kunst und Volk: Mitteilungen des Vereines “Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle” 2, no. 2 (February 1927): 4–5. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. The composer, musicologist, and critic Paul Amadeus Pisk (1893–1990), like David Josef Bach, was an avid proponent of new music and the Second Viennese School. Like Bach, Pisk held the view that Social Democracy had to introduce the working class to the modern age by means of education in the arts and practical music instruction. He also presented this position in Kunst und Volk, the monthly journal of the Social Democratic Arts Council. In music, as in any art, the concept of the contemporary means different things to different people. Just like generations of artists have produced works in different styles, the works of today’s younger artists are very dissimilar. Perhaps this is because our times lack a well-knit cultural community that alone would encourage the creation of uniform art works. In this age of such conspicuous individualism, especially among intellectuals and artists in particular, everyone speaks a different language and thus is understood by very few. Here I will write about a kind of music that is quite remote from what the general public considers music to be, namely harmonic and melodious (the general public being understood here as the masses who love, are receptive to, but are not formally trained in

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music). It is well known that in recent years, all over the world and independent of any mutual influence, new means of expression in music have been sought that differ greatly from those used until now. When confronted by such music, the layperson is initially at a complete loss. Naturally, he tends either to reject it as nonsense or to misinterpret it because of his inability to comprehend it. But before guiding you toward an appreciation of this new art, it would be wise to discuss what the term musical appreciation actually means. Musical appreciation differs depending on the mental disposition and attitude of the listener. Those listeners at the lowest level perceive sequences of tones and structures of sound in the same way they would look through a kaleidoscope or watch the unfolding images of a film: they are only interested in the sequence of colors, the interplay of images, but this does not touch any deeper emotional or intellectual realm. At a higher level are those listeners who, although unable to grasp the course of a musical event intellectually, have an emotional response when listenting to music. They either conjure up unusual images in their mind’s eye or feel some sort of narrowly defined “mood.” For them, music has an effect on their spirit. Again, this too is not enough to understand music. For the truly comprehending listener, the inner structure of a work of art, even if only on a subconscious level, must be clear. They must sense that a formally and architecturally closed structure is passing by their ear, a structure whose beauty consists not only in its emotional value, something they incorporate into the work themselves according to their own feelings, but in the even proportions of its construction and arrangement. In buildings and paintings, it is much easier to see and recognize formal elements. But a piece of music passes the ear; it takes place in time, not in space, and most people have a less-developed sense of time than of space. Musical notation, which offers a sort of visual explanation of the acoustic process, generally cannot be read by the great masses of average listeners. And even for those who understand these signs, they often cannot imagine them as a pattern of sounds. With large audiences it is basically impossible to carry out a practical “form analysis,” that is, dissecting individual pieces to clarify the various relationships within them. This would be possible only if each member of an audience were to be able to read and dissect the pieces on their own. In the concert business, an attempt is made with the so-called introductions in program booklets that describe the course of each work, emphasizing how particularly characteristic sections affect the emotions. Of course, this is really very little help for “understanding” the music. Today, the musical education of the layperson is generally so advanced that they can easily take in folk songs and dances. If a melody is sharply structured, they can clearly follow its short sections. They can recognize when similar material is repeated and sense the effect of contrasts. Being aware of harmonic cadences as compulsory chord progressions that signal turning points and endings makes it easier for them to recognize the course of a piece of music. The simple melody and cadenza structures found in folk music are no longer as apparent in works by the composers of the classical and romantic era. For this reason, while a folk song has a clear impact on a worker, this impact is immediately less clear when it comes to larger-scale musical forms. In addition, understanding absolute music, which has no lyrics, is much more difficult than music with lyrics, since words at least steer thoughts and feelings in certain directions. It is very hard for the average listener to gain a clear impression of modern music, which not only forgoes simple melodic lines but also cadences in the traditional sense. To grasp such a piece, it is not enough to have an impression of the progression of the tones or an emotional response to the inner musical processes. Indeed, lack of musical training

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obscures the path to intellectual comprehension. There is only one remedy, one that is the most powerful teacher in other areas of human life as well: experience combined with slow and gradual familiarity, in this case through regular and repeated listening to such music. The worker, simply for the sake of his worldview, must fight for those new things that point to the future; this is why it is imperative that he not reject contemporary music from the outset. Moreover, he should not let his musical teachers, who often follow only certain artistic movements, influence him to strive for a comprehension of only classical or otherwise well-known works, leaving him with no understanding for others. For someone who has no musical training, it is just as hard to grapple with a classical piece as a modern one. And since it is our hope that the entire populace, the proletariat, will support the musical culture of the future, we must now spend time and effort to engage workers with music, to assure that the artists of the present day are creating the community of the future. Despite the various crisscrossing movements, despite the foibles of many artists, rudiments of a genuinely social type of art are already being felt. To pursue this new social art requires tenacity and dedication, but the worker, who has also faced difficulties when progressing in other areas of life, will be up to the task.

4. Anton Webern The Path to New Music, II. Lecture Published as “Der Weg zur neuen Musik. II. Vortrag,” in Der Weg zur neuen Musik, ed. Willi Reich (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1960 [February 27, 1933]), 13–17. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. Between 1932 and 1933, Anton Webern held two eight-part lecture series for a select circle at a private home in Vienna. His friend, the lawyer Rudolf Ploderer, transcribed them in shorthand. The two series were titled “The Road to Composition in Twelve Tones” and “The Path to New Music.” With detailed examples played at the piano, Webern’s presentation was structured musically, including deliberate repetitions and pauses (indicated in the transcribed text with long dashes). Webern believed, as did Schoenberg, that the path to new music would only succeed by rigorously examining the great works of music history and understanding their rules. It would then be possible to deduce from them the rules of contemporary music. How do people hear music? How do the great masses hear it? —It seems that they must be able to stick to images and “moods.” If they cannot imagine a green meadow, a blue sky, or something of that sort, they lose their way. While listening to me now, you are following some sort of logical intellectual development. But that is not how a person follows tones. If I sing something very simple—something for one voice such as “Es kommt ein Vogerl geflogen”5 or the shepherd melody from Tristan, where the musical concept takes very little space and has almost no depth—is not everyone nonetheless aware that there is a “theme,” a melody, a musical thought? —At least for someone who thinks in terms of music—and this is what I would like to guide you to do a little—there is no doubt about what is happening. I can recognize whether a thought is commonplace or dull—this has 5 “A

bird flew by”; a well-known Austrian folk song.

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nothing to do with whether a thought is familiar—and I know how to distinguish banal thoughts from those that are more advanced and valuable. —Indeed, Karl Kraus’s statement about the “shores of thoughts” is so typical!6 It is certainly meant to be disparaging. —Are the compositions of Bach and Beethoven just a “smudge of emotions” when placed next to thoughts? —What, then, corresponds to the grammar of language, which is so rightly respected by Karl Kraus? —The rules of musical form! And secondly—the point of departure for Karl Kraus—there is “moral gain.” If you acquire an inkling of the rules, then you definitely stand in a very different relation to those spirits than before! Then it is no longer possible to think that a piece either can or cannot exist—rather, it must exist. Whenever something exceptional was claimed, centuries always had to pass before people could accept it. —This is “moral gain.” And thus when I quoted Goethe in order to explain my understanding of art, this is why: to show you that art follows sets of rules just as nature does. Art is a product of universal nature as found in one particular form, that of human nature. What perspectives this opens! It is a process that is far from arbitrary. —I remember here something that Schönberg said when he was in the military. A commander asked him in surprise, “Are you perchance the composer?” —To which Schönberg replied, “Yes, since no one else wanted the job, I had to take it!” Speaking concretely: tones follow rules of nature that are related to our sense of hearing. —We recently examined these matters and detected these rules. —As always, my intention here is to guide you to think in a certain way, and then to view things in that way. —A tone, as I have told you, is a compound made up of the fundamental tone plus its overtones. And now a process has been completed, a process whereby music has progressively, stage by stage, taken advantage of this composite material. This is one path: to first use what is closest and then what is more distant. Nothing is more wrong than the opinion that often pops up today, an opinion that has always existed: “They should compose like they did in the olden days, not with so many dissonances like they do today!” —This is because we are being faced with the continual appropriation of what nature has given to us! —It can be said that the overtone series is practically infinite; ever finer differentiations are conceivable. And from this point of view, there is nothing to be said against trying quarter-tone music and the like. It is only a question of whether the present time is already ripe for that. —But the path is absolutely the correct one and is given by the nature of the tone. —So I would like to make it clear that also what is being attacked today is actually part of nature, just like that which was practiced earlier. And why is it important for us to explain this? —Just look at the music of today! — The misperception seems to be taking hold that what is happening has never happened before. People are talking about “directions.” Or: which direction should we believe and trust? —It is certainly clear to you what I mean when I say “directions.” I repeat: the diatonic series was not invented, it was discovered. It was already given, and so for us, what we were to infer from this discovery was very simple and clear: the tones of the scale are formed by the overtones of the “parallelogram of forces” between the three neighboring related tones. It is precisely the most important overtones that stand in closest relationship to one another—something entirely natural, not imaginary. 6 “Music laps the shores of thoughts. Only someone who has no mainland lives in the world of music. The easiest melody awakens thoughts, as does the easiest woman. Someone who does not have any thoughts seeks them in music and in women. New music is a woman who compensates for her natural shortcomings by mastering Sanskrit completely.” Karl Kraus, Sprüche und Widersprüche, 3rd rev. ed. (Vienna, Leipzig: Verlag “Die Fackel,” 1924), 145.

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And it is these that form the diatonic series. —But what about the tones in between? —A new epoch begins with these, something we will deal with later. And what is a triad anyway? The triad that has played such a role in music so far, the triad whose disappearance is making people so upset. A triad is made up of the first overtone that is different from the fundamental tone plus the second. It is thus a duplication of these overtones and an imitation of nature, the first primitive relationships found in a tone. That is why it sounds so pleasant to our ears and why it was originally used. Now there is something else, something that was first explained—as far as I know— by Schönberg: these simple combinations are called consonances. It was soon discovered, however, that the more distant overtone relationships, which people called dissonances, could be perceived as added spice. What we must understand is that consonance and dissonance are essentially indistinguishable from one another; the difference between them is not a fundamental one but only a gradual one. A dissonance is just another rung on the ladder of progress. We do not know where the fight against Schönberg is leading, a fight based on the charge of his making excessive use of dissonances. This is nonsense of course; music has always faced this struggle. Anyone who dared to make a move forward was accused of the same. —In the last quarter century, however, this move forward has been quite vehement, in fact, as can be said quite calmly, never before in music history has it been greater. —But those who suppose that there is a substantial difference between consonance and dissonance are wrong. This is because each tone, as given by nature, contains the entire range of tonal possibilities. That is how it works. —But how you look at it is always very important.

5. Elsa Bienenfeld Schönberg’s Pierrot lunaire First published as “Konzerte. Schönbergs ‘Pierrot lunaire’,” Neues Wiener Journal, November 13, 1922, 2. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. The chamber music melodrama Pierrot lunaire, based on the eponymous expressionist poems by Albert Giraud, was first performed in 1912 in Berlin. Arnold Schoenberg’s work is regarded as a modernist milestone. The composer saw the atonal work as absolute music, not as illustrating the lyrics. The reactions to the first performances ranged between great approval and tangible scandal. Musicologist, critic, and music teacher Elsa Bienenfeld (1877–1942) was herself a student of Alexander Zemlinsky and Schoenberg. She uses her review of a performance of Pierrot lunaire at the Konzerthaus in Vienna in 1922 to make (the nonverifiable) assertion that new music no longer upset Viennese audiences at all, in contrast to Germany. At the same time, however, she ironically distances herself from her former teacher. Vienna has the Society for Private Musical Performances. The ruling potentate of this association is Arnold Schönberg. Under his leadership, didactic work has been going on for several years now. Closed to the general public and with a ban on journalists writing about them, these performances introduce the association members to recently composed music. A few young people, pupils of Schönberg, zealously take on the organizational tasks of the association. First and foremost, the pianist Eduard Steuermann should be mentioned as well as the conductor Erwin Stein who are both talented artists with pure artistic ambitions. From time to time the association puts on propaganda

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concerts. Mahler, Strauss, Reger, and Debussy are put in the limelight on such occasions, although none of these composers are any longer in need of propaganda. And actually, Schönberg himself does not need it either, because although he is not necessarily so familiar, he is not unknown. Nonetheless, after such a long time it was very interesting to hear Schönberg’s Pierrot lunaire again. The performance took place in the mid-sized hall at the Konzerthaus. For an audience that was not very big. The audience listened to the whole cycle patiently and even applauded at the appropriate times, namely during longer pauses. It was a concert like any other, no unsettling hissing or cheering. In contrast to Germany, where, according to reports, performances of Pierrot lunaire are accompanied by tumultuous riots, Vienna is one step ahead. Here, the war of opinions regarding Schönberg is over. Pierrot lunaire is a curious hybrid composition. It comprises seven consecutive poems from a cycle by the French poet Albert Giraud, who is what one used to call a modern fin-de-siècle poet. Morbid sensations, nervous statements, fragments of moods give the impression of something infinitely difficult to understand being catapulted from a soul sunk in absinthe. A Verlaine without the strength of vision (despite the translation by Otto Erich Hartleben). Schönberg set the verses to music composed for piano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and a Sprechstimme. The voice pronounces the poems according to prescribed accent marks, pauses and prolongation. (We would have happily watched and listened to the adorable Erika Wagner even if she had been speaking Chinese.) Individual tones from the instruments toss in light and darkness. They do not form themes or motifs; they seem more like mere primal sounds, sudden appearances of sensory stimuli. An airy cello vibrato, a clear note in the clarinet, a humble figure in the violin: they create some sort of grotesque charade, something miserable and sad. But then there are suddenly moments when it seems as if a naked soul is sobbing. Behind veils of tones, a humanlike form seems to flicker. Distraught stammering! To hear it is terrible, even shocking, like the agony of the dying who can no longer utter what they want to say, when they are so weak that the distance from the brain to the mouth has become too great. And so the tones, the sounds, express only approximately their innermost meaning, their actual intention. These tones, these sounds, do not build bridges over which our senses, our understanding, can cross to what is really desired by that intention. And incidentally there was an unusual coincidence at this performance of Pierrot lunaire, in which everything seemed twisted and sounded crooked: the violinist (Rudolf Kolisch) held his instrument with his right arm and drew the bow with his left. Of course, there are people who are left handed, but it is surprising when they become violinists. And there are also philosophical geniuses; when they decide to become composers, that is also surprising.

6. Theodor W. Adorno On the Anbruch: Exposé Published as “Zum Anbruch: Exposé,” Musikalische Schriften VI, Opern- und Konzertkritiken, Buchrezensionen, Zur Praxis des Musikerlebens (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2003 [1928]), 595–604. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) lived in Vienna in 1925 and 1926 to study composition under Alban Berg. In 1928 he became the editor of Musikblätter des Anbruch (loosely, Music

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Journal of the Dawning Age; from 1929, simply Anbruch), a prominent Austrian music journal focusing on new music. In addition to articles by composers such as Bela Bartók, Arnold Schoenberg and Berg, numerous articles appeared by music critics, including Paul Bekker and Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt. Paul Amadeus Pisk and David Josef Bach also contributed to the journal. Actively involved in the debates on modernity in music, in 1925 a special issue on jazz appeared. The following exposé by Adorno was written in 1928, one year before the journal’s editorial voice was modified to reflect the changes of a new era in music. It remained unpublished in his lifetime. Here Adorno reflects, in a manner typical of him, on various things, including the role of light music in the contemporary music scene. His ideas show strong similarities to those of David Josef Bach. It is important to transform the Anbruch into an absolutely up-to-date institution, into a journal representative of the modern era, actively interceding in music politics with all its might. Its point of view, based on an understanding of the most current musical development, cannot be expressed in an abstract manner but has to emerge from the pages of the journal. In specifically musical matters, the guiding principles are provided by the works of composers who represent the music published by Universal-Edition, that is, by Mahler and the Schönberg School. This should not mean that the Anbruch is committed to only these composers; strong and radical forces outside these circles, such as the composers Kurt Weill and Křenek, naturally deserve consideration as well. The Schönberg School—intellectually the most advanced and radical group in contemporary music—is to provide just the basic underlying categories of the Anbruch, that is, those aspects that are intrinsically musical or are theoretical and sociological. This should not be achieved by using insider terminology and dogmatic principles but only by means of the objective seriousness of the statements. [. . .] In the context of discussions of a sociological nature, a whole new type of music must be the focus of the Anbruch, music that has hitherto been excluded from any serious consideration. Namely the entire sphere of “light music,” of kitsch, not only jazz but also European operettas, popular songs, etc. Also reviews of operettas and musical shows should be introduced. When doing this, a resolute position must be taken, one that is subject to two constrains. On the one hand, the arrogant concept of “serious” music must be left behind, a concept that believes it unnecessary to deal with the only kind of music consumed by the vast majority of people today. In contrast to average art whose status has merely been elevated, in contrast to expired ideals of character, culture, etc., kitsch must be put on the table and defended. On the other hand, one may not succumb to the fashionable and blatant glorification of kitsch that prevails today, especially in Berlin, and declare it the true art of our times merely because of its popularity. Rather, the radical problematic nature of kitsch and its ostensible “popularity” should be ruthlessly paraded, kitsch exposed toto genere to sociological criticism. This will reveal that it is by no means “community art” but an ideological surrogate dictated by certain class interests. Moreover, the “modernity” of kitsch should be disproved by pointing out how musically backward it is. But sentimental kitsch is always more justified than pretentious sentimental art. For example, real everyday jazz should be protected from attempts to transplant jazz into art music and to “ennoble” it. This would be as much of an injustice to jazz as to the art music. [. . .] Kitsch is a matter of interpretation; nonetheless, it is of utmost importance. I will occasionally and gladly offer detailed guidelines on how to treat the issue of kitsch. But by all means and with all sincerity, light music must be given a place in the Anbruch (of course, not presented as comic or odd). Whether it is

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better to establish a special section for “light music” or to treat it in a manner that is completely open, practice will show. I attach great importance to this point of revamping the Anbruch for our times.

7. Anonymous The Young, the Old, and Us: The Bourgeois Youth of the Postwar Period First published as “Die Jungen, die Alten und wir. Bürgerliche Jugend der Nachkriegszeit,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, January 8, 1928, 1–2. Translated by Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek. Ernst Krenek’s first opera, Jonny spielt auf, which premiered in Leipzig in 1927, entered the history of music as a jazz opera and became the composer’s greatest international success. Like Josephine Baker, who performed in Vienna in 1927, the main character, the Afro-American jazz violinist Jonny, ellicted long-lasting reactions, not only from conservatives in the city but also from the general populace. In contrast to the bourgeois newspapers, strikingly few articles appeared in the Arbeiter-Zeitung about the work’s first performance at the Vienna State Opera in January 1928. Their response to the bourgeois criticism was more pragmatic than content oriented: “The State Opera finally has a hit financed with taxpayers’ money and now it is going to be canceled?”7 Only the following review discussed the role of jazz in art music, seeing it as expressing the bourgeois attitude toward life—modern and youthful, but also hectic and eager for anything sensational. This is juxtaposed with the entertainment culture of working-class youth, whereby the anonymous author draws heavily on Otto Bauer’s ideas about mass culture that he had already formulated in a speech held in 1924 for officials of the Socialist Workers’ Youth association.8 The sons of the bourgeoisie who are now twenty-five were twelve when the war broke out and sixteen when the Habsburg Empire collapsed. The economic comfort of the old Viennese bourgeoisie, who for a century was the custodian of Viennese culture, has been destroyed by inflation. The cultural milieu of the old empire, to which the Old Viennese patriciate faithfully adhered, has been shattered by the revolution. All cultural traditions have been torn apart by the war. What are you demanding from this youth? Ideals? The bourgeoisie no longer has any ideals to realize. Enthusiasm? Should the fight against the Breitner taxes, in which the bourgeoisie is engaged, fill young souls with enthusiasm? Pathos? If there are no ideals left, then there is no pathos either. Worldly-wise serenity? Its basis was the retirement pension. Serenity gave way to convenience. Respect for the cultural heritage of the past? How can young people living in such different circumstances still keep sacred what their fathers and grandfathers considered sacred? Jazz bands and shimmy, cinemas, revues and bars, soccer and skiing provide enjoyment for their leisure hours and shape their tastes. Skeptical of all authority, all ideals, all forms of the past,

7 Anonymous,

“Die Neue Freie Presse tanzt.” Arbeiter-Zeitung, January 7, 1928, 4. See Otto Bauer, Die Arbeiterjugend und die Weltlage des Sozialismus. Rede, gehalten auf der Jahreskonferenz des Kreises Wien des Verbandes der sozialistischen Arbeiterjugend (Vienna: Sozialistische Jugendbücherei, 1924). 8

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they are looking for the new and sensational in the din of car horns, radio loudspeakers, neon signs. Looking for art that is freed from all traditions is a reflection of this new generation. In Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf, this new generation is being ironic about itself. The piece no longer has anything to do with traditional opera. It is life as is being led by this bourgeois youth. It is no longer Gretchen poetically following Faust into the green arbor, but the soprano quite prosaically following the violinist into a hotel room. The opening motifs of romantic musical drama have been exchanged for the Charleston. But this reality is housed in the pessimistic irony of a generation aware that its life is only the result of a historical defeat, the economic catastrophe of its class. It portrays the American Negro, whose music they dance to and who steals their magnificent violin, as the coming lord of the world. Oh my God! This is the resentment of those who have become impoverished, whose singers, professors, and paintings are being bought from under their noses by American capitalists. The debtor has always taken revenge on the creditor by portraying him as Harpagon9 or Shylock. And so Krenek turns John Pierpont Morgan into a Negro. The old bourgeois ladies are indignant. If middle-class young people feel and live this way—that can’t be helped. But this kind of lifestyle and these feelings becoming the model for books and music—appalling! And now it is even happening at the old court opera [Hofoper]! The elderly bourgeoisie is outraged by its youth, its past by its present, by the falsehood seeking to squeeze the lifestyle of a new generation into the art forms of a society that has gone up in flames, about the courage to say the truth. What do you want? You don’t like the mirror image of our times? Then get angry at the times, not the mirror! But what about us socialists? Well, when the upper balconies and standing room applaud more loudly than the hissing from the parquet and the boxes, we are applauding with them. We are happy about the courage to break with a tradition that has turned a world revolution into an insipid lie. We are not convinced by talk about a dissolving culture! We have seen the last fruit of that culture in tattered human bodies on barbed wire, have experienced aristocrats becoming black marketeers. But if we also laugh at the successful irony about our times, our merriment increasing with the ranting of angry old ladies, we are not overlooking the complete lack of spirit, lack of ideas, lack of culture in the image being reflected in the mirror in such an entertaining way. If this is the attitude toward life of the postwar bourgeoisie, it only proves to us that new great art can no longer emerge from the bourgeois lifestyle! Certainly, the pleasures of every age are the pleasures of the ruling class. And the amusements of the young generation of workers do not go much beyond cinema, radio and soccer. How they assert the new self-confidence they have gained through the revolution, how they use the increased free time they owe to the eight-hour day, will always be determined by the level of culture they were able to achieve during the struggle against capitalism, a level determined by very little education, doing mechanical work eight hours every day, and at the end of the work day, the oppressive constraints of overcrowded workers’ tenements. And yet young workers have a tremendous advantage over the young bourgeoisie. They have an ideal in front of them for which they are fighting. They are aware of their historical mission. They have before them the idealism, enthusiasm, ethos, and pathos that only grow out of the struggle for a great goal, reshaping humanity. It is only here that elements of a new great art of the future can arise, only from the optimistic attitude toward life of the younger generation of workers, their confidence about 9 The

miser Harpagon in Molière’s play The Miser (1668).

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the future, as well as from those groups of bourgeois youth who break down the barriers of aimless and futile bourgeois thinking and join the youth of the working class, appropriating their ideals. It is certain that great art will not emerge from the hopeless self-irony of a generation which has lost its spirit. Art only becomes great as the result of a spiritual struggle for humanity. In the new American novel, a great young nation that until recently was still uncritical of the fairy-tale-like growth of its gigantic capitalism, its frenzied technical development, will for the first time become aware of its mechanized, mindless, servile life, dominated by the power of money and tyrannized by machines, life given up in the name of business. Again, as has so often happened in history, literary criticism of the ruling system is what precedes the class fight against these systems. The history of the revolution is reflected in new Russian poetry and the new Russian novel, literature that follows tremendous social and political events. Only in this way, from the great struggles of our times, can a new future emerge. Do you know Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem, his rallying cry to artists written in the midst of the revolutionary storm? Stop whining about beauty! Break apart your own chains! The streets are our brushes! The city squares are our canvases! The thousand pages Of the book of time The old rabble be damned. To the street! To new clashes Futurists, drummers, and poets!

“‘Most-borrowed’ authors and titles in the category ‘Literature’ in the Vienna Workers’ Libraries, 1932.” Bildungsarbeit: Blätter für sozialistisches Bildungswesen 20, nos. 7–8 (July–August 1933). (Courtesy of VGA.)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

LITERATURE Richard Lambert and Gernot Waldner

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iterature in Red Vienna possessed neither a salient position nor a unifying style. From the party’s point of view, Josef Luitpold Stern had already formulated the task of literature prior to World War I (Wiener Volksbildungswesen, 1910). Stern viewed literature as a tool for combatting the influence of “kitsch, filth, and trash” (such as the adventure stories in the style of Karl May). In place of popular literature, the party touted the classics of German literature alongside a corpus of social realist works by Stern, Alfons Petzold, and Else Feldmann. In practice, however, readership statistics, publication lists, and reviews from the period point to a dynamic literary culture that embraces both kitsch and classics as well as works that today are considered canonical. The literature of Red Vienna cannot only be understood as a list of texts supported by the party, its inner circle, or its critics—including authors and thinkers such as Oscar Pollak, Ernst Fischer, and Ernst Waldinger—but as a patchwork of texts and writers from both the center and the periphery (such as Stefan Zweig, Hermann Broch, and Jura Soyfer) whose works were also well-received, either among party officials or among segments of the working class. The literary culture of Red Vienna profited primarily from two institutions: the creation of the Vienna Workers’ Libraries and the prolific press culture. The initial pre-war band of workers’ libraries was significantly expanded to create a wide-reaching institution capable of explicitly influencing reader habits and gathering data for empirical social research. By carefully curating their collections with an emphasis on literary realism as well as the natural and social sciences, these libraries fused the party’s interest in Marxist empiricism with literature to argue for fiction as a harbinger of objective reality. While the library system of Red Vienna sought to cultivate working-class reading culture, the vast newspaper scene in Vienna enabled the proliferation of literary forms. The offerings of the press spanned from serious journalism to political pamphlets to tabloids, creating a diverse collection of literary forms that reached from vernacular poems to fairy tales, from children’s plays to travel accounts and serialized novels. Newspapers also enabled access to foreign literature in translation from authors such as Upton Sinclair, O. Henry, and Jack London. Beloved by the readers of Red Vienna, these authors balanced escapism, entertainment, and social criticism, while avoiding the depressing realism that was characteristic of many so-called workers’ novels (Arbeiterromane). The Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP) also approved of the works of authors such as Hugo Bettauer, Johann Ferch, and Hans Kirchsteiner. Even though not well reviewed by some members of the party, they were seen as allies against the Christian Socials in the effort to create progressive readers.

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This tension between the reading habits of the working class and the party’s preference for direct, mimetic, socially engaged texts is typical of the contradictions that have impeded the historiography of Red Vienna’s literary culture. While popular works— whether from foreign- or German-language authors (such as Erich Kästner)—offer social content consistent with the SDAP’s aims of social education and class consciousness, the centrality of these widely read writers to Red Vienna is less obvious. The diverse array of domestic and international sources, canonical and unheralded contributors, and selfserving, utopian, or political motivations all exerted an influence over the availability, publication, and consumption of literary texts at this time. As a result, an assessment of the literature of Red Vienna cannot be bracketed by time and place and instead must consider questions of aesthetics, participation, audience, and impact. Proletarian dreams of social mobility meet attempts to cultivate a core working-class identity; modernist Austrian authors today considered canonical convene with workers’ novels composed by loyal SDAP members. These apparent contradictions comprise a complex and highly variable constellation of often competing perspectives that span cultural, class, economic, aesthetic, and formal divides, which must be balanced in order to offer a complete picture of the role of literature within Red Vienna’s culture. This complexity precludes any comprehensive definition of literature in Red Vienna. Although texts that conform to the SDAP’s political program—such as Stern’s Prometheus—are included in this chapter, this subgenre accounts for only a small portion of Red Vienna’s literary offerings. The chapter instead reveals literature’s participation in broader aesthetic, historical, and discursive relationships that characterize the Viennese socialist project. These themes include female working-class identity, education and the fairytale, German literary traditions, the legacy of logical positivism, and the spectrum of interest—from political advancement to social mobility—that inspired the literary careers of the authors who composed them. The chapter also investigates the political engagement of now-canonical authors, including Stefan Zweig and Robert Musil.1 Their inclusion provides context for considering Red Vienna’s literary scene within the literaryhistorical landscape of German-language modernism. This multidimensional focus reveals literature to be not only a pedagogical instrument for instilling sociopolitical values but also a forum for synthesizing the many transformations of life in Red Vienna. Further reading Anonymous (Transdisziplinäre Konstellationen) 2019 Holmes and Silverman 2009 Pfoser 1980 Schmidt-Dengler 2002

1 See

also “Eine Kundgebung des geistigen Wien: Ein Zeugnis für die große soziale und kulturelle Leistung der Wiener Gemeinde,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, April 20, 1927, 1, in chapter 34.

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1. Rudolf Brunngraber The Greatest Possible Order (from Karl and the Twentieth Century) First published as “1880–1893 Die größtmögliche Ordnung,” in Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Societäts-Verlag, 1933), 9–10. Republished as Karl und das zwanzigste Jahrhundert. Roman (Wien: Milena Verlag, 2010). Translated by Richard Lambert. Karl and the Twentieth Century counts as the only Austrian literary example of the New Objectivity. The essential influence behind the text, however, comes from Otto Neurath, who employed author Rudolf Brunngraber (1901–1960) in his Social and Economic Museum. The novel has two protagonists: Karl Lakner, a working-class boy from the Hernals District, and the quantitative economic and social history from the start of the industrial revolution to the global economic crisis in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929. Brunngraber, who soon after became the head of the Association of Socialist Writers, employs these two protagonists to depict the glaring discrepancy between, on the one hand, the spread of Taylorism, the formation of global cartels, and the risks of overproduction and, on the other hand, the intellectually deficient means of the working class to comprehend the processes that directly influence their lives. By depicting economic forces with quantitative figures, the text also attempts to defend the statistics-based education of the working class. In 1880, when Frederick W. Taylor (Philadelphia) had just become the first individual to conceive of rationalization, Vienna’s Karl Lakner was not yet among the living. This proved to be to Karl’s disadvantage. Because he could have just as well been eighty years old at that time. Had he been fourteen and afflicted by a goiter, and had he then undergone an operation, then they would have removed his thyroid gland because of the goiter and he would have become a cretin. Yet, apart from the state of medical science, life then was still relatively safe. Alas, Karl Lakner was not yet present in either of these forms. The fates had destined him along with eighteen hundred million others to be a part of this planet’s most violent era yet. Mr. Taylor, meanwhile, played his part to tighten down the rails upon which this era rolled. He had the nerve for what they call civilization. Although he had received an offer of admission from Harvard University, he joined the Midvale Steel Company as a laborer. And he did so with the sense of purpose that one only finds in those sorts of characters whose families have reached their biological pinnacle. The Midvale Steel Company was also the richest soil for the cultivation of this sort of man. The renowned pioneers of scientific management methods had passed through the ranks of their company: Henry R. Towne, Wilfred Levis, Carl G. Barth. This demonstrated that the head of the company, Mr. William Sellers, always kept one eye on the future. The workers of the Midvale Steel Co. found themselves roughly in the position of people who had been caught in an updraft. That the nation had acquired a number  of  railroads was known by every newspaper reader. Likewise, that the first skyscraper had been built in Chicago (1883), that in the East electric lifts carried people upward in buildings, and that in the West, every potato farmer had drilled an oil well. Inside the company, however, the impact of all of this was palpable, the winds that rose from these changes. What yesterday was work was today engagement in

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something that was called scientific management. Workers were watched like criminals. Furthermore, the tools differed from shift to shift, and the daily work routine, with or without the influx of new equipment, underwent continual changes. And damn it, while everything was more efficiently structured, the process in itself was uncanny. Within this process, the familiarity between man and machine, and with it, the familiarity between life and labor was disturbed in a way that instilled a feeling of horror about the future. That was it: scientific management was a system.

2. Hermynia zur Mühlen The Ally First published as “Die Bundesgenossin. Ein Märchenbuch,” in Das Schloß der Wahrheit (Berlin-Schöneberg: Verlag der Jugendinternationale, 1924), 24–26. Translated by Richard Lambert. As a socialist fairy tale, The Ally recounts Niccolò Machiavelli’s theory positing that a leader cannot be deposed by his people. The story by Hermynia zur Mühlen (1883–1951) appeared in The Castle of Truth, which diverged from her earlier fairy tales by offering a collection of unrelated, stand-alone texts. Nearly every fairy tale in the book takes its inspiration from a canonical foundation, but as is customary for socialist fairy tales, the morals are clearly Marxist. In the adaptation of Cinderella, for instance, the rich wedding guests are turned away and the rule of the proletariat is declared among the remaining guests. In other fairy tales, the author’s creative liberties are more transparent; Christianity, for instance, is not understood as the antithesis to Marxism: in one story, Kaspar, Melchior, und Balthasar represent a unified front of workers, farmers, and intellectuals. Zur Mühlen was known in her own right for socially critical novels, feuilletons, and countless translations. Published just one year after the first edition of the feminist magazine Die Unzufriedene (The dissatisfied woman), The Ally offers a clear connection to Red Vienna through its depiction of satisfaction as the feeling that allows despots unlimited control. Once upon a time, in the East, where the sun shines brighter and the flowers bloom more bountifully and the fruits flourish, there lived a powerful prince. He was cruel and his greed could not be satisfied, not by the full treasure troves and not by the abundant fields, and not by the marble palaces, and not by the majestic horses and camels that filled his stalls. His subjects all led difficult lives, they had to work so hard that their tongues nearly all hung out of their mouths like exhausted dogs, and they only received minimal sustenance for their work and lived in miserable mud huts. It came to pass that a great grumbling arose among the people, and that night, the sound of this grumbling beat against the prince’s palace like the waves of the sea. And the prince became very fearful, because he was a coward like all tyrants. He called his court sorcerer to him and spoke to him: “I am in danger and I must protect myself. But I do not trust my soldiers, because they are the brothers and sons of those who are dissatisfied and it would be possible that they are faithful to them and not to me. For this reason, I want to seek my allies in the spirit world. Call the spirits to us!” And the sorcerer drew a circle on the ground and cast spells. Suddenly the hall shook, the windows clattered as though a powerful storm had come blowing in, and in the circle, a giant man appeared, terrible to look at, with shaggy

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hair, blazing eyes and balled fists. The prince took several steps backward and asked the sorcerer: “Who is that?” “That is Hate,” replied the sorcerer. And Hate spoke: “I turn the people against each other, so that they kill each other. Send me into the people and brother will kill brother, father will kill son. I am as strong as the sea and as hard as granite.” But the prince was cautious and asked: “Are you certain that you will teach them to only hate one another?” “I cannot promise that,” Hate replied. “Woe is me!” cried the prince. “If they learned to hate me while you were agitating among them—that would be my death! Away, I will not make you an ally.” Hate disappeared, and a very old woman appeared in the circle. She had a furrowed face and bent neck, was toothless, pathetic, and had fearful eyes. “This is Need,” explained the sorcerer. “I am the best ally,” boasted Need with a bright voice. “Wherever I go, the people become fearful, cower, and become easy to subdue. I make them become weak. Their faces become haggard, their limbs dry out. Where I have been, the people there have nothing to lose.” “If they become weak,” suggested the prince with wrinkled forehead, “then they cannot work any longer, and who knows what sorts of thoughts they will have when they realize that they have nothing to lose. Away, old woman, you are not the right one!” All sorts of spirits came in succession, but in each case, the potential danger arose that the spirit’s influence could also work against the prince. Doubt said, “The man that I have touched does not respect either his own life or the lives of others.” Hunger said: “I have already turned more than one people against its leader.” And Jealousy explained: “Certainly I am able to fill the hearts of people with envy. But why should the poor envy the poor? All envy would fall upon you, who lives here so splendidly.” Finally, the prince became angry and he threatened to behead the sorcerer if he did not immediately call forth the correct spirit. The sorcerer then loudly and fearfully cried out his final spell, and they saw, in the middle of the circle, a small woman, neither young nor old, well-dressed with smoothly combed hair. She curtseyed charmingly and smiled broadly. Seeing this, the prince became deeply angered and he shouted: “Are you trying to deceive me, you roguish sorcerer? What can this small, smiling, dumb woman do? Send her away!” But the sorcerer spoke, shaking: “Oh, my Lord, this small woman is Satisfaction and she is more powerful than all of the other spirits. I beg you, allow her to speak.” And the smiling little woman began: “Wherever I go, the grumblings are silenced, people cease to think, they look around and say: “Admittedly, we are not doing well, but it could be much worse. We should be happy and thankful that our despair is not yet and greater.” And the people eat dry bread and live in mud huts and work like cattle and are peaceful and obedient. Particularly the women let me into their hearts, and if the men should want to undertake a risk in order to improve their lives a tiny bit, then the women hinder them and implore: “No, no, don’t do it. Who knows if your risk will pay off, and if it does not, then perhaps we will be worse off than before. We should be happy that we are not starving and that we do not have to sleep on the ground!” The prince nodded graciously: he took the gold chain from around his neck and hung it around the neck of the smiling woman and declared her with adulation to be his ally. And from then on, he was not troubled by any fears: his days were full of joy and his nights were full of peace, because, where satisfaction rules the hearts of the people, there the oppressors and exploiters can sleep at ease: they are in no danger.

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3. Else Feldmann Dandelion—A Childhood First published as Löwenzahn—Eine Kindheit (Vienna: Ricola-Verlag, 1921), 19–21. Translated by Richard Lambert. In her novel Dandelion, novelist and journalist Else Feldmann (1884–1942) depicts a childhood in the tenement houses of the Jewish lower class. Growing up in a poor family in the Second and Twentieth Districts of Vienna, Feldmann first worked in a factory before she gained employment as a court reporter for a number of newspapers. She later composed plays and adapted classic works.2 She frequently exchanged letters with Arthur Schnitzler, was a founding member of the Association of Socialist Writers, and thus embodied the biography of an intellectual climbing the social ladder. The narrative perspective of this novel conforms with social-realist expectations but breaks with them on the formal level, where the world of the tenement house is shown through the estranging perspective of a child. Martha Hauer smiled strangely and said: Nonsense! I have totally different friends. I asked: Who are they? Golly, everyone. The prima ballerina and the one in the second quadrille and the entire corps de ballet and above all the dancers! I’ve got a whole mountain of bonbons at home. I couldn’t say anything out of astonishment. I just looked at her. Then she bid me adieu. She had to go home right away, because at 2 pm there was rehearsal, where she was supposed to dance around the prima ballerina as the devil in a red tulle dress. Martha Hauer as the devil at the main opera! My brain couldn’t fathom it. A few times I tried to get close to her again, to see if she would tell me about the ballerina again—I would have been quite happy about it—but it never happened. Martha Hauer never said another word to me. I liked Olga Welt because she wore overshoes and a velvet dress, and because she could laugh and cry at the same time. She was almost always cheerful, and she was the only one that our teacher had laughed about, if only for a second. I would have liked to be friends with Olga Welt, but when I tried to talk to her, she told me that she really would like to be my friend, but that her mother wouldn’t allow her to hang around with poor children. She always went with Grete Hupfeld and Klara Marten, they even had galoshes and in spring when it rained, they always came in wearing Scottish wool coats. On the same day, I went to see Ploni in the kitchen and asked: Ploni, am I a poor child? Of course you’re a poor child. Why, Ploni? Because your parents don’t have any money. Yes, I understood that. I didn’t pursue Olga Welt’s friendship anymore, nor did I have the courage to ask anyone else. Instead, I continued walking along the wall alone.

2 Her

translations include N. W. Gogol’s short story The Overcoat (1842), published as Der Mantel (1927).

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I took it upon myself to work harder than all of the others. But that was difficult for me. It was most difficult in writing and math. And when the teacher asked: Are all of you finished with the dictation? they all said yes. I was the only one who hadn’t finished yet. Then she came to me and said: Put your hands up on the desk! And she hit them hard with the ruler: twice, three times, four times—well, she said, was that enough? It’s as if your fingers are made of wood. The girls laughed. The teacher had settled down and was calm again. She removed her glasses in order to clean them, and her horrifying eyes appeared. I sat there with my wooden, beaten fingers. Oh, I was worried to death! Then came a cheer. A cheer without equal. We moved on from that house to another. The windows opened to an inner courtyard. Inside there were cats: brown, black, snowwhite with eyes like glass beads: in the mornings they cried like small children. Then, a table would be brought into the courtyard, the two fur monger’s assistants laid down a fur and tapped rhythmically on it with a cane. At that point, children would come out of the second-hand store into the courtyard with their ugly old bulldog named Hackney that looked like it wore glasses, and in fact looked quite similar to our teacher.

4. Anton Kuh Bettauer First published as “Bettauer,” Die Stunde, October 6, 1925, 5. Translated by Richard Lambert. On March 10, 1925, Hugo Bettauer (b. 1872) was shot by Otto Rothstock, a dental technician with ties to the NSDAP. A well-known author (The City without Jews), journalist, and editor, Bettauer was constantly assailed by Christian Socials and National Socialists as a “corrupter of youth” or “Red Author” for his sexually permissive texts and his publication Bettauers Wochenschrift (Bettauer’s Weekly). In this article published to coincide with the start of the trial for Bettauer’s killer, Anton Kuh, one of the most productive and stylistically distinguished journalists of the time, discusses the reception of Bettauer’s work and the reaction to Bettauer’s murder within the Viennese literary scene. Reading Kuh’s text, it becomes clear that Bettauer’s style and his popular formats won him few friends among the literati, who regarded his work as incompatible with literary high culture. Sometimes it takes a murder for a prejudice to fade. I see a piece of paper in front of me that was circulated by the Viennese Nazis following the attack on former Chancellor Seipel. On this flyer, titled “Who are the murderers?” are the names of several writers and journalists printed in ink dark as night. By chance, my name was linked with Bettauer’s in a separate line. And, a short time later, I can still remember saying to the editor in chief of the Arbeiter-Zeitung (who quite begrudgingly was also a condemned comrade of ours): “How fiendish! You put someone on a list like this and immediately deprive them of their honor by putting them in such undesirable company!” Indeed, I bore no great affection for my neighbor on the page. None of the Viennese literati did (even those abroad). They opposed the rabbitlike productivity, opposed the almost impetuous sense of ease with which his typewriter conquered its challenges, opposed the leveling of oppositional and rebellious ideas, and

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opposed the enormous popularity that all of these qualities garnered him. On the same day that the news of his murder broke in all of the coffee houses, bars, and offices, one of them couldn’t help but speak out, and said: “That’s the tragic flaw of allowing people into your language. Whenever you let people into your style, you let them right into your room—and then they shoot you dead!” It was the mildest condemnation. But by saying this and then seeing his critique trumped by a more venomous one, he came to realize—along with the disgust for his associates—the implicit praise that he had expressed for his murdered colleague and for the injustice he had done towards him. Did this snobbish contempt of the literati, the hermaphrodites of art and the bourgeoisie who serve a sophisticated brain through a thoroughly reactionary body, have other roots beyond this let-them-into-your-language rhetoric? Did they disdain him out of their truly antirevolutionary essence not because of a betrayal of form but rather of content? That is, did they disdain him for describing and divulging certain reserved truths that would otherwise remain the secret property of a small circle of intellectuals, and not for reasons of linguistic and intellectual dishonor? Yes, this was the reason for their hate, and for this reason they continued to denigrate him in essays and articles even after his death. The intellectuals cannot excuse someone who shares the truths with the people like a demagogue that they themselves have cultivated as their own, away from the masses! A writer cannot forgive the sight of his free thoughts on the streets. He pretends that he is not angered by the transmission of these thoughts, but rather, by the castoff who babbles it. But he lies, he never cares about anything other than his personal reputation. And this is precisely the point at which the sexually inhibited and half-inhibited, the literati and the Hakenkreuzler, the snob and the mob agree. The Viennese Bettauer returned from America after a long stay overseas. Perhaps this was also a sort of “tragic flaw.” His popularity was as enormous as it was repressive. It was Viennese, it created and pollinated that which was Viennese, but its driving force was too airy, too unrestrained, too matter-of-fact. He came home with the gift of humility, freed from the desire for celebrity, and had the will to transcribe the democratic, social, sexually enlightened knowledge of the Old World in the Dictaphone-style language of the new one. In other words: Pop fiction with negative prefix; anti-Courths-Mahler-sensibility in the Courths-Mahler-language.3 He made himself known for his ability to write in the language of his readers, if only they could capture their thoughts in words and write them down. The themes were appropriate for the idiom: the mistreatment of servants, the neglected wife, the seduced office girl, are you allowed to have an abortion? Money, love, etc. With a revolutionary two-penny psychology—which was worth far more!—he shed light on the dull worries of home life, articulated the unspoken, enlivened the demoralized claim to sweet smells and sensory pleasure that eat away at poor women and girls, and placed the seed of the revolutionary pursuit of happiness in their breast, which is many thousand times more important than all socialist demands for bread. (But because the two wishes are inseparable, Bettauer still would have deserved a monument among the dogmatically risk averse.) The magazine that was founded and named in honor of these efforts rapidly became a bestseller. The woefully drawn-out call for his Viennese weekly still endures, which—phonetic foreshadowing?—met the ear like a panic of triviality. The people made pilgrimages 3 Reference

to Hedwig Courths-Mahler, prolific author of popular romantic dime novels.

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to get their hands on each edition, the advice columns became bedside oracles, seldom had Vienna seen a more demagogic impact from the printed word. Scoffers said: “That’s just psychoanalysis for handmaids.” (Oh, how much more practical and healthier than the social game involving emotional expulsion!) Objectivists claimed, “He is revolutionizing the stenographers!” And this was true. The pretty little bob-headed things, the manicurists, stylists, stenographers, they had found the man who revolutionized them, starting with their desire for uninfluenced love and continuing into their desire for fragrance, tenderness, warmth. It’s possible that the sight of their liberator—who in spite of his mighty Goethe-like mind was a steadfastly bourgeois man—disappointed them a bit. But he was their god. No, more than that: their Lueger.4 But there are other creatures in the world beyond unhappy petty-bourgeois women, troublesome bob-headed girls, happiness-craving secretaries, and tragically sexualized young girls, who are too stubborn and ashamed to entrust their suffering to a leader of their gender, and would rather place it in the hands of politicians. Youths who have been taught that the truth of love is a devilish apparition and that the real, ideal world is a mighty superstructure made of words, glittering like steel that hangs over their abstinence. They go around with the dried sweat of their unhappiness, like foul-tempered children that were kicked out of the playground. From time to time they start to swing sticks and flags. For them, the unenlightened, naive girl with the bob is so often unapproachable. What are they to do with those who have been pricked by the ambition of happiness, who laugh in the face of politics and desire only gaiety? And then along came someone who raised them up to demand one thing after the next and made them even more unattainable! Unthinkable!—They were ready to pull the trigger. But the literatus was working on the sixth volume of his Chinese love parables as the news of this murder came in. Does he realize today that the courage that kept the fallen Bettauer from such pastimes has secured his own right to stand as a martyr?

5. Joe Lederer Type-moiselle First published as “Tippmamsell,” Bettauers Wochenschrift: Probleme des Lebens, no. 51 (1925): 2. Translated by Richard Lambert. As with most poems by Josefine “Joe” Lederer (1904–1987), “Tippmamsell” is based on personal experiences. Alongside daughters from similarly bourgeois families impacted by the inflation crisis, Lederer worked as a typist in the Pollak banking house, earning less than her male colleagues, without any opportunity for upward mobility while being subjected to sexual discrimination. Working for Bettauers Wochenschrift between 1925 and 1928 gave Lederer a platform to write about her experiences. There she began to compose poetry, inspired by her exchanges with her female readership and the progressive aims of the paper. In the context of Red Vienna, these poems offer a rare depiction of the experiences of female employees and signal an affinity for the literature of the Weimar Republic. 4

Karl Lueger, influential anti-Semitic Austrian Christian Social politician and opponent of Social Democracy, served as mayor of Vienna from 1897 until his death in 1910.

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6. Josef Luitpold The Return of Prometheus First published as Die Rückkehr des Prometheus (Berlin: Buchmeister Verlag, 1927), 13, 15–17. Translated by Richard Lambert. Josef Luitpold Stern (1886–1966), here credited as Josef Luitpold, was a central figure in Social Democratic educational reform: the Workers’ College (Arbeiterhochschule), the Central Office for Workers’ Education (Arbeiterbildungszentrale), the Social Democratic Arts Council (Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle), the Vienna Workers’ Libraries, the Vienna Free People’s Stage (Wiener Freie Volksbühne), and the Arbeiter-Zeitung were all influenced by his work. In one of his major programmatic works, Class Conflict and Mass Education (Klassenkampf und Massenschulung), Stern demanded the implementation of humanistic education for the workers using the model of Weimar Classicism. The following excerpt from one of his major literary works can be understood as a prime example of the implementation of this program. The analytical adaption of the legend of Prometheus, which is inflected by a Marxist vocabulary (productive forces), attempts to bridge the gap between a reinvigoration of the classics and the creation of genuine proletarian literature.

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Introduction [. . .] Now you understand, friends, that this book would gladly be many things, a book for men, a companion for girls, a women’s book, and a breviary for youths, a book of saints and a book of heretics, a book for quiet hours and a book for public gatherings, but always a book that awakens the planetary spirit. Return of Prometheus Prometheus stood before Zeus Gathered were the deities all. And the son of Cronus began to speak Lo now you breathe in again the heavens Beyond the earthly dust Forget the torments you have suffered, Rejoice again in the peace of the blessed, Welcome, Prometheus! But the tightly cinched mouth Of the pale, gaunt man twitched, Defiantly he raised his head Gazed at each god in succession Darkly rejected the greetings And began: You bound me, son of Cronus, No longer does my body bleed In the heavens I am commanded To be a god among the gods. Let me be hammered to the cliffs again! Send all your torments to me! Wrong, wrong, was your compassion Wrong was your forgiveness. [. . .] Murdering, suffering, dying in fire I saw people like you. But hence glows a powerful will Unbreakable in my heart To teach the people your godly powers. [. . .] They serve to teach of the sacred fire, To change the Earth to Heaven, And man to god.

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7. Josef Weinheber The Crowd Published as “Der Auflauf,” in Wien wörtlich (Vienna, Leipzig: Adolf Luser Verlag, 1935), 18. Translated by Richard Lambert. Raised in modest circumstances, Josef Weinheber (1892–1945) initially wrote for satirical publications before he turned to poetry inspired by Karl Kraus and Anton Wildgans. In the mid1920s, Weinheber composed poems and serial novels (such as Das Waisenhaus [The orphanage]) for the Arbeiter-Zeitung. Weinheber first truly came to prominence after the end of Red Vienna for his poetry collection Adel und Untergang (Nobility and decline). Well-received across the political spectrum, Weinheber was not only a beloved poet during the life of Red Vienna. His broad social appeal propelled his popularity into the 1930s, where he became one of the most prominent lyricists of National Socialism. Weinheber’s biography also reveals further discontinuities: After leaving the Catholic Church and converting to Protestantism, for instance, he returned to Catholicism in 1944. “The Crowd” represents Weinheber’s attempt to capture the Viennese milieu in terms of both form and content. The deliberate use of dialect in the original is embedded in the prototypical Viennese blue collar setting of the Würstelstand (sausage stand). The Crowd “What’s going on? What happened?” “It looks like some kind of fun.” “There’s too many people, you can’t see a thing.” “Go on, get up there, be brave!” “Aha, so they’ve caught a thief.” “A German shepherd bit somebody.” “Say, mister, what happened here?” “He set off a little bomb.” “You won’t see a constable for something like this, In the meantime you can bleed to death.” —“Stabbed in the heart? How awful!” “The ambulance Is just around the corner at the pub.” “The sausage stand’s going to collapse!” “That guy is the murderer, right?” “That crooked face! Bound to the stretcher And finally he’s getting some treatment.” “Finally an inspector, see?” “Alright, break it up!” “He got him. Now, friend, you’re up!” “You, this is no laughing matter!” “You’re coming with me!”—“Ooo now I’m excited.” —“You’re inciting the populace!”— “I was just going to the sausage stand To make change for ten schillings.”

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8. Stefan Zweig Trip to Russia First published as “Reise nach Rußland,” Neue Freie Presse, October 21, 1928, 1–2. Translated by Richard Lambert. Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was one of the most widely read Austrian authors of the interwar period. Despite his popularity, Zweig notoriously sought to remain apolitical, favoring the persona of bourgeois aesthete over social activist. In 1928, however, Zweig accepted an invitation from the Soviet government to participate in the celebration of Leo Tolstoy’s one hundredth birthday. Zweig’s ensuing report romanticizes all aspects of Russian society. In the face of urban overcrowding and poverty, Zweig argues that Russian culture has gained renewed unity, passion, and awareness of its own social ties. Zweig’s positive report transformed him into a political lightning rod. While the leaders of Red Vienna stood in competition with Soviet-style communism and in opposition to the Communist Party of Austria, Zweig’s celebrity endorsement of socialism captured the political imagination of the Austrian Left. In the aftermath of this debate, Zweig was everywhere, on stage, on the radio, and in the press. On the right, commentators pointed out the contradiction between praise of the Soviet Union and Zweig’s opulent lifestyle. The debate initiated by Zweig’s report highlights the unmistakable interactions between even the most apolitical authors and the influence of Red Vienna as a key historical context.5 A candid note. What trip within the confines of our neighboring world would today be nearly as interesting, captivating, informative, and exciting as a trip to Russia? While our Europe, and in particular our capitals, are subject to the alternating and unstoppable contemporary forces of reshaping and homogenization, Russia remains without peer. Not just the eye, not just the aesthetic sensibility is held in ceaseless surprise by the unadulterated architecture, this new nation. Even intellectual things are constructed differently here, from another past and off into a particular future. The most important questions of a social and spiritual structure impose themselves irresistibly on every street corner, in every conversation, in every encounter. You feel yourself passionately moved by an uninterrupted busyness, engagement, excited between enthusiasm and doubt, between astonishment and reservation. Every hour is packed so full with social and intellectual substance that it would be a simple feat to write a book about spending ten days in Russia. A few dozen European writers have done exactly that in the last few years, and I personally envy their courage. Because, whether sage or foolish, dishonest or truthful, reserved or apodictic, they all share a fatal similarity with the American reporters who dared to write books about Europe after a two-week tour with Thomas Cook. Those individuals who cannot speak any Russian, who have only seen Moscow and Leningrad, just the two highlights of the Russia trip, and who moreover are unable to compare the new revolutionary order with the experiences under the czarist regime should, in my honest opinion, preferably refrain from prophesying or praising lofty discoveries. They should instead only recount their impressions, as colorful and fleeting as they may have 5

For these contrasting reactions, see, for instance, Anonymous, “Wegweiser durch das RAVAG Programm,” Die Rote Fahne, November 22, 1931, 10, and E. P. “Offener Brief an Stefan Zweig,” Freiheit!, November 9, 1928, 2.

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been, without any assessment or pretense beyond that which is most relevant for Russia today: do not exaggerate, do not distort, and above all, do not lie. [. . .] Moscow: The street to the main station. Still on the train after two nights and two days—a torrid first curious gaze through the rattling window of the car into the street beyond. Everywhere throngs are buzzing, overfilled, intense, vehement life. Suddenly, too many people have been poured into the new capital, and its houses, squares, streets swell and boil over from this turbulent commotion. Over the rough cobblestones, the Iswotchik glide delicately with their little carts and sweet, shaggy draft horses, streetcars, with dark bodies clinging to them like grapes, approach their stops as quick as lightening. The stream of pedestrians is met everywhere with wooden stalls like a Christmas market. In the midst of the hustle and bustle sit hunchedover women leisurely offering their apples, melons, and small wares for sale. Everything swirls, tugs, and pulls with a briskness and urgency completely unexpected in Russia. Nevertheless, in spite of this majestic vitality, something in this street fails to contribute its full vibrancy. Something gloomy, gray, shadowy, intermingles, and this shadow comes from the houses. They stand over this disorienting, fantastic activity in a way that is somehow old and worn out, with wrinkles and bending facades, with blind and dirtied visage, one is reminded of Vienna circa 1919. The finery has fallen from the facings, the window trimmings lack color and freshness, the gates lack festiveness and luster. There has been no time, no money to rejuvenate and refresh them; they had been forgotten, and for this reason they all still appear so glum and outdated. And so—and this is the most impressive part—while the streets whoosh, chat, bubble, and speak, the houses stand silently. In other big cities, the shops gesticulate, cry out, flash into the streets, they amass an alluring game of colors, toss lassos of advertising to catch passersby and drag and keep them for just a moment before the fantastic, vivid shop windows. Here, the windows are shadowed by silence, completely still, without artificial collections, without the assistance of refined shop window designers, they present their few humble things (because luxury goods are prohibited here) under the morose windowpanes. The shops next door or across the way have no need to quarrel with one another, no need to struggle and compete, because they all belong to the same owner, the state, and the necessities do not need to look for buyers, they are sought after. Only the excess of luxury, the things that aren’t actually useful, “le superflu,” as they were called during the French Revolution, must be offered, must harry the passerby and grab him by the coattails, the truly necessary (and there is nothing else in Moscow) needs no appeal and no fanfare. This grants the streets of Moscow (and all others in Russia) such a unique and fateful earnestness, that the houses stand silent and reserved, in fact merely dark, high, gray dams of stone through which people flood. Advertisements are rare, rare too are posters. And what does hang in the halls and train stations, bordered by red lettering, does not proclaim refinements, perfumes and luxury cars, life’s amusements, rather they are official posters from the government calling for increased production. A call, not for wastefulness, but rather for discipline and cohesion. Just as in the first moment, one feels the determined will to defend an idea once again, the earnest, accumulated energy, now exactingly and powerfully applied within the economic domain. Unlike the pointillistic, glittering, colorful, light-spewing asphalt avenues of our European cities, the streets of Moscow are not aesthetically beautiful, but they are livelier, more dramatic, and somehow fateful.

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9. Ernst Fischer The Man without Qualities: A Novel by Robert Musil First published as “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Ein Roman von Robert Musil,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, December 9, 1930, 8. Translated by Richard Lambert. Ernst Fischer (1899–1972), culture editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, is regarded as one of the leading critics of Red Vienna. In his cautious, yet overwhelmingly positive review of Robert Musil’s interwar novel, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), Fischer identifies the eccentricities—but also the commonalities—of Musil’s densely philosophical novel. He cites a range of themes—from “tempo” to decadence and historical rupture— that invoke the vocabulary of literary modernism, but also appear alongside a collection of socialist keywords, including collectivism, social experimentation, and rationalism. This fusion of modernist themes with the lexicon of social democracy emphasizes the potential for Red Vienna’s literary culture beyond the narrow definition of party-sponsored realism and social allegory—if only for a small slice of the readership. The final section of this review, “Our Lives: An Experiment” aims to link Musil’s essayistic reconstruction of Vienna’s past with the experimental character of Red Vienna. Finally, in the tumult of the hyper-current, hyper-alarming, and hyper-sellable books, the great symphony of a novel resounds, written by a man who has the courage not to write for half-literates and other lovers of short stories, magazines, and fast-paced “Tempo, Tempo!”-reportage but rather for intelligent readers. And this is remarkable, because out of one hundred authors, ninety-nine eschew these difficult and unedifying readers who are bored by the books declared most moving, who can hardly suppress their yawns at the so-called thrilling fabrications of literature, and who would be ready to trade in the wildest storyline over two hundred pages for half a page of spirituality and intellect. Here, however, the astonishing has happened: the novel The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil is more than one thousand pages long (the reader who is accustomed to the “speed of the times” will not fail to be struck by this), and for one thousand pages, the reader breathes in the bright, lofty delight of spirituality and intellect. It is impossible to put the book down, and when the reader finally turns out the light, the grey light and sounds of morning are already breaking into the room: there are not many books that can make an entire night melt away without the reader noticing. [. . .] Our lives: An experiment. Yes, this novel of over one thousand pages, in which both nothing and—between the lines—the fantastic occurs, is much more than a novel about the fall of the monarchy. This “man without qualities” is the thinking, coldly passionate, skeptically adventurous, restlessly passive man of an undermined world fevered by the madness of rationalism and precise superstition. A man in the throes of a reality that is more difficult to perceive and conceive of than predicting the future of mankind from the heavens. Man, who “abolishes reality” and wants to replace it with ideas, a man who has become transparent and unbelievable to himself, a man “without qualities,” because the so-called qualities are residues of the past and nothing else, empty husks, empty shells. Buzzwords. Idioms, because below the surface something completely new, something nameless and overwhelming is

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beginning, because we do not feel what we believe to feel, because we have no contact with our own selves, rather a thousand puzzling contacts with all that revolves around us. “Something must happen!” this drives the figures in this novel from life to life, it drives them to goals that are hidden. This allows everything to be considered as an experiment, as a laboratory test. “Something has to happen!” It is as if the “self” cracks the mortar of qualities, the limestone of biases, the stucco of conventions away from us and our subsurface—until now unspoken and unspeakable—and emerges naked and stark into the light. “Something has to happen!” The old order is now nothing more than a thin crust of dust, cobwebs, memory. The new order does not yet exist, our lives are an experiment. Our great passion is the curiosity, the lust for the new. Our greatest virtue is the bravery of knowledge. Our greatest desire is the synthesis of all contradictions into a clear, precise and ordering idea. All of this, which is said over one thousand pages in inimitable perfection of language and thought, cannot be summarized in snippets. This book must be read and reread; up until now there is hardly another that expresses our spiritual fate and the fracturing of our lives into the unknown with similar scale and illumination.

10. Hermann Broch The Unknown Quantity First published as Die unbekannte Größe (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1933), 143–46. Translated by Richard Lambert. Today, Hermann Broch (1886–1951) is considered a key author of late Austrian modernism. As with his contemporary, Robert Musil, Broch was acutely interested in science, empirical philosophy, and literature, and experimented with these discourses in his literary works. In the 1920s Broch studied with members of the Vienna Circle at the University of Vienna. He is best known for his densely philosophical novels Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers) and Der Tod des Vergils (The Death of Virgil). During Red Vienna, however, Broch’s intellectual writings were received poorly: The Sleepwalkers was reviewed in the publication Bildungsarbeit as “not for the average Joe.”6 Written to fulfill a publishing contract, Die unbekannte Größe is Broch’s subsequent attempt to write a popular novel. Abandoning his challenging, high-brow aesthetic, Broch’s novel chronicles Richard Hieck, doctoral student in mathematics and astronomy, in his attempts to apply mathematical logic to life and love. In the cited passage, Richard goes on a date with his love interest, Ilse Nydhalm. The awkward encounter, which is riddled with scientific imagery, but punctuated by Broch’s poetic style, is characteristic of Broch’s critique of a purely positivistic worldview. Richard Hieck’s level of embarrassment was not insignificant. Erna Magnus had given him the idea of visiting the observatory, but in fact, he hoped to realize this idea with Ilse Nydhalm. This dilemma took up nearly two full weeks. In the end, he solved it by force when just he and Ilse Nydhalm traveled there together. Nevertheless, it felt like he had broken a law.

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E. W., “Bücher nicht für jedermann,” Bildungsarbeit: Blätter für sozialistiches Bildungswesen 19, no. 12 (1932): 256.

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Neither of them felt particularly at ease in their clothing, and question and answer alike failed to go beyond the astronomical. In the streetcar he already had begun to conjure the broad Einsteinian universe. She listened with great attentiveness, and beyond that, she found it comforting that they could communicate in a secret language. Across from them sat a man with the splayed legs of a corpulent fellow, reading a newspaper: from time to time he lifted his gray-bearded head and glanced at them across the way through his glasses. He was a friendly man, and he hesitated before he turned the page, because he had thought that they were trying to read the reverse side. In reality, however, they were just comparing the general comprehensibility of the newspaper with the isolation of their own intellectual union. Hieck pulled out a piece of paper and began to scribble down formulae. Night was already falling. People were crowded at the streetcar stop outside the public bath, where they waited for the next train returning to the city center. As he rode by, Richard caught a small glimpse of the pool surface, dwarfed by the diving platform, with its supports rising sharply against the evening sky. His guilty conscience was newly reawakened. To excuse himself for something, he said “In our European observatories, there aren’t many nights with clear visibility .  .  . that’s why it’s not really worthwhile to install big, expensive instruments around here . . . today, though, we should have exceptionally good observation conditions.” “Then I’ve been lucky!” said Ilse Nydhalm. “Yes,” he said, and was proud, as though he were responsible for the weather, “and to top it all off, there’s a meteor shower.” Then Ilse Nydhalm said something unastronomical: “So I can make a wish then.” Out of the night of memory, a golden shaft broke through, wonder of wishing, wonder coming true, above the law, created out of nothing, and falling into nothingness, formless in the consciousness, but nevertheless luminous. Oh, humanity. Hesitantly, because he knew it wasn’t the right time, he said: “It’s quite likely that the craters on the moon were caused by meteorites.” When they finally arrived, the conductor had already turned off the lights and the streetcar heading in the opposite direction sat illuminated at the station. Two people were seated inside. The gray-bearded man with the newspaper bid farewell and groaning, disembarked. He disappeared down a dusky side alley. Richard didn’t take the path through the forest, but rather, the paved path that led up the east side of the hill to the observatory in two great serpentine curves. From here, one could gaze out over the city. The ground between the hilltop and the city lay with the leeside covered by dusty fog, the alley led straight back to town, adorned with a dark crown of trees. In between them, the stretches of cobblestones flickered uncertainly like the light of an X-ray, illuminated by the streetlights hidden among the trees. The half-circle of the dressing room shimmered from near the city bath, but the shine of the water had already faded into the thick air. The contours of the city could still be seen, the towers of the cathedral, the tower of the university church and St. Anna: in quick succession the lights in the mass of homes were lit, and amid them a few neon signs changed from yellow to red like flashing beacons. In straight lines a wealth of streetlights. “Nice view,” said Richard, gazing up into the heavens, where the first stars appeared against the colorless background. In the field next to the path lay sheaves of straw, dry was the field, dry were the bushes and trees where the path turned. Dusk in its bright face of night.

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Why is that so important to us? Where is that life that races past? Is it in the city? Is it flowing up into the stars? “We’ll be at the top soon,” said Richard, calmingly, although Ilse must have known the way. The curve of the observatory’s cupola towered over the hill, the curvature swung out into the tops of the pines. Dry and withered and immovable. The dry air hung, almost warily, and surrounded the immovable things. And then they were at the top.

“The Political Cabaret.” Cover image for the political theater pamphlet issued by the Socialist Performance Group (Sozialistische Veranstaltungsgruppe), Vienna 1929. (Courtesy of VGA.)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

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nlike literature, the performing arts occupied a central role within the cultural and political programs of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP). Party leaders capitalized upon Vienna’s  vibrant theater scene to advance a pedagogical program driven by the stage.  Under the initiative of David Josef Bach, culture editor of the ArbeiterZeitung, the formation of the Social Democratic Arts Council (Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle) in 1919 provided discounted tickets, supported theatrical productions, and defined a cultural agenda based on political education through collective participation and consumption. This mass participation gave rise to new forms of performing arts that reshaped both the theater as an institution and the communities it served. From the speaking choir (Sprechchor) movement to the spread of community theaters, the inauguration of socialist arts festivals (Festspiele) and, later, the explosion of political cabaret, the SDAP sought to develop and instill class cohesion informed and reinforced by the participatory, cooperative model of artistic performance. The history of the performing arts in Red Vienna can be understood in terms of three distinct and occasionally competing initiatives. The official role of theater, articulated by Bach and the Arts Council, used the existing Viennese theater culture at the Raimundtheater and the Deutsches Volkstheater, among other theaters, to instill social values through classical works from the canon of German-language theater. This topdown artistic pedagogy revealed an optimism that Karl Kraus, Oscar Pollak, and others maligned as elitist and out of touch with working-class culture. An alternative conception of theater was endorsed by a group of artists—including Josef Luitpold Stern—who championed didactic plays as an essential cog in the process of cultural development, designed to serve and nurture the New Human just like breakthroughs in education, social housing, and hygiene. However, as social and political pressures on Red Vienna mounted throughout the 1920s, the performing arts became increasingly polemical and ultimately gave rise to a robust socialist cabaret scene in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This upswing was led by journalist and playwright Jura Soyfer as well as Ernst Fischer and Robert Ehrenzweig, founding members of the Socialist Performance Group (Sozialistische Veranstaltungsgruppe). This provocative agitprop theater (Agitationstheater) rallied support for the socialist cause through clear depictions of social injustice. In the late 1920s, the Arts Council also aligned itself with this newly politicized and inclusive form of theater, which included not only political cabaret, but also amateur

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working-class productions (Arbeitervorstellungen), in order to preserve the theater as a unifying site of working-class identity.1 The SDAP’s attempts to transform Viennese theater culture were not without obstacle, however. The entrenched status of theater in the city ensured that competing theatrical forms and venues persisted, despite diligent attempts by SDAP officials to win them over to the socialist cause. The iconic Viennese Burgtheater offered a steady program of classics amid attempts by both the Social Democrats and Catholic conservatives to assert outright control. Max Reinhardt’s directorial return to Vienna via his takeover of the Theater in der Josefstadt yielded aesthetic innovation in terms of staging, set design, and casting, but resisted the social pedagogy of Red Vienna’s theater culture. Together with Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the founding of the Salzburg Festival in 1920 highlighted a dominant and surviving strain of Viennese theater culture that advocates tradition, not progress. The tension between these different forms of theater underscores the breadth of the performing arts within Red Vienna which were by no means confined to the stage. As an analog to the Salzburg Festival of Hofmannsthal and Reinhardt, participatory, choreographed festival culture formed a core tenet of Red Vienna’s aesthetic identity. From the founding of the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen) to less frequent events such as the Workers’ Olympics (Arbeiterolympiade), parades, dance routines, and other public spectacles sought to capture the public imagination. The cultural importance of such mass events emphasized not only the goals of social cooperation and enjoyment, but also physical, working-class participation symbolizing the collective striving toward a stable socialist state. While festival culture stands as one component within Red Vienna’s performing arts culture, this chapter presents a cohesive view of the performing arts within Red Vienna by focusing on developments within the realm of theater. This singular focus on theater is not intended to bracket or delegitimize alternative forms of performance. Rather, the discourse of theater itself offers the most salient illustration of how contentious the SDAP’s attempt to initiate a socialist art culture proved to be. From Bach’s theoretical formulation of the Arts Council to the artistic innovations of Red Vienna’s theater scene—especially the speaking choir—and finally, the rise of agitprop theater, this chapter weighs the theoretical underpinnings, critiques, and strivings of the stage against actual historical realities and artistic products. In doing so, this chapter highlights the evolving relationship between the arts and politics in Red Vienna by embedding the history of the performing arts within the broader trajectory of Red Vienna itself. Further reading Doll 1997 Pyrah 2007 Veigl 1990

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Despite the similarity between Bertolt Brecht’s and Red Vienna’s projects, Brecht’s Epic Theater exerted only minimal influence on Red Vienna’s productions.

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1. David Josef Bach The Arts Council First published as “Die Kunststelle,” in Kunst und Volk: Eine Festgabe der Kunststelle zur 1000. Theateraufführung (Vienna: Leopold Heidrich, 1923): 112–18. Translated by Richard Lambert. Led by critic and journalist David Josef Bach (1874–1947), the Social Democratic Arts Council devised official policies and public initiatives designed to control the consumption and creation of cultural events. The activities organized by the Arts Council included concerts, poetry readings, and public lectures. Moreover, it offered free and discounted theater tickets to workers for venues including the Raimundtheater, the Carltheater, and the Deutsches Volkstheater and curated the publication Kunst und Volk. The Arts Council’s official direction for the performing arts emphasized social education through aesthetic encounters with classic works of high culture. While this vision of the performing arts conflicted with more explicitly pedagogical or political conceptions of theater as expressed by Josef Luitpold Stern, Ernst Fischer, and others, the canon-heavy program outlined by Bach nevertheless shaped the theater of Red Vienna in the early to mid-1920s. In November 1919, the party leadership of the Austrian Social Democrats agreed to found their own Arts Council. The attempts to provide artistic education to the intellectual and physical workforce were to be led collectively and cohesively, in order to add impact and substance to the public’s artistic priorities. Possible models were apparent. Foremost among them are the Workers’ Symphony Concerts (Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzerte), founded in 1905, the first example of popular education through music, through nothing but the highest form of art. When I first drafted and implemented their plan, amid opposition from all sides, I barely noticed the powerful seed of an idea; and indeed, from these humble concerts, everything else has proceeded. A few years later, the People’s Stage [Volksbühne] arrived in Vienna, based on the Berlin model, while the Workers’ Symphony Concerts remained without equal.2 Internal disputes between the directors, and finally, the catastrophe of the World War sealed the fate of the People’s Stage. Although it still exists in name, it no longer has the same lively potency. If, during the first few years of its existence, the People’s Stage provided new poets with a platform to reach new audiences, for a while even in its own company theater, in later years the organizers were lucky if they could find engagements for any of its few remaining loyal performers at all. The technical organization of the People’s Stage had disintegrated. So much so that, in the first months after the collapse, as the former royal theaters [Hoftheater], now the state theaters [Staatstheater], opened their doors to the masses, no other organizational remedy could be found than that of the Workers’ Symphony Concerts. Under this name, and under this flag, the first performances took place in the opera and the Burgtheater. Now, we have entered into these theaters, and no one can keep the public away from them. What is the meaning of state theater—or even national theater, as it is officially 2

Bach is referring to the Vienna Free People’s Stage (Wiener Freie Volksbühne), which was founded by Arbeiter-Zeitung editor Stefan Großmann (1875–1935) in 1906. Based on the successful model of workers’ theaters in Berlin, Großmann was keen to import the concept as a way of giving the working class of Vienna access to the classics of German theater. Conceived as a theater without a set performance venue, Großmann’s project enjoyed early successes before collapsing from mismanagement and internal politics in 1913.

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called—without the central idea of a collective people, a nation, that constitutes a state in the first place? We, meaning the regiment of intellectuals and craftsmen organized by the Social Democrats, are no longer alone in this. Following us and our example, other smaller groups have banded together in the last two years—some based on professional ties, others based on political ones—and have even taken the name “Arts Council” from us. The name has become meaningful, popular. What would become of all the theaters, including the best ones, and not just the state theaters, without us? Without the will of the masses pouring itself into art? We have taught each of them not to neglect the people’s claim to art. That is a revolutionary act in every sense of the word, just as it is no accident that our Arts Council and its successors and imitators are children of the revolution. All art, all truly great art is revolutionary, meaning that it points beyond the present and into the future, creates new elements. The content, the problem inside a work of art is always revolutionary, even if its technique, perhaps its outer form—not the form as unity—its “plot” is still tied to its time, circumstance, and ephemerality. A Beethoven symphony is eternal, revolutionary, and Goethe’s Iphigenia is, too. We have developed our art policy based on those works and not the works that claim to be modern or revolutionary simply because they use those words or present themselves differently. A thousand theatrical performances in three years, attended by a million people—this is just one part of our achievements, because it is just one part of our task. Nevertheless, you can extract a few facts from the statistics of these performances—only those figures are included that counted at least five hundred visitors—that illuminate and attest to the bigger picture. “Fidelio” was our foray into opera, and the celebration of our anniversary was commemorated with “Fidelio” once again. In the first three years of the Arts Council’s existence—in two opera houses—we have produced eighteen performances of the work, including twelve performances in a single year, not as part of a performance series with operettas and not because the members of the Arts Council were forced to do so but because they themselves demanded it. In the history of “Fidelio” as a play, this is likely the first such success, if you can even use that word. Here the public is overwhelmed by art and vice-versa. “Fidelio” is the highest song of human love, brotherly love, not just the gripping ballad of the loyal Leonore. To have uncovered the true meaning of the work by bringing the text into its living potential was the true value of these performances. In not quite one half of a year, an impressive new production of “Faust” could be performed up to twenty times—where else in today’s world would this be conceivable without the help of a new audience that is willing and able to enjoy art? If Vienna’s private theaters have been able to stage worthwhile dramatic literature, whether older or truly modern, then they owe it above all to this audience. The “Trojans” of Euripides, as adapted by Franz Werfel, would not have been able to continue after very few performances in the Burgtheater. Then we took it upon ourselves to stage the piece, and the work became part of our repertoire. There are many such examples; in these thousand performances lie not only an education in theater and the arts, but a partial restoration of art as function of the social organism, as social necessity, and no longer as a luxury item.

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2. Ingenieure der Werkstatt für Massenform Theater of the Future First published as “Theater der Zukunft,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, April 29, 1924, 5. Translated by Richard Lambert. This essay by the “Engineers from the Workshop for Mass Forms”—a group consisting of architects Franz Löwitsch (1894–1946), Rudolf Scherer (1891–1973), and Walter Neuzil— invokes Red Vienna’s desire to reenvision both public and private spaces and to infuse them with the spirit of innovation. This innovation was not only aimed at the performing arts, but also at the interior space of the theater itself. Löwitsch, Scherer, and Neuzil were best known for their social housing projects and their interests in integrating new materials, particularly steel, into their designs. This essay serves as a template for their collective treatise, Die plastische Bühne (The three-dimensional stage), published one year later in 1925. The engineers’ call for both audiences and communities that revolve around the stage draws on avant-garde developments in the theater, most notably Jacob Levy Moreno and Friedrich Kiesler’s parallel development of the immersive space stage (Raumbühne) and also invokes the nodal vision of city planning postulated by Otto Wagner in Die unbegrenzte Großstadt (The unbounded metropolis, 1911). A new theater is to be built. If someone buys a new suit, then they survey the offerings for the newest, most modern. Not as a fashion snob. We must see beyond the idea that fashion only exists to satisfy the whims of the do-nothings. It is the expression of the time and its needs, and for that reason, it is a need itself. And so it should be, and so everyone should fulfill this need for themselves. In 1760, we moved differently than we do today. For this reason, people back then wore hoop skirts, whereas today we wear sportswear. Each form allows very particular movements and no others. As such, it expresses that movement and influences those who live at that time. In this way, a baroque surrounding can set a person back centuries. Everything that is not modern is restrictive. But a theater should survive for decades. For this reason, we must be careful. In this case, it will not do to build according to the fashion of this moment. In ten years, it might already be dead. We must be on the look-out for that which will be modern. The movements that will come. Even more so in a time when revolutions seem to follow one after another in quick succession. It will not do to simply characterize our times, rather we must see in them the sign of that which is to come. Just as every point on a line contains its entire law, such that a knowledgeable individual could determine the rest of its continued path, it is also true that the form of what is to come is contained in the characteristics of today as educational law. Two types of stage have become outdated. First, the conventional picture frame stage [Guckkastenbühne]: The curtain is raised and reveals columns and perspectives that are striving to be real. Illusions. They force audiences to gaze deep inside into a far-away fairy tale land. Then came the relief stage: it places the entire perspective in front of a single background, and the scene plays out in front of it. This stage is in essence a simplification, or a concentration, of the first form. [. . .]

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Out of disgust over these options, the idea of the space stage arose: stage and auditorium become one, because the stage lies within it. Surrounded by the audience, the actor performs, without direction, becoming completely three-dimensional. However, the space stage experiment only lasted a few trial runs. Audiences were quick to reject the Reinhardtian circus stage, calling for a renunciation of realism and a return to the abandoned illusion. Everything should remain as it was. [. . .] We demand here that the illusion be achieved by intellectual means: complete spatial acting that brings the viewer under its power by suggestion and refined lighting techniques that supply the illusion of the scene. As a consequence, the following theatrical form was devised for the—somewhat— great drama: in the middle of the theater is the stage. Rings of steps lead up into the mystical background; in its pit, the orchestra. The actors emerge from below. The rows of seats surround it like an amphitheater. In the cupola above, the lighting apparatus is attached. In the darkened room below, the already constructed stage emerges, only then will it be lit by the cone of light, while the space around it remains dark. Alternatively, it will be possible to transform the rows along the walls of the hall by projection into parts of the scene. In both cases, the actor and viewer stand under the same suggestion of a scene. That plays will unfold differently, even spatially, is clear. Surely some actors will have to relearn things. Then again, there will be some who see it as a liberating relief when they are no longer required to orient themselves according to the front and back of the stage. They must no longer waste energy, rather they may concentrate solely on the play itself. In this way, the piece will become more complete. The acoustic objections can neither be proved nor disproved. Only experiments can decide. As an aside: it is high time to investigate this purely physical realm in a precise, empirical way. This form of theater stands at the end of a long progression. Conceived in antiquity, it was reinvigorated in Shakespeare’s theaters and today in the ideas of Reinhardt and Strnad.3 Notions of festival plays and passion plays are tied to it. For works with such heroic content, it is the ideal stage. In addition, a second form of theater comes into play: the cabaret, the chamber play, and the cinema. Here, we want to be entertained. Whether clown, soubrette, or film screen: here we are fooled. We need not believe it. Then again, in true acting, the stronger that this belief is expressed, the better the play becomes. Think of the tomfoolery of modern operettas and their attractiveness. This is not the place to debate the cultural meaning of these artistic venues. For us, it is sufficient that they exist and continue to gain in power. We cannot simply ignore them if we wish to engage with questions of modern theater. It is the form of small theaters with relief stages, regardless of whether the entertainment is chamber music, dance, cabaret, sketch, or cinema. However intimate the theater is, however minimal its luxury, it will be that much better for it. They are not looking for the sublime, not the great affects and effects. There are few truly good small theaters. We could stand to have one in every district of Vienna. What works for the large theaters, namely that they are located in the center of the city, would be misplaced here. Here, we want things to be comfortable. We do not want to have to take a streetcar. In your own district, a few steps away, and you are already there. In contrast, such theaters must be centrally organized so that it will be 3

Oskar Strnad was an Austrian architect and theater set designer. In 1918 he began working on an experimental theater, where the stage was completely surrounded by the audience. In 1919 he joined the Deutsches Volkstheater as set designer.

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possible to stage the same plays in different districts. The settler movement, incidentally, has shown us the way in this regard.4 We are no longer building massive halls, just as we wish to see heroism banned from daily life. We have heroism aplenty in our daily battles. We want our theater plain. Only then can it work with all its grandeur and weight, without the romance of the scenery. This is what we expect from the space stage.

3. Gina Kaus Toni: A Schoolgirl Comedy in Ten Snapshots First published as Toni: Eine Schulmädchen-Komödie in zehn Bildern (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1927), 39–42. Translated by Richard Lambert. Born in Vienna in 1893 as Regina Wiener, Gina Kaus was a successful playwright, author, and screenplay writer. Her breakthrough with her play Diebe im Haus (Thieves in the house), premiered at the Burgtheater in 1917. In Toni: A Schoolgirl Comedy her flapper girl title character challenges the era’s gender stereotypes through frank depictions of gender roles, sexuality, and sexuality politics and theory. Otto Weininger’s controversial Sex and Character (1903), is of particular importance to Toni. In this work, Weininger postulates normative definitions of masculinity as “active” and femininity as “passive,” but also advances a theory of bisexuality, where “manly women” and “feminine men” possess biological percentages of the opposite gender. Weininger used this notion of female masculinity to explain the rise of the Women’s Rights Movement. Against Weininger, Toni delivers a psychological exploration of the New Woman through nuanced and complex characters of both genders, and offers an intimate, everyday perspective often lacking in characterizations of women in Red Vienna. Fourth snapshot [. . .]

andreas: Let me see that! (She lets him.) Of course! Weininger, Sex and Character. That’s the most important book for a teenage girl! toni: Please, give me back the book. I have to read the rest! andreas: I wouldn’t think of it. I wouldn’t know how to explain it to your mother. This book definitely doesn’t belong in a woman’s hands, and especially not in a little girl’s. toni: I’ll be fifteen this summer. andreas: Well then, there are much better books: The Last Days of Pompeii or The Battle for Rome . . . toni: Why should I care about Rome and Pompeii?! I want to learn about life. andreas: Life! Do you think that life gets easier if you know more about it? (He gestures towards the book.) This here will give you such a terrible glimpse into the depths of life. This book is the report from his first voyage upon the sea of life. He never came back from the second one, like the diver in the Schiller poem that you must know by heart. He found out so much about life that he couldn’t take it anymore: he shot himself. toni: What a man! 4 See

chapters 20 and 21.

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andreas: Because he was a man! A woman could never do it, not without some personal scandal, just give up her life as some consequence of a pessimistic worldview. toni: Do you think the same about women as he does? Weininger? andreas: I can’t pull myself away from the genius’s compelling arguments. This is a terrible—but tremendous book. It’s a necessary catharsis at the end of a ruined, directionless, romantic progression . . . toni: Let me borrow it! andreas: No, my child. You could suffer irreparable damage to your young soul from it. Come here, I want to explain something to you. (Toni hesitantly comes closer.) Today, you are standing, in a way, at the threshold of life. Why are you shaking so badly? toni: It’s cold here. andreas: Your scarf is right here. (He starts to wrap it around her, but she takes it out of his hands.) toni: Thanks! andreas: You are standing at the threshold of life—and you are a girl. That’s just a fact, isn’t it? toni (Nods. She is trembling heavily.) andreas: Now you can do one of two things. You can protest against this fact—that’s what most of the girls are doing today. You can clutter up your head with all sorts of stuff that was created by men, you can learn how to use weapons that were forged by men—in short, you can try to make yourself into a man. You can let your true self wither away in order to gain, by sheer obstinacy, all of those abilities that nature has given to men. And what is going to happen? You will never reach your goal, because you will always be the smallest bit less important, less deep, less creative than a man. And this little missing piece will burn your soul. And the man, the real man, when he finally enters your life, it will always be you against him. He will be your enemy, your opponent, at work, in everyday life, and in bed. toni: That’s not true. It’s all going to be so different—for me. andreas: It is. You will become an ugly, cantankerous creature, with a withered soul and a wasted body. You will never live your own private life, instead a stupid, aspirational program. You won’t be either a woman or a man, and you won’t have success or happiness either . . . toni: Happiness?

4. Elisa Karau On the Speaking Choir Movement First published as “Zur Sprechchorbewegung,” Kunst und Volk: Mitteilungen des Vereines “Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle” 2, no. 9 (December 1927): 2–3. Translated by Richard Lambert. After attaining popularity in Germany and Russia, the speaking choir movement only reached Austria in 1924, yet it made one of the most significant contributions to theater and the performing arts in the Austrian interwar period. Elisa Karau emerged as one of the leading voices of the speaking choir movement and argues passionately for the centrality, utility, and pedagogy of the incipient form in numerous essays and other publications. Karau also fostered the evolution of the speaking choir in practice, serving as the speaking choir director under the auspices of the Social Democratic Arts Council. The form consists of multiple parts designed to be chanted in unison. Ernst Fischer, Karau, and others hailed

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the egalitarian style of performance, which required only the ability to speak, as a remedy to detached, bourgeois theater, and moreover, as a pedagogical tool for cultivating political and class solidarity through collective performance. The old youth hostel Castle Hohenstein in Saxon Switzerland was the site of strange sounds in mid-September. The leaders of speaking choirs, along with those who wished to become leaders, came together there, and soon the Dehmelian refrain “Grind, mill, grind!” entered into the clear fall air from the thirty assembled voices.5 So strong is the interest in the newly awakened, collectively rooted art form that the German Board for Socialist Education called all of these people together in order to support and expand the concept of the speaking choir through a course. Adolf Johannesson, the venerable leader of the Hamburg speaking choir, led the course with his immense knowledge and spirited devotion to the topic. In presentations, practical exercises, and free discussions, the various problems of the speaking choir movement were unfurled. The main questions pertained to technique, organization, stage design, and the selection of subjects to be performed. All colleagues were convinced that a choir formed from the lowest social level cannot have, without direction, the gripping effect of a well-led, technically trained one. On the communist side, the opinion emerged that the cultivation of a speaking choir for the purposes of artistic expression was “bourgeois foolishness” and that the speaking choir must emerge from the uneducated mass of the proletariat and grow into a weapon. The one and only function of the proletarian speaking choir must be to cry out the slogan of the day. But then why do hundreds of class-conscious workers in Moscow study “The Sea” by Gogol with fervent and gleeful effort, and achieve their greatest impact with the choral performance of this poem, which is in no way an ideological poem? O, the leaders of the proletarian art movement there also know the effect of artistic impression upon the souls of the proletariat. They know that we cannot forgo the well-led hour of celebration any more than the fiery speech or the clenched fist. For this reason, no union of speaking choirs that takes itself seriously should dare to appear with great haste and little preparation before an audience. We can only attain beautiful results through work and perseverance, and training in everything that can be called “technique.” The counterpart to the “wild,” unmanaged choirs are those where the technical gimmickry inhibits the immersion in the piece; when a choir director tears apart sentences for the sake of a certain rhythm, allows words to be emphasized illogically—the average speaker can no longer keep up. Perhaps this works with a virtuoso, and the piece functions as an aestheticized work of art, but the speaking choir creates its greatest impact through the collectively felt and collectively spoken word and has nothing to do with purely technical artistry. Therein lies the response to a belief held by the bourgeoisie: that the proletarian speaking choir cannot be an artistic instrument because it furthers ideology! Indeed, should true art stand only for itself instead of flowing from conviction? True art only arises from inner experience; and when the fifty or hundred members of the speaking choir cheer out from deep in their souls: “Bread is freedom. Freedom, bread,” then they have done more for art and cultural progress than any bourgeois organization that performs a well-blended rendition of some tendentious poem. This latter kind of work can perhaps satisfy a small circle of aesthetes, but those hundreds or thousands of listening brothers are enraptured and excited by a form of artistic expression in which the idea powerfully shows its advantage. 5 Reference to the poem “Erntelied” (Harvest song; 1907) by German poet Richard Dehmel (1863–1920).

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Here the response to a comrade’s recent opinion should be included. He argued that the lay speaker should not take part in an artistic performance at public festivals, but rather, only in an intimate circle of sympathetic friends because he can ultimately never attain artistic perfection. Very well, then: where does “art” begin, and where does it end? Are you not allowed to exhibit a painting that tentatively points the way toward a new aesthetic? Does not every great artist go through an immature stage, only to be cultivated later through steady work and contact with the audience?—We once heard a speaking choir made up of well-known artists on the stage of a revolutionary drama; it did not satisfy or excite us: it was a choir of speakers, but no speaking choir. It lacked the powerful social feeling. It was “art” that left you cold. We have otherwise seen very sober and perceptive men shed tears at a performance of the folk piece “Mass Man” by a speaking choir—the speaking choir of the Viennese Social Democratic Arts Council—and months later they still spoke of it with full emotion. Where does art begin and where does it stop?

5. Ernst Fischer Red Requiem First published as “Rotes Requiem,” Kunst und Volk: Mitteilungen des Vereines “Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle” 2, no. 8 (November 1927): 2–9. Translated by Richard Lambert. In addition to his role as culture editor for the Arbeiter-Zeitung and his status as cultural critic and provocateur within the party, Ernst Fischer (1899–1972) also created political theater in support of the socialist cause. As a founding member of the Socialist Performance Group (Sozialistische Veranstaltungsgruppe), Fischer devoted himself to the theater of political agitation. His works proved especially popular with the youngest devotees of the socialist cause, who found validation in Fischer’s writings for their rebellion against the more conservative generation of their parents. Red Requiem was composed for the coming anniversary of the First Republic in 1928, adopting the passion play as a way of commemorating the martyrs of the socialist movement. The work also offers an example of the speaking choir as a genre which positions the voices of collective resistance against the voices of power and the judge. (In the sickly light of the courthouse. All rise.) presiding judge:

Guilty! Twelve votes “yes”! presiding judge: Sentenced to death! rival chorus: Twelve votes “yes”! female voice: A million votes “no”! cry of the people: No! Justice. (Jazz music and the stamping of machines.) presiding judge (after a pause): Opinion of the court? rival chorus: They are rebels. presiding judge: The prosecutor has arraigned, the witnesses have all explained, the police force has therefore detained, rival chorus:

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with evidence of highest worth, and everything checks out right here The facts of the case are crystal clear— robbery homicide. female voice: A hundred witness to the contrary! rival chorus: But they are rebels. female voice: A hundred pieces of evidence to the contrary! rival chorus: But they are rebels. presiding judge: The character of the accused is poor. They continue here to agitate, against law and justice, church and state. No wonder, when such people can no more resist, the urge of the devil it comes to this. rival chorus: Twelve “yes” votes, that is the evidence, we are protecting the state. Twelve votes, indeed, at any price, they won’t be missed at all. female voice: Murderers! rival chorus: We are power, we are rule, all at our behest. The nation, money, the loving God— our twelve votes say “yes.” We are the meaning and the law. You are the blame. We always have might, for you it’s all the same. We say “yes” to this world, twelve “yes” votes. You are the unfruitful “No,” but we stand as if made of stone, twelve “yes” votes. (Darkness) Chorus (hollow): All around us fate unfolds, ready for the storm. But in the darkness, no one sees the countenance and flame. Work, work, work drives us on. All around us begins the eternal song, but deaf and blind we move along to earn money at the machines. Work, Work. Work drives us on. female voice: Let the machines be silent.

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The voice of the people cries, don’t you hear it? Break the iron dance of the gears, the labor, the suffocating duty. The voice of the people cries— don’t you hear it? (A prison cell. A prisoner paces back and forth, back and forth; a second crouches on the bed and writes.) female voice (Takes the page from his hand and comes forward. She reads): Four meters long, four meters wide. Two meters high is the darkness inside. But the brothers are coming. I hear the footsteps night and day, all of them are on their way, five continents are marching. March on, march on as fast as you can, who knows how long our time will span, in this hole, this cramped prison! We wait, we wait—when are you coming—when? No man, you brothers, can wait again, with more faith than we. But sometimes we doubt your loyalty, then everything, everything is poisoned, hateful to us. Freedom, a lie, fraternity, a devilish lie! Forgive us! Forgive us! You will come, you will come! You must come! chorus: Claims and calls knock at the door of the eternal factory Like blood it flows within our core and ears so musically. It goes for all, for you and me, it goes for all the world. It is not there, it is not here.— Listen, listen! The voice falls like rain on the cities of earth. rival chorus: Why do you care? Why do you care? The rooster crows, wind moves the air. The death bells play their piece. The work must never cease. Why do you care? The world is great. And somewhere they create, and something will be done there. That’s how it is, why do you care? chorus: It rings in stone, and sings in the wind. The people to die are without sin. We are not deaf, we are not blind. The people to die, are brothers of mine.

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rival chorus:

T’was homicide, why do you care? These murderers will get what’s fair. Justice, twelve votes “yes” Why do you care about the rest? These rabble-rousers cause sensation. Think more about your compensation. Work and pay! Work, pay! Work, pay!

6. Oscar Pollak Why Do We Not Have a Social Democratic Art Policy First published as Oskar Pollak, “Warum haben wir keine sozialdemokratische Kunstpolitik,” Der Kampf  22, no. 2 (1929): 83–86. Translated by Richard Lambert. Oscar (also: Oskar) Pollak spent his career working his way up through the ranks of the ArbeiterZeitung. After World War I, he served as a London-based foreign correspondent for the paper, before returning to Vienna in 1926 to assume the role of editor of foreign affairs. Pollak used his position to comment not only on matters of foreign policy but also on the cultural products of Red Vienna. In 1924, Pollak touched off debates over Karl Kraus’s standing within Red Vienna, eliciting a defense from editor in chief Austerlitz himself.6 In this essay on the politics of art, Pollak investigates the lack of a politically effective “socialist” art. At issue was the Arts Council’s failure to found a true people’s stage (Volksbühne) in the Carltheater in 1928. Pollak stumps for theater with political engagement. Bach’s subsequent response presents the quandary of the people’s stage: how to create a popular theater that does not alienate the nonsocialist consumer.7 Enough time has likely passed since the failures of the “Plays at the Carltheater” to take away the embarrassing aftertaste of a current event and to prepare for a sober discussion.8 This discussion is removed from deliberations over whether the guarantees that Direktor Berisch had to offer stood up to careful businesslike scrutiny, or whether Grabbe’s “Jest, Satire, and Irony” was a wise selection for a theater in such poor circumstances. All those who know nothing about art or the art business, that is those whose judgment is not clouded by special expertise of any kind, let alone knowledge of behind-the-scenes tricks of the trade [Kulissengeheimnisse], are left with one question after the latest failed attempt to create a performing arts venue for the Viennese workers: Why did this attempt have to fail? Why have we not had any success in Vienna in the arena of Social Democratic art policy? [. . .] As for the supposed crisis of the theater, which will neither be denied nor investigated here, it does not seem to have prevented numerous mid-sized German cities from achieving something that is missing in Vienna: the influence of workers’ organizations on the 6 See

chapter 28. Bach’s response in chapter 24. 8 Located in Vienna’s Second District, Leopoldstadt, the Carltheater was briefly the site of a failed attempt by the SDAP to found its own theater. The Performances at the Carltheater (Schauspiele im Carltheater) survived only a few months after its first performance in the fall of 1928. 7 See

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local theater. And in Vienna, Red Vienna, with more than four hundred thousand organized party members, with its majority Social Democratic municipal administration, with its—compared to Germany—enormous circulation of the Social Democratic press: how enormously great is the potential, and yet how incomparably few are the successes! [. . .] In its beginnings, the workers’ sports movement was in a similar state as the workers’ art movement: [they began with] very modest and in part narrow-minded attempts that dated back to the prewar period; [the reception by] the public agencies, especially the municipality of Vienna, was very reserved; [they had] against them the power of the capitalist sporting business, bloated by inflation, who convinced many hundreds of thousands of proletarians to pay for ever-worsening, more noxious entertainment—[they had] nothing on their side but the vague yearning of the masses for mobility, for strength, games, and sunshine. And what has become of that? Today, with all of its shortcomings, the workers’ athletics and sports movement is already so powerful that in Vienna, it will soon have pushed the bourgeois ones into the background. Today, the sport-steeled columns of our gymnasts and the Friends of Nature, the sun-kissed bodies of our athletes and swimmers, and the entire organized strength of our youth is a social norm that has impressed itself on the consciousness of the entire social class. What has happened during this time to bring the proletariat closer to the art of mastering the theater, or to replace it with artistic cinema? Nowhere and never before— throughout the rest of Europe, with the exception of Russia—has a proletarian arts council (to give this term a function and a responsibility) had so many opportunities, backed by so much power and enthusiasm, as here in Vienna. It has failed to seize them. In the past ten years, despite all political reactions, the priorities of socialist culture have permeated all corners of existence. Specific proletarian organisations are at work in all areas of cultural life. The Social Democratic Arts Council has found no less positive energy among the proletariat—but also no fewer bourgeois biases and financial obstacles that have unavoidably forced compromises—than in the workers’ sports movement or any other organization within the socialist cultural program. It alone remains far behind its aspirations. [. . .] The task of a socialist art policy is twofold: it must promote artists to the working class, and it must educate the working class in art. On both fronts, Vienna falls short. [. . .] Now we arrive at the core of the problem: does our Social Democratic art policy sufficiently consider the needs and the understanding of the working class? Under no circumstances should some arrogant intellectual opinion be put forward that regards the workers as only the object of their education, or as experiments (as is commonly seen in communist circles), nor any well-meaning social pedagogy that constantly spouts a lesson at every turn. On the contrary: the worker has a clear right to be entertained by a work devoid of artistic value, to watch a bad movie without being morally condemned, and to find serial novels in his paper that can be read without effort and prior knowledge. Moreover, he has the right to be led, not by idealistic insistence and intellectual excess, but rather with passionate commitments and intelligent decisions by the experts, such that the working class, which only now is struggling for these intellectual goods, may gradually find their way to true art. The idea immediately presents itself to demonstrate the tasks and deficiencies of our art policy through the related problem of art criticism. We are familiar with a certain “critique of the Burgtheater,” which contains more insinuation and allusion for the initiated

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than intelligible sentences. We also know how it is reviewed in the bourgeois press: that it is precisely the model that Social Democratic art criticism should not follow. If Julius Caesar is performed, then the bourgeois critics take it as a chance to let its spirit be illuminated; they can presume that their readers are all familiar with the play. The social democratic caretakers of art may not do this; they must not be ashamed to tell the workers who Shakespeare was! Take any day of remembrance in honor of a great composer or author: they like to perform their least-known work even though the majority of the working class are not familiar with the best-known, they like to reproduce copies of the most unpublished fragment—a true delicacy for the literary connoisseur. In order to simply bring the general reader and listener closer, so that all Social Democrats should not forget who these great figures were and what they mean for cultural history. That is not to say that we should only serve the working class the most easily understood works, that we should constantly bore them with William Tell and Aida—that is to say that, if we are to commemorate Goethe, then the task of the Social Democratic art leadership is not to write something new about him at any cost but rather to repeat that which has already been said a thousand times in a new and vivid way so that a thousand newly converted souls will reach for the works of Goethe for the first time. . . . One might object here: but the editorials in the party press also are often difficult to read. That is true. But this is because a Social Democratic newspaper is forced to engage with difficult political issues for a proletarian (and politically educated) audience that challenge their reading comprehension abilities. And that is why the press has an educational responsibility to appeal to a broad public when it faces the difficult yet splendid task of introducing a completely uninitiated yet immensely receptive and enthusiastic audience to all our intellectual treasures. And the same goes for facilitating the workers’ relationship to art. Certainly, it is not easy, and in fact it is unbelievably difficult to gently lead the workers away from kitsch and to introduce them to both the old masters and new art, both of which must still find their places within the workers’ intellectual life—but it is such a thankful, fruitful, culturally deprived soil! Instead our Social Democratic caretakers of art, as embodied in the leadership of the Arts Council, have wasted their unique status and opportunity to do so, in order to—of all things—compete with their bourgeois adversaries. Much of what they have said and written has been done with an eye not towards the Favoriten District, where the proletariat today seeks and finds recreation, distraction, entertainment, but rather toward the coffee houses of the Inner City where the experts and professionals sit pondering. . . .9 The best intentions are mired in a tragic misunderstanding that the best is good enough for the proletariat. The Social Democrats tried so often to impress the bourgeois theater by saying that they had the support of the masses, until someone began to look around—and saw that the masses were gone. The art was too lofty for general appreciation. And once again the Viennese workers are one step further away from having a performing arts venue of their own. The simple, painful, persistent truth is this: the Social Democratic art policy, the art policy for the workers, has yet to be created in Vienna.

9 Favoriten

is Vienna’s Tenth District, and a traditionally working-class neighborhood.

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7. Jura Soyfer Political Theater First published as “Politisches Theater,” Die Politische Bühne (March 1932): n.p. Quoted from Jura Soyfer, Das Gesamtwerk, ed. Horst Jarka (Vienna, Munich, Zurich: Europaverlag, 1980), 464–65. Translated by Richard Lambert. Jura Soyfer (1912–1939) was born into a Jewish, upper middle-class family in Kharkiv, Ukraine, but grew up in Vienna as a committed socialist. He was a core member of the Socialist Performance Group (Sozialistische Veranstaltungsgruppe) along with Ernst Fischer, Robert Ehrenzweig, and others. Soyfer’s theatrical works were not published until after the end of Red Vienna, but his essay “Political Theater” serves as both a blueprint for Soyfer’s own conception of theater and as a manifesto for the politically charged theater that defined the Red Vienna stage in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In his radical claim that the stage serves propaganda rather than art, Soyfer lobbies for a style of theater capable of responding to Red Vienna’s growing state of political crisis. Today’s bourgeoisie claims categorically: Politics do not belong on the stage! Politics are the contents of the dismal everyday. The stage, however, is a place to enjoy the highest intellectual art, the elevation out of the commotion of daily life, or else the source of harmless pleasures. That sounds nice—no less nice than the bourgeois demand to settle permanently the class struggle and for a peaceful collaboration between workers and owners. But, just as class harmony and honest collaboration cannot exist in the world of class differences—so too is the stage unable to be apolitical as long as class struggles exist! How so? Did the bourgeoisie always dream of the “apolitical theater”? Just remember! Lessing, Schiller, the young Goethe—they made the stage into a political tribunal. Their dramas were fiery proclamations, revolutionary manifestos of the victorious class, the bourgeoisie. Since that time, however, the role of the bourgeoisie has been reversed. Now it battles against the onslaught of a new ascending class, the proletariat, to be the support within a collapsing world. Now they demand an “apolitical theater.” The life of the proletarian is political through and through. If the theater is to give him more than simple distraction through the illusion of a fictional world, then it must be political! The art of the proletarian must have social, political content. How is it in the bourgeoisie’s entertainment industry? Could a well-honed salon piece, a gay operetta, a mindless sound film be dangerous to the proletarian? A large number of these “harmless” plays and films borrow their ambiance, their humor from the “good old days” and thus abet all these petty bourgeois, conservative desires. They enchant their audiences with a dream world that does not exist, in which class differences do not exist, and the falseness cripples the faculties of judgment. Like a sweet poison, the bourgeois, reactionary ideology creeps into the consciousness. However undecided, politically confused, or indifferent the proletariat becomes, it is all right with the bourgeoisie. However empty their entertainment, their interests in their free time are, however much reactionary kitsch clouds their brains—the more beloved it is to the audience! We must fight against this seemingly harmless but in reality most dangerous theater! The workers must find a theater that stands alongside, rather than against, their battle for liberation: a political, revolutionary theater.

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The theater of agitation is a powerful weapon in the class struggle. The small stage lends us its satirical might, the theater of the masses its powerful pathos. Whether what we create counts as art or not makes no difference to us. We do not serve art but rather propaganda. Perhaps our disposition, our ethical strength will occasionally bring us close to artistic production.

8. Neon Agitation Theater First published as “Agitationstheater,” Das Politische Kabarett (Vienna: Sozialistische Veranstaltungsgruppe, 1929), 2–4. Translated by Richard Lambert. As political pressures on Red Vienna mounted in the late 1920s, and particularly after the Palace of Justice fire in 1927, voices in and around the party pushed for a more politically engaged theater culture that could rally support for the socialist project.10 This essay was taken from the propagandistic promotional pamphlet, Das Politische Kabarett, which was published by the Socialist Performance Group. The group consisted of approximately thirty leading leftist practitioners and theorists of the stage, including Ernst Fischer, Jura Soyfer, Karl Sobel, and Robert Ehrenzweig (1904–1984). Ehrenzweig, who published frequently under the pseudonym “Neon,” was also responsible for a range of cabaret revues that sought to bring the contents of political agitation to the masses in the form of on-stage entertainment. In its struggle to dominate the masses intellectually, two important allies stand alongside the bourgeoisie: reactionary art and reactionary kitsch are dangerous enemies—art because we overestimate it, kitsch because we underestimate it; art because it appears to be above any critique, kitsch because it is below criticism; art because we do not recognize its ties to the bourgeoisie, whose form of expression it is, kitsch because we do not recognize the ties that it creates to the bourgeoisie. The reactionary art and kitsch of the bourgeoisie influence the emotional life of the masses and their intellectual response. They take possession of their nerves, intoxicate their thoughts, negate their instincts, affect their risible muscles and tear ducts—in the service of the bourgeoisie. They are conniving enemies: they know how to slip into proletarian events, spread themselves as dishonest, reactionary films, as revues and operettas that valorize militarism, the imperial and royal “good old days,” and indeed the entire bourgeois social order. [. . .] The theater of agitation is an attempt to at least partially solve this problem. And what inexhaustible possibilities we have to align the theater with our great struggle: to allow the commotion and consistency of reality to flow by in the spotlight, to express the contrasts of life with photographic fidelity, to exaggerate, to caricature all the abjection and ignominy of society, which, by virtue of being born into it, we have the honor of dissolving through the laughter of satire! What a task—to foster the courage and fighting spirit of our comrades, to electrify those who waver, to win over the disinterested! [. . .]

10 For

details on the Palace of Justice Fire, see chapters 1 and 36.

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The life of the proletarian, the world of socialism’s ideals—has enough problems, tragedies, and joys as well as desires, disappointments, and strong wills that dramatic material can be created in abundance. In this way, the stage can be conquered by the proletariat, it can become a weapon in the hands of the workers, can exert its force upon the intellect with pathos and satire. The theater of agitation is not forced to conjure illusions out of nothing. It works through the directness of the events on the stage, through the closeness of the content and the unity of disposition that links actor and audience. It inflames, until ecstasy erupts, so that the boundary between stage and auditorium disappears, so that play and reality become one and the souls beat together in the flames of experience. In the same way, the great plays of the French Revolution swept up the masses, the revolutionary theater of Meyerhold inflamed the Russian proletariat, and the “political cabarets” and traveling political acting troops in Russia, Germany, and Austria also work in this way. It is not necessary to write very much, the history of the world is its own author. In no time, a newspaper is turned into political cabaret, the events of the day into improvised scenes, and amateurs incite the audience to outrageous laughter and uproarious elation. And as the theater of agitation takes its content from world history, it also influences world history: formed in miniature, it is a part of the larger intellectual movement, a servant of the greatest idea of humanity, of socialism. Is that “art”? The theater of agitation should not be valued aesthetically. It does not want to be art! It wants to be life, a part of the life of the proletariat, a weapon in its struggle for freedom.

9. Rudolf Holzer The Rejuvenated Theater in der Josefstadt First published as “Das erneute Theater in der Josefstadt unter Führung Max Reinhardts,” Wiener Zeitung, April 3, 1924, 1–3. Translated by Richard Lambert. The various attempts to instrumentalize theater to better support the political and pedagogical aims of the SDAP did not encompass the entirety of Vienna’s interwar theater scene. Among the notable holdouts was Max Reinhardt (1873–1943). The prolific director and dramaturg began his career in Vienna, but forged his artistic reputation in Berlin, directing theaters including the Kleines Theater, Neues Theater, and the Volksbühne. Here, he developed new techniques in stage and set design, including the use of a rotating stage and the creation of new entrances and exits for the cast of players. In 1923 Reinhardt returned to Vienna to take artistic leadership of the Theater in der Josefstadt following its complete renovation by Italo-Austrian industrial magnate Camillo Castiglioni. This feuilleton piece from the state-run Wiener Zeitung hails Reinhardt’s return as a welcome respite from the politicized offerings of Red Vienna. Taken together with Reinhardt’s collaborations with Richard Beer-Hofmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and others, the piece offers a powerful reminder that the didactic theater of Red Vienna remained in competition with depoliticized, aesthetically avant-garde alternatives. In a time of tension and worry, Max Reinhardt is taking it upon himself to found a new theater in Vienna, because the arrival of a group of actors from Berlin—plus defectors and dissatisfied members of the Burgtheater—can mean nothing else. As with everything else that Max Reinhardt takes on, his “actors in Josefstadt” also evidently have standards,

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culture, and an understanding of art. If he had done nothing else than give Vienna this theater in the Josefstädter Straße, then we would still have to thank him and hold him in indelible memory in the history of Viennese theater. The grand opening proceeded the day before yesterday. As is the case with all of Reinhardt’s ventures, one had to put up with the fanfare, drumrolls, and messianic singing typical of an advertising and propaganda machine that is always completely and unconditionally subservient to his efforts. It was a completely fitting event for our city, with proper Viennese conviviality and refined elegance. In terms of the artistic development of his interests, Professor Reinhardt selected Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters to premier on his stage. He has grown weary of the long-static forms of theater that are rooted in nature, reality, and the absolute; today he seeks mystery in Salzburg and the stylized theater of the baroque in Vienna. In both, the primacy of the word is almost blurred, pushing the meaning of the text into the background, the art of improvisation shimmers, triumphs, and the sensory impression reigns over the entire artistic effect, formed out of music, dance, mimicry, painting, machinery. . . . The authors—well, they play along! With an openness that he himself perhaps did not realize, Reinhardt spoke out in the name of the establishment, the “actors of the Theater in der Josefstadt,” that he, the erstwhile actor, held and fostered an interest and affection for acting on stage, for the art of miming, but not for the poet, for the spirit and meaning of the eternal words. Reinhardt’s renovated house is a breathtaking jewel that only he could have realized, with his energy, his tenacity, and above all his power over people! He has earned the honors; but the success lies in his personality. Who else in Vienna would be in a position to conquer the Viennese apathy, the Viennese lack of understanding, the Viennese insouciance that was an accepted consequence of the rapid decline of the artistic theater; who else could have produced the strength for such a great act as this new creation? More importantly, who else would have been allowed to, who else would have been tolerated to accomplish such a feat?

10. Ödön von Horváth Tales from the Vienna Woods First published as Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1931), 90–94. Translated by Richard Lambert. Ödön von Horváth (1901–1938) was born in Sušak, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (in present-day Croatia). His literary career, however, unfolded almost exclusively on German soil and the Tales from the Vienna Woods debuted in November 1931 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Von Horváth did sympathize strongly with the Left, and his work consistently attempts to unmask the hypocrisy of nationalist movements. In Tales, von Horváth’s scathing parody of Viennese and Austrian culture mimics the style of Austrian folk theater. The plot revolves around Marianne, who breaks off her engagement to Oskar and conceives a child out of wedlock with Alfred. Alfred’s grandmother, who lives outside of the city in the Wachau Valley, encourages him to abandon his new familial obligations and then murders the infant child he leaves behind. These serial shortcomings expose the moral bankruptcy of the ostensibly traditional, value-oriented community of conservative Catholic “Black Austria” in contrast to Red Vienna. In this scene, Marianne has left her child to seek

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counsel from a Catholic clergyman. Despite the apparent affinity between von Horváth’s piece and the political aims of Red Vienna, the work ruffled feathers.11 Tales ultimately was not performed in Vienna until 1948; the premiere was met with public indignation. VII In St. Stephen’s Cathedral Before the side altar of St. Antonius. Marianne confesses. The bells are silent and the world is still. confessor: Alright, let’s review: You have caused your poor old father, who loves you more than anything, and only ever wanted the best for you, the most terrible pain, grief, and worry. You were disobedient and unthankful—leaving your honest groom and binding yourself to a degenerate type, driven by your carnal lust—Well! We know that already! And so you have lived with this pathetic individual forgoing the holy sacrament of marriage for over a year, and in this terrible state of mortal sin, you conceived and birthed a child—when? marianne: Eight weeks ago. confessor: And you have not had this child of shame and sin baptized—ask yourself: Can anything good come of this? Not a chance! But that is not enough! You wouldn’t stop, and even wanted to kill the child while still in its mother’s womb— marianne: No, that was him! I only underwent that procedure for his sake! confessor: Only for his sake? marianne: He didn’t want to have any children because the times are only getting worse, probably indefinitely. No, it burns at my soul that I had wanted to abort this child every time that he looks at me— (Silence.) confessor: Is the child living with you? marianne: No. confessor: Rather? marianne: With relatives. Out in the Wachau. confessor: Are they God-fearing people? marianne: Definitely. (Silence.) confessor: You regret, then, that you wanted to kill him? marianne: Yes. confessor: And also that you live together with that beastly figure in animalistic matrimony? (Silence.) marianne: I thought then that I had found the man who would well and truly complete me.— confessor: Do you regret it? (Silence.) marianne: Yes. confessor: And that you conceived and birthed a child in a state of mortal sin—do you regret that? 11 In a fictional interview with von Horváth’s characters in Der Morgen, the new voice of the Viennese citizens laments von Horváth’s lack of appreciation for the real face of the city. Repos, “Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald,” Der Morgen: Wiener Montagblatt, November 16, 1931, 6.

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No. That’s not possible— What did you say? marianne: It’s still my child— confessor: But you— marianne (interrupts him): No, I don’t.—No, I would immediately be terrified if I could regret it.—No, in fact, I’m happy that I have him, very happy— (Silence.) confessor: If you cannot have regret, then what do you want from your Lord? marianne: I thought that the Lord might maybe speak to me— confessor: Then you are only coming to Him because you are in difficulty? marianne: When things are going well, then He is with me—but no, He cannot possibly require me to regret this—that would be against the laws of nature. confessor: Then go! And come to know yourself before you step before our Lord.—(He makes the sign of the cross.) marianne: Yes, I’m sorry.—(She steps out of the confessional, which now dissolves into ­darkness—and now the murmuring of a litany can be heard. Gradually the voice of the ­cantor can be distinguished from the parishioners; Marianne listens—the litany ended with the Lord’s Prayer; Marianne moves her lips. Silence.) marianne: Amen. (Silence.) marianne: If there is a loving God—what do you have planned for me, oh Lord?—Dear God, I was born in the Eighth District and went to public school, I’m not a bad person— do you hear me? What do you have planned for me, oh Lord?— (Silence.) confessor:

Part IX Mass Media

“This man wants to knock that man’s head off, even though he has laid the foundation for Vienna’s reconstruction. Can that be?” Photomontage by Siegfried Weyr, responding to an anti-Semitic attack against city councillor of finance Hugo Breitner. Der Kuckuck, October 19, 1930. (Courtesy of ANNO/Austrian National Library, ÖNB.)

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did not just rise in popularity in Vienna after the end of World War I. Already during the war, both media had demonstrated their usefulness as a political tool in war reporting. The propaganda of the war years offered two lessons for the theory and practice of film and photography during the Red Vienna period: at the explosive core of the photograph was its ability to document, its ability to capture and penetrate the surface of the world. This conception of photography, however, also entailed a struggle for interpretation that went beyond the individual image and involved its mass audiences. Viennese Social Democrats only reluctantly took part in this debate. Their leading figures subscribed to a concept of culture that had little use for the photographic media. Organizations aligned with the party, such as the Friends of Nature (Naturfreunde), promoted photography to workers more as a hobby than as a means for cultivating oppositional consciousness. In the years immediately following the war, Social Democratic writers broadly condemned the cinema as capitalist mass stupefaction.1 At the same time, the entertainment tax on cinema admissions—set at 40 percent, much higher than the tax on the popular theater—provided the city with an important source of revenue starting in 1921. It was not until 1923 that the Viennese Social Democrats emphatically embraced film: the Central Office for Workers’ Education (Zentralstelle für das Bildungswesen, aka Arbeiterbildungszentrale) set up a film office, which recommended politically or aesthetically valuable films to party organizations and audiences and established a party-run distribution service, and Fritz Rosenfeld began to write for the culture section of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and soon became a leading, passionate Social Democratic film critic. In October 1923 Social Democrats also made their first large-scale use of film in an electoral campaign. In addition to electoral advertising—including the feature-length Das Notizbuch des Mr. Pim (Mr. Pim’s Trip to Europe, 1930) and Die vom 17er Haus (The people from house no. 17, 1932)—the films that they commissioned consisted primarily of documentaries of party activities, such as May festivals and parades. These films were produced by private companies. The party neither established its own independent production infrastructure (like that of the Communist-aligned Prometheus Film in Germany) nor inspired artists to develop a sophisticated politics of form to rival those found in German or French cinema. Photographic projects were also outsourced to commercial inema and photojournalism

1

See, for example, Paul Wengraf, “Allerweltverdummungstrust Kino,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, October 26, 1919, 2–3.

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studios, above all to Martin Gerlach Jr., whose striking photographs of municipal housing complexes helped to shape the international image of Red Vienna. From 1929 on, the Social Democratic magazine Der Kuckuck published original contributions to the photomontage aesthetics of the era. Executive editor Siegfried Weyr used photo competitions and didactic articles in an attempt to create an archive of images that would be independent of the commercial press agencies and would enhance the political impact of workers’ photography. Although the results, as far as explicitly proletarian photography was concerned, remained meager, the workers’ photography groups formed by the Friends of Nature and at popular education centers (Volkshochschulen) produced artists such as Martin Imboden and Richard Träger, whose work drew inspiration from the New Objectivity movement. Apart from these instances, artistic photography during the Red Vienna era was shaped by the legacy of pictorialism as well as by a moderate modernism that only cautiously borrowed from the New Vision (Neues Sehen) and New Objectivity movements. These circumstances produced predictably mixed reactions when the German Werkbund brought its avant-garde exhibition Film und Foto to Vienna in early 1930. Several art historians became outspoken proponents of New Objectivity, including Wolfgang Born, Alma Stefanie Frischauer, and Heinrich Schwarz who were very adept at discussing photography, even in popular magazines. The combination of inflation, the economic crisis, and the rise of sound film plunged the Viennese film industry into a tumultuous period of ups and downs. The economic structure of film and cinema also became a focus of theoretical debate. Béla Balázs (Visible Man, 1924) and René Fülöp-Miller (The Fantasy Machine, 1931) reflected boldly on the challenge that industrialized mass culture posed to established concepts of art, entertainment, and education. Intellectuals from Hugo von Hofmannsthal to Ann Tizia Leitich to Robert Musil examined the potential of film from multiple and at times contradictory perspectives, considering it as a form of compensation for experience, as a means of achieving understanding, or as a genuinely new space of perception.2 The key terms of these investigations—the masses, standardization, internationalism—were not only used in the communication theories of Red Vienna, they also frequently appeared in the popular film reviews of the day. Film and photography were, above all else, facts of everyday urban life. Illustrated magazines such as Die Bühne (est. 1924) and the Wiener Magazin (est. 1927) assigned greater importance to photography. The photojournalist became a popular figure, whereas the (often female) studio photographer offered access to consumer worlds that the majority of the population would only ever experience with their eyes. Cinema was the most popular form of entertainment, drawing more than five hundred thousand visitors per week in the late 1920s, and also became a significant forum for tests of political power. Although the bourgeois federal government did not follow Germany’s lead in preemptively banning the January 1931 theatrical release of the antiwar movie All Quiet on the Western Front, National Socialist violence in and around the cinema provided the government with all the pretext it needed to ban the film shortly after its Vienna premiere (see chapter 33). 2

See Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Der Ersatz für die Träume,” Neue Freie Presse, March 27, 1921, 31, translated as “The Substitute for Dreams” in The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory 1907–1933, ed. Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer and Michael Cowan, 384–86 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); Ann Tizia Leitich, “Don Quichottes der Silberleinwand” [Don Quixotes of the silver screen], Neue Freie Presse, July 20, 1927, 17–18; and Robert Musil, “Ansätze zu neuer Ästhetik. Bemerkungen über eine Dramaturgie des Films” [Toward a new aesthetic: Observations on a dramaturgy of film], Der Neue Merkur, March 1925, 488–506.

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Further reading Dewald 2007 George 2009 Holzer 2014 Mayr and Omasta 2007 Riesenfellner and Seiter 1995

1. Siegfried Weyr The Photo as a Weapon First published as “Das Photo als Kampfmittel,” Der jugendliche Arbeiter 30, no. 4 (April 1931): 8–10. Translated by Kurt Beals. Siegfried Weyr (1890–1963), executive editor of the Social Democratic illustrated magazine Der Kuckuck, criticized the lack of political focus in Viennese workers’ photography. This critique, like many similar arguments made in Social Democratic publications in the years 1931 to 1932, reflects an escalation in cultural agitation against a backdrop of diminishing real political options. In this text, Weyr implicitly attacks the contradictions that have shaped Der Kuckuck, which became the central photographic publication of Red Vienna upon its founding in 1929. The use of polemical captions and starkly juxtaposed images, which he strongly supports here as a political strategy, was implemented primarily in editorial photomontages. By contrast, the magazine’s photo competitions mainly urged “amateurs” to discover the beauty in everyday life, in the spirit of the New Objectivity. This was in line with the apolitical orientation of most of the Viennese workers’ photography groups, which consisted largely of employees and civil servants. Workers’ photography is one of the newest cultural movements of the proletariat. It is emerging at a speed that would have been unimaginable only a short time ago. From one year to the next, new photographic talents find their voices in the various photo exhibitions held in Vienna, and the vast reserves of creative ability residing in the working class become ever more clearly visible. Much has been said about the musicality that is rooted in Vienna’s soil. Yet less attention is given to the fact that the baroque art that developed so richly here also created a powerful culture of spectatorship, the consequences of which have long remained in the background due to a variety of unique circumstances. But it is undeniable that the active, increasingly noticeable photographic movement is somehow influenced by the bygone currents of baroque visual culture that continue to spring forth from the depths of the people. The eight-hour day, then, has made it possible to awaken the abundant talents that had long lain dormant in the Viennese population. A common thread running through the exhibits of Viennese working-class photographers is a pronounced talent for composition, a distinctive legacy of the baroque era. Again and again, the viewer encounters captivating details in these images. Well-composed images are practically a given. Consequently, the average quality of the photographs on display is extraordinarily high. The subject matter of working-class photographers is another question. This is because the worker, in his cultural life, still carries so much baggage from the bourgeois

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past, indeed from a bourgeois world of the eighties and nineties. This will not surprise any connoisseur of cultural history. After all, the farmers of the eighteenth century, for example, preserved an exact replica of the world of the Thirty Years’ War in their customs, manners, and dress. Thus it is hardly shocking to find that these photographs routinely depict themes from the early days of bourgeois amateur photography, which in turn served as models for the landscape and architectural paintings of artists such as Lichtenfels and Rudolf von Alt.3 Many Viennese working-class photographers have not yet realized that workers’ photography is an important and sharp intellectual weapon in the struggle of the proletariat. Political photography has hardly been practiced at all. Social photo reportage is limited to images of disfigured beggars or miserable figures picking through the trash in garbage cans. But that is not the point. The point is to express a political idea, a social concept in visual form. And that requires not only juxtaposition but also a compelling caption. Take, for example, the picture of a pretty typist adjusting her garter next to her machine. If we write “The boss has called,” then the whole thing, which was initially a superficial, erotic eye-catcher, takes on deep social meaning. The working woman’s terrible dependence on her employer, the dependence that often compels her to put not only her labor power, but also her body at his disposal, is captured once and for all. The erotic dalliance has become a bitter indictment. Does this clarify what the working-class photographer can do in the class struggle, using the possibilities that his device offers? The image has much more power than the written word. Its path to the mind, its path to the heart, is shorter. Is it not time to make some serious efforts in this area? And there is another task to which workers’ photography could be applied that would be of great service to the workers’ press. This is the image of the enemy. Surely many working-class photographers live in apartment buildings, on streets, and in neighborhoods next to class enemies. Has no one realized yet how valuable pictures of these figures can be when they are captured in moments when they believe themselves to be unobserved? How compellingly a person’s character can be expressed in precisely those moments, when it is not hidden behind empty words and hypocrisy. How devastatingly such a system, a lie, a giant hypocrisy can be picked to pieces. Indeed, those images of Mussolini that were taken in unguarded moments during his speeches, travels, and rallies have revealed more about the nature of fascism to the horrified world than brochures and books!

3 Eduard Peithner von Lichtenfels (1833–1913) was professor of landscape painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1872 to 1901. The painter Rudolf Ritter von Alt (1812–1905) was known for his watercolors of architecture and landscapes.

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2. Fritz Rosenfeld Social Democratic Film Politics First published as “Sozialdemokratische Kinopolitik,” Der Kampf  22, no. 4 (1929): 192–97. Translated by Kurt Beals. In this key text about internal conflicts in the cultural policy of Red Vienna, Fritz Rosenfeld (1902–1987), the film critic of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, condemns the artistically and politically neutral film programming in the city’s communally run cinemas. By 1931 the city-owned Kiba (Kinobetriebsanstalt) operated a considerable number of cinemas in Austria, including one-eighth of Viennese cinemas. The Kiba received financial backing from the Workers’ Bank and operated under the direction of the entrepreneur Edmund Hamber; however, programming decisions were dictated by economic criteria, without input from the party’s Social Democratic Arts Council (Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle). Rosenfeld develops a plan that foresees a transition from initial cinema programming driven by the spirit of class struggle to new approaches to film production. In response to this and other similar polemics, the party’s executive committee banned him from reviewing Kiba films for the Arbeiter-Zeitung. The film is as terrible a tool as a flame-thrower. —S. M. Eisenstein

In nearly sixty thousand cinemas with twenty million seats, bourgeois-capitalist film leaves its mark on twenty, thirty, forty million people every day, influencing them with its mendaciously optimistic view of the world and its glorification of imperialism, of the bygone days of the monarchy, of the blessings of class-based society. In three decades it has become not only an enormous, economically important industry but also a means of domination, with an unprecedented and even now unequalled power to manipulate brains. Film is international (and will remain so, in spite of the new fashion for sound film); it shows the American and the European, the Englishman and the German, the Greenlander and the African, that he lives in a world that could not possibly be made a better place, in which everything is fair and everyone can be happy, as long as he is humble and modest enough. [. . .] These films are bad, these films are dishonest, these films are reactionary. Nothing could be more obvious than the fact that we must make other, better, honest, revolutionary films to counteract them. But as clear as this may have seemed, it has proven to be equally impracticable. Talent aside, producing a film costs immense sums that the working class simply cannot afford. Even with limited resources, it is still possible to perform a play or a symphony in some hall. Groups of enthusiasts can join together to support workers’ music, workers’ theater. But it is impossible to produce a film with little money and untrained actors. Despite all the enthusiasm, such a film would be miserable and probably ridiculous, it could never hold its own against the products of the bourgeois film industry which often boast such splendid acting and directing. Also, to show movies you need movie theaters. When the trade unions in Germany began to support the production of films with limited budgets (the rather disappointing Die Schmiede and Freies Volk4), it 4 Die

Schmiede—Das Hohelied der Arbeit (The forge: The hymn of work, 1924, dir. Martin Berger); Freies Volk (Free people, 1925, dir. Martin Berger).

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turned out that the cinema owners rejected these films. They had to be shown in halls or in separately organized events. But what are a few special presentations, compared to the countless daily movie screenings in the cinemas? [. . .] Based on these experiences with the two German films and the Russian films, one thing has become clear: even more important than film production is the ability to influence the cinemas. Social Democratic cinema policy cannot begin with film production, because film production requires both financial resources and distribution, both of which are currently lacking; instead, we must begin by acquiring movie theaters. Just as it is difficult to implement a healthy theater policy if you do not have your own theaters, it is not possible to have a healthy proletarian film policy if you do not control any cinemas. But, one might argue, which films should be played in these socialist cinemas, if no one is producing socialist films? We will not be at a loss for films. Russian films, even if they have Bolshevik tendencies, can be adapted for Social Democratic cinemas with only minor edits, and the significant artistic achievements of other countries will meet the needs of proletarian cinemas for years to come. [. . .] With the Russian films and the other movies that the commercial cinemas have rejected, although they by no means lack commercial potential (it is just a matter of daring to show them!), workers’ cinemas could be run until they generated enough of their own capital to fund film productions. A confederation of the united socialist cinemas of some European countries could form a production partnership. Then we would have the funds to produce full-fledged films, then we would not have to worry about the distribution. Just as capitalist film factories can operate without risk because they have their own chains of movie theaters to generate profit from those films, so too this production partnership would be on secure footing because the workers’ cinemas would offer enough venues to generate revenue. This production partnership remains only a beautiful dream. But the workers’ cinemas are already a reality. There are a number of worker-run cinemas in France and Germany, there are many cinemas in Vienna and the Austrian province which are located in people’s houses, built by the Workers’ Bank, or operated by the workers in communities where the Social Democrats are in the majority. But now we must ask whether and how these workers’ cinemas serve the purpose they are meant to serve, what films are included in their programs, and how the influence that the working class has already achieved in the cinema is put to use. Here we find a very sorry state of affairs. Not only do almost all of these cinemas play the usual movie trash, they play the very worst of this trash; not only do almost all of these cinemas neglect their commitment to artistic film, not only do they fail to make their influence felt in film production, they also play films time and again that ought never to be played in workers’ cinemas if their political orientation were taken into account. Anyone who looks through the programs of these cinemas, especially the Viennese workers’ cinemas, will get the general impression that there are fewer good films being played there than in bourgeois movie theaters—that much must be freely admitted—and that these cinemas show reactionary kitsch that would certainly and rightly cause the workingclass audience to revolt if it were shown in a bourgeois cinema. All the American-made Russia kitsch films—The Last Command, Mockery, The Red Dancer, The Volga Boatman, Tempest—have been shown in cinemas operated by the working class; reactionary films, such as The Adjutant of the Czar, The Yellow Lily, or Archduke Johann, can also be found in these cinemas.5 The techniques used in such films are well known: the revolutionary 5

The Last Command (USA 1928, dir. Josef von Sternberg); Mockery (USA 1927, dir. Benjamin Christensen); The Red Dancer (USA 1928, dir. Raoul Walsh); The Volga Boatman (USA 1926, dir.

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peasants and workers are nothing but a drunken, greedy, sadistic, and dirty mob who only revolt out of a thirst for blood and revenge; but the nobles, the czar’s officers, and the princesses are luminous figures, so angelic that it would be a most abominable crime to even lay a finger on them. The farmer who betrays the revolution is rewarded with the princess, the peasant girl who betrays the revolution receives a dashing prince. And the ideology of the revolution in these “apolitical” films is not “all for all, freedom and equality for the whole people,” it is “every man for himself, yesterday’s servants should be free to go about boozing and whoring, while yesterday’s gentlemen play the servants.” If two films of this intellectual and political orientation appear one after another, it may happen (and it has happened more than once) that the audience in a workers’ cinema is influenced for a whole week by the spirit, by the hidden political intent of these films. On any given evening in a people’s house, there may be a lecture on the Russian Revolution in one hall, while in the other a film such as Tempest or Mockery is playing. In Vienna, today’s working class has at its disposal a number of cinemas that give them some power; they can—they could—use this power to influence the entirety of Viennese cinema, change its direction, enable certain films to be screened, prevent reactionary films from being screened. Yet nothing of the kind is done. [. . .] Some argue that the cinema must be run as a business. Well, first of all, it is very questionable whether a workers’ cinema can only be run as a business; but there is no question that even from a business standpoint one can run a workers’ cinema differently. We do not want to talk about aesthetic value or lack thereof—that may be a matter of debate. We do not want to talk about the fact that unappealing films, the waste products of the film industry which the bourgeois cinema business practically ignores (Where the Alpine Roses Bloom, Your Corporal or Annemarie and her Cavalryman),6 are shown in workers’ cinemas, of all places. We only want to talk about the political danger that this program entails. After all, even good, politically well-educated, Social Democratic workers who are firmly committed to the movement will not fully escape the influence of these messages that are repeated week after week, these defilements of the revolution, disparagements of the working class, and glorifications of various princes and Habsburg archdukes. However, it seems that the political intelligence of the workers in the audience has been significantly underestimated. The workers are perfectly aware of the political tendency of these American films about Russia, these German officer comedies, these Austrian archducal idiocies. The blame for these programs rests not with the comrades at the Workers’ Bank or the people’s houses, who do not have the opportunity to view and evaluate each movie beforehand, but rather with those who have been entrusted with the direction of the cinemas. [. . .] Thus, everything still remains to be done in Vienna and Austria, as far as a Social Democratic cinema policy is concerned. [. . .] But what can happen soon, and easily, is a reorganization of the management of the existing workers’ cinemas. Whether they are placed under the authority of the Social Democratic Arts Council or the Central Office for Workers’ Education or assigned Cecil B. DeMille); Tempest (USA 1928, dir. Sam Taylor); Der Adjutant des Zaren (The adjutant of the czar, Germany, 1928, dir. Vladimir Strizhevsky); The Yellow Lily (USA 1928, dir. Alexander Korda); Erzherzog Johann (Archduke Johann, Austria, 1929, dir. Max Neufeld). 6 Wo die Alpenrosen blüh’n (Where the Alpine roses bloom, Germany 1928, dir. Hanns BeckGaden); Ihr Korporal/Annemarie und ihr Ulan (Annemarie and her cavalryman, Germany 1926, dir. Erich Eriksen).

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their own artistic and political advisor—this is where the work must begin. The cinemas are there; the audience is there; all that matters is who chooses the films, how they are chosen, according to what criteria they are chosen. Without forgetting the possibility of commercial success, without diminishing the opportunities for the cinemas to generate income, their programs can be very different, perhaps much more successful, much more profitable. All too often today we feed our opponents in our own house, we spread propaganda for the cause of the workers’ enemies. We are not talking about an insignificant entertainment venue; we are talking about a tool for political power. That should, that must finally be recognized in its full significance, in its tremendous importance, and then we must act accordingly.

3. Hugo Huppert Kulturfilm, Revisited First published as “Noch einmal Kulturfilm,” Die Rote Fahne, April 3, 1927, 8. Translated by Kurt Beals. Although the Communist Party was greatly outnumbered in Vienna, it nonetheless exercised influence on the city’s film culture. Organizations affiliated with the party, such as International Red Aid and Workers’ International Relief, sponsored film screenings—primarily of Soviet films and German proletarian films—that had an impact beyond the party’s membership. The Austrian Rote Fahne (Red flag) and Rote Illustrierte Woche (Red illustrated weekly) covered film in polemical reviews and articles. The present text by Hugo Huppert (1902–1982), the film critic for the Rote Fahne from 1927 to 1928, casts a spotlight on the struggles over film images in Vienna in the late 1920s. The Viennese Urania, a prominent bourgeois institution of popular education (whose vice president was SDAP politician Otto Glöckel) had shown a Soviet Kulturfilm about China.7 The accompanying lecture, according to Huppert, neutralized the film’s revolutionary critique of imperialism. In contrast, the screening was attacked in the Catholic magazine Schönere Zukunft (A brighter future) as a sign that the Urania had veered to the left.8 The ruling science is the science of the rulers. No one would doubt that today, unless he remains intellectually in thrall to those same ruling powers. For instance, even the poorest of the poor in spirit can still receive enlightenment from a “conscientiously” interpreted educational film such as Hexenkessel China [China: The witches’ cauldron],9 which the popular education center Urania is currently presenting to curious and knowledge-hungry lay audiences. Not enlightenment about China, that topic is thoroughly obfuscated by the accompanying lecture, but enlightenment about the relationship of bourgeois “popular education” to China. 7 The term “Kulturfilm” (cultural film) was used in German-speaking Europe between 1918 and the 1950s to identify documentaries presenting scientific and “cultural” topics to general audiences. 8 See Professor Dr. Rechtenfels, “Henry Ford über die Stellung des Judentums in der modernen Weltwirtschaft und Weltpolitik” [Henry Ford on the role of Jewry in modern global economy and politics], Schönere Zukunft, June 12, 1927, 776. 9 Velikij perelet: Moskva-Mongolija-Pekin-Tokio/Hexenkessel China/Von Moskau über die Mongolei nach Shanghai (USSR 1925, dir. Vladimir Šnejderov).

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We recently reported on this very interesting, beautifully executed film, particularly highlighting its pedagogical effectiveness. The film compellingly reveals an inequality in the distribution of the basic necessities of life that would be outrageous even by the most conservative standards—an inequality between coolie and capital, which in this case means: between the Chinese and foreign imperialists! On the one hand, we saw Chinese children without shirts, Chinese rural proletarians in ragged scraps, horses and machines rendered useless by the competition of human beasts of burden, who are less expensive because they are so “undemanding”; the Chinese plebs’ settlements forced out onto the water because the ground rents in the big port cities are so unaffordable (and this is what they call a “land shortage” and “overpopulation”!); we saw the small craftsmen squatting half-naked and starving beside their medieval hand tools. On the other hand, we saw English, American, and Japanese palaces of industry, yachts, luxury villas, and cars; we saw barricaded, vigilantly guarded European neighborhoods, fortified embassies, and the heavily armored battleships of these “powers.” But we also saw the Chinese revolution in concrete images that leave no room for debate. How does the speaker at the Urania’s lectern explain the outbreak of this revolution and the course it took? Quite simply: the cosmopolitan-dynastic theory of the state that Confucius propagated was misunderstood by his students and followers and came into conflict with the national-expansionist principle of Western political philosophy. Chinese universalism has experienced a renewed self-awareness and has cast off the advancing, invading life force of this energetic civilization. The Orient has oriented itself. And so on. The lecturer then offers a quite respectable overview of the new scholarly dynasties in China, the more recent philosophical systems and schools, especially insofar as they seek to revise and correct the Chinese theory of the ​​ state in the spirit of Confucius. It gets confusing. . . . Yes indeed, the Opium War and the Boxer Rebellion were pure pretexts! It was all a matter of overcoming their own theocratic social model. What is that, tariffs? Industrialization and colonization? We must understand that the stakes were much higher: they sought nothing less than to adapt to external fashions in their political and racial activity, while preserving internal ways of living and religious-dogmatic moral standards. In short, China is becoming Chinese. . . . Now you know! The words imperialism, intervention, market, investment, concession, are never spoken. The names Sun Yat-sen and Kuomintang are not even mentioned. The generals are all driven by their “pure lust for power,” Wu Peifu is appointed revolutionary commander, the revolutionaries themselves do not know exactly what they want. . . . And so it continues, the unsuspecting listeners are patient. This is neutral popular education, this is how “Bolshevik” images are rendered impotent (because the reality is always “Bolshevik”) and the masses are endowed with a truly elevated knowledge. Now, we may assume that such knowledge can be found in the reports of the Belgian Seminary or other European missionary societies, and indeed the “objectivity” of the ignorant lecture at the Urania’s pulpit smacks strongly of an encyclopedia entry. A man of science does not have to read the paper which is a political activity—God forbid! And a lecturer in popular science does not have to be a scholar by any means. But his proper pronunciation and dialect-free intonation do not qualify him to spread “enlightenment,” to “educate” the people—not by a long shot. Instead of a Jesuit source, he would have to use a critical source and prepare his remarks with an eye toward the living reality, not the marginal notes of a religious brother. But if the goal was merely to strip a Moscow Proletkino Kulturfilm of its culture, i.e., “propagandistic point [of view],” then a simple pair of scissors would have sufficed. Because their voice came through as well.

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4. Béla Balázs The Masses First published as “Masse,” Der Tag, January 31, 1926, 3. Translated by Kurt Beals. Between 1922 and 1926, Béla Balázs (1884–1949) was a film critic and columnist for the Viennese daily Der Tag (The day). “The Masses,” one of the last reviews that he published in Vienna before moving to Berlin, exemplifies Balázs’s way of developing his film theory from his experience of everyday cinema exhibition. Based on his viewing of a Soviet feature film in the cinema, he champions film’s ability to allow the masses to come face to face with themselves: as a gathering of people that cultivates rather than threatens and that remains egalitarian rather than resorting to leader figures. In this text, Balázs, who had fled to Vienna after the defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, allows his Communist convictions to show with unusual clarity, given the bourgeois-liberal orientation of the newspaper. Even before his emigration to Vienna and his turn to film, Balázs had explored the conditions of possibility of a “mass soul” in his dramatic work. “There are men in ones, twos, and threes. At four, mass psychology begins”—Nietzsche writes somewhere.10 And when he said “mass,” that was meant as harsh mockery. Even four people are less than one, the arch-aristocrat believed, and the paradoxical arithmetical formula “the more humans, the less humanity,” seems to be accepted as a general truth to this very day in educated and intellectual circles. To be sure, we often hear political and moral speeches that grant the masses a higher value. But in art, in literature, in the theater, in film, the crowd always appears as a dark, dull, amorphous element, one that can perhaps be dominated from time to time, but that always remains impenetrably foreign and dangerous, like a force of nature. Its image could not be shown in any other way. Friend or foe, exciting or frightening, ugly or beautiful—there was always something blind and faceless about it. To be sure, there is less scorn when it comes to the national “soul of the people.” This soul is credited with great beauty, wisdom, and character. But only when it is expressed in the individual. One man can have the soul of many, but the many, when they are together, have less soul than one. For only isolation leads to form, only separation to consciousness. The masses suck both of these up. The sea swallows its waves, the earth its mountains, mankind the man. The spirit is man’s flight from his peers, and it can rise no higher than he can lift himself up, by his own hair, from the swampy ground of commonality. But the masses are chaos. Strength without sense, law without thought, movement without shape. They have no face. This is more or less the way the masses have always been represented. This seems to have been the immediate experience of artists. Until now. There is friendship and love. There is an inner connection between two people. Nietzsche even allows a union of three, and some might yet believe in a possible community within the family, and in brotherhoods held together by a spirit, a feeling. But those who have no private, intimate relationship to one another are strangers to each other. This seems self-evident in our society. All of its people are functionaries in an incomprehensible, poorly organized operation and have only practical/functional but not close 10

The original source of this quotation could not be identified in Nietzsche’s works.

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human relationships. Then there is the special category of friendship and love, of private intimacy. We know no third option. But society, the people, the masses are like the sand of the desert—to be sure, the grains roll together as they are driven and guided by the wind and gravity, but no grain is linked to any other by an inner vein. If that could change, that would be world history. That alone. Not just the change of political and economic forms. Not when mountains fall and rise, but when their innermost substance, the earth itself, becomes different. Is it conceivable that a deep, close human relationship can emerge without private friendship and individual love, an inward connection of the many that is no less spiritual than that of the two? Is it conceivable that the “mass soul” can become as deep, as rich, as sensitive as the soul of the individual? Is it conceivable that an individual could merge with the masses without becoming submerged in them? Is it conceivable that the masses could develop a face and eyes, eyes like those of the friends to whom we open our hearts? Why do I have such fantastical dreams? I saw a film. A contemporary Russian film called His Call.11 The film boasts plenty of talent, but it is primitive, not very well made. We see enchantingly lovely, touchingly sincere acting. But that was not it. Nor was it the beautiful physiognomies that radiate a strange, youthful strength unknown to us, a youth that transcends the individual, so to speak, one that cannot belong to an individual, a youth that seems to glow and shine in the common air. But there are “crowd scenes” in this film. Workers in their assemblies, workers in the factory, workers in the canteen and in their club. Some one hundred people sit together, and it has the mood of an intimate family gathering. One person speaks to a crowd, and it seems as if he were speaking in private to his beloved. And this crowd has a single face that can laugh and cry, a face that is so animated, so animated by a single feeling, as only the face of the greatest actor in moments of the most intense emotion can be. Those are strange, new images that no art has shown us, because they could not be seen in any reality. To be sure, these are only scenes “portrayed” by actors. But they are so new that no one could portray them unless he had seen them, no one could play them unless he had experienced them. There is a scene: About two hundred people sit silently, motionlessly, anxiously awaiting the news of Lenin’s death. A group of two hundred people is transformed into a single physiognomy of the pale sorrow of suffering love, with a single ardent feeling that—that I have never seen even on Duse’s face.12 Then we see them march past in masses. What is in the rhythm of these heavy marching boots? It is like a tremendous song that makes anyone who hears it so woeful and wistful and sorrowful and . . . is it faith? I have rarely seen so many moist eyes after a film screening. Why were they crying? It was not a sentimental film, it was not sad at all.

11 Ego

Prisyv (His call, USSR 1925, dir. Yakov Protazanov). Eleonora Duse (1858–1924) was one of the most internationally renowned theater actresses of her day. She was known for her subtle acting style. 12

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5. Max Frankenstein The Market of the Masses . . . First published as “Der Markt der Massen .  .  .,” Die Bühne 2, no. 15 (February 19, 1925): 50–51. Translated by Kurt Beals. The urban masses could best learn to see and understand themselves through the representation of social types. This conclusion, which Béla Balázs reached with respect to cinema and Otto Neurath in his “pictorial statistics,” is expressed for a popular audience in the following report about film casting in a Viennese café. Max Frankenstein (1888–1942), who specialized in cultural reporting and later in court reporting as well, describes the daily tests of patience and the small dramas that occur as extras are recruited for film productions. Toward the end of the article he lays out the incredible variety of stock roles assigned to minor characters. His on-the-ground report also offers a snapshot of the abrupt contraction of the Austrian film industry that occurred when the inflation bubble burst: whereas 138 new feature films were produced in Austria from 1921 to 1922, only 5 movies were shot in 1925. Where is the modern slave market? Where do they all end up, those people who once set their sights on great careers as thespians but got stuck at the first stop along the way, in Jägerndorf or Czernowitz? Where do they spend their twilight years, those old actors whose careers are already behind them? At the film agency—the employment agency for the “masses” of the film world, the extras. They meet every evening at a coffee house in the Burggasse, these actors predestined to play warriors, farmers, priests, bayadères, Egyptians, Hebrews, grandees, Moors, Apaches, police, ladies of the ball . . . in short, the “people” of the film, extras of all ages, men and women from seventeen to seventy. Happy are those for whom these mass films are only a second job: circus artists, dancers, elocutionists, choristers who supplement their modest incomes in this way or fill the gaps between their other engagements with film work. But pitiable are those who hope to subsist on these earnings alone. The weathered old faces of comic actors, the narrow, rouged cheeks of girls bear witness to this austerity. But the indomitable humor of this amiable little bunch helps them to overcome their sorrows. Harmlessly chatting and flirting, they await the things to come, the assistant director who will hire them for the film. They are true bohemians, with all the temperament of but not as gifted as artists: sanguine, fun-loving, always quarrelsome, scheming. All of them tamed and reined in by the energetic, circumspect, ever helpful secretary of the Verband der Filmdarsteller [Film Actor’s Association], the head of the Film Börse [Film Agency], Kurt Marlett-Stamler. Every time film companies announce plans to hire more actors, it is a big day for the agency and Mr. Stamler. The hopefuls all sit close together, eyes trained expectantly on the door. Even Juliet’s longing for Romeo could not rival the eagerness of these extras as they gaze at the assistant director who comes to offer work. Anyone who happens to enter with a briefcase in his hand might be mistaken for this long-awaited man and approached on the sly with pleas for patronage . . . But in fact that is strictly prohibited. According to the statutes, everyone must remain dutifully seated in his own spot, place his membership papers in front of him, and submissively wait to see whether, after a rigorous examination, the lord of the manor deems him to be a worthy servant. But as soon as the selection and hiring process begins, even the best discipline may no longer suffice. A deafening babble

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of voices arises, the noisy music of the real agency [Börse, literally, stock exchange], they all jump up from their seats and crowd around this influential gentleman upon whose judgment they may depend for their bread in the days to come. With that, the moment has come for the head of the agency to intervene. With his stentorian voice that drowns out every noise, he calls for quiet and shoos the mutineers back to their seats. In no time they are sitting there again on their best behavior, and the assistant director can freely stride through the ranks and assess the “goods.” Right now, the prospects for those seeking film work are not looking very good, since very few films are currently being made in Vienna. Under these conditions, Reinhardt’s Shakespeare productions, which require more extras, offer a welcome opportunity for employment.13 In the other theaters, too, the agency’s management finds work for its members as background actors. A large number of young dancing girls were brought to Germany, where they have been touring for a year with the revue “Wien gib acht!” (Look out Vienna!). Another group will be departing soon. The film agency also has its “celebrities,” the cast of “types” and recurring roles: the elderly Mrs. Marie Swoboda von Weitenfeld, the former rival of the great Wolter—today she is a little old woman who sits at the agency awaiting the day’s casting .  .  . Anton Weidinger, a commanding presence, once admired for his role in Der Meineidbauer [The farmer’s perjury], is frequently hired today as a film “lord”; Mrs. Sepha Berg, a gifted dancer and mimic, a member of the Neuber Ballet, is sought after as a specialist for Apache and salon lady roles; Emanuel Schulhof, who portrays eastern types in film by day, directs the very western “Nachtfalter” [Moth] cabaret by night; Mrs. Marie Greger, a former theater director, is a touching “granny”; Mr. Franz Prankl, a general from the pre-March era type, bears a striking resemblance to Kaiser Franz Josef I with the right make-up and is often in demand as a film Kaiser; finally, there are two real former “court dignitaries,” the first imperial coachman Walter with his distinctive valet physiognomy and the hunting attendant Herzog, both of whom have shrewdly profited from their “historical” value. But even those who are not celebrities have their ambitions. Almost everyone has, just in case, photos of themselves in the most flattering poses and costumes, which they are eager to share with any director who recognizes their talent. But all the young people at the agency still cling to their illusions, hoping that one day they will have careers like Jannings or Asta Nielsen . . .14

13

Max Reinhardt (1873–1943) was a theater director and businessman and the director of the Theater in der Josefstadt (see chapter 26). His directorial work in the 1924–25 season included The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and King Lear. 14 The German actor Emil Jannings (1884–1950) and the Danish actress Asta Nielsen (1881– 1972) enjoyed both popular and critical acclaim as film stars in the 1920s.

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6. Wolfgang Born Photographic World View First published as “Photographische Weltanschauung,” Photographische Rundschau und Mitteilungen: Zeitschrift für Freunde der Photographie, no. 66 (1929): 141–42. Translated by Kurt Beals. The art historian Wolfgang Born (1893–1949) was one of Vienna’s most dedicated journalistic proponents of the New Objectivity in photography. Like Alma Stefanie Frischauer and the pioneering historian of photography Heinrich Schwarz who both graduated from the University of Vienna with a doctorate in art history, the Breslau native Wolfgang Born brought his expertise and curiosity to the study of the medium’s history and present around 1930. Born’s many works of art criticism appeared in the illustrated magazine Die Bühne (The stage), among other periodicals. In this text, he offers a nuanced aesthetic program for photographic New Objectivity, not as a manifesto but from the sympathetic arm’s length perspective of an art historian. The clear contrast with impressionism takes on additional significance in light of the strong tradition of impressionist-inspired “pictorial photography,” which had brought international recognition to Viennese amateur and art photography around the turn of the century. No mere accident, no fashion could have given photography the significance that it has today. Its increasing prominence among the means of expression today represents a necessity of intellectual history. Only an ideology insensitive to the realities of life could attempt to deny this transformation of world views. The triumph of technology continues unabated. However, it is the sorcerer’s apprentice, and the man who called it forth can no longer rid himself of it, even if he wants to. It is easy to assume that technology has so far destroyed more opportunities for happiness through its mechanization of human life and its annihilation of historical standards of beauty than it has created with its civilizing achievements. The increasing awareness of this reality has sparked a resistance. The eternal right of mankind has asserted itself against the rigid dictatorship of the machine. The moment of crisis has come. The call for a new humanism has made itself heard and has already borne fruit in many ways. It is time to make up lost ground. But the “return” that romantics praise as the cure is itself a fiction. The creative individual will seek other paths. He will proclaim the goal of endowing matter with spirit, shaping the rough-hewn wares produced by technical methods to conform to the principles of living aesthetics, indeed he will know how to find a standpoint from which the hard surfaces of the present break down and to which the brutal appearances must yield. Dedicated artistic labor will disclose new territories of beauty where historically oriented senses saw only chaos. This discovery of reality is the mission of photography. It is no accident that its mode of capturing images is a technical process. It is well suited to the structure of today’s world view in its innermost nature, its objective manner of registration corresponds to the forms of thought of a generation of engineers. Today the camera is free to display its greatest virtue, its veracity. For the aim is to grasp the object, to extract it from its weak reliance on other objects. To be sure: the forest can be experienced as a shimmering surge of color and light, of scent and sound—in formal terms this experience is aptly captured in impressionism, just as Wagner captured it musically in “Forest Murmurs,” Liebermann as a plein air painter, Peter Hille in words in his “mood poetry.” Other epochs have experienced this phenomenon and given it form in other ways. When Dürer represented the forest,

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the product was a collection of individual trees, each of which was portrayed as an independent organism. He was most interested in the consistent laws governing the order of the branches, the silhouette and the layering of the leaves—in short, not the appearance, but rather the shape of things. The same was true around 1800, when classicism was the dominant form of seeing, and it is true to an extent even today, when related tendencies in art dominate (as the art historian Franz Roh has convincingly demonstrated). This new realism, which finds satisfaction in the overly precise elaboration of details, is the expression of the rational mindset of the era. At the same time, it does not by any means have to be inartistic and banal. For in order to be truly moved by reality, one must approach the world with a sort of piety, a spiritual mode of observation that senses a hidden meaning behind things. And one must be truly moved in this way in order to produce a work of art: that is what distinguishes the artist, even today, from the engineer who focuses on the end result. The consistent law is at the core of the drive to produce art today. Architecture, and not mood, is the primary element of the image. The crystalline, the rigid, the logical, the balanced, the transparent—these are the properties that we demand from a work of art. Should this not lead us directly to a new valuation of the photograph? Precisely what the impressionist generation lamented, the fact that photography withdrew reality from the grasp of the transforming imagination, becomes an advantage from the point of view of the New Objectivity. The lens incorruptibly records what it sees, and specialized tricks have been required to make it blur the edges, to reproduce in photographic form the impressionist style of overlapping spots of color. But in order to elevate an objective photograph beyond the level of the documentary, to transform it into an artistic image, a specific mind-set is required, a very particular relationship of the self to the object. One must first muster the courage to go straight to the heart of things. The eyes must turn uninhibitedly to the outside world, as if the goal were to forget all of the sentiments that cling to it. Take, for instance, the construction of a new building. Planks and carts, bricks and cranes have occupied a plot of land that is torn open, and from this piece of earth bare walls rise up. A scaffold surrounds the work: rods weaving together, bearing, supporting, climbing, higher and higher; a light cocoon, on which the outlines of the workers appear like decorations.—Now, is this ugly? A sensibility that attends to the nature of things will perceive an elegant play of wonderfully ordered forces, the harmony of static arrangements governed by laws, the rhythm of the workers’ movements, the aesthetic value of which has often been recognized. Living beauty is found in the structure, the same beauty that Dürer found in the morphology of his trees. But once it is clearly perceived, the image follows logically from the theme. The interplay of shadow and light reveals the object’s form, the cropping of the images is dictated by the proportions and lines. Contrasts give precedence to the essential over the accidental, the surface is examined again to see if its distribution of lightness and darkness has an ornamental effect, and then the lens records the whole, and the developing and printing processes realize it and give it nuance as the author intends. [. . .] Above and below, near and far—these must be grasped as fundamental conditions of perception. A close-up leads to a revitalization of the still life, which can offer inexhaustible discoveries. Here the new mode of perception will be displayed to particular advantage. Photography can most richly express the distinctive character of its medium by rendering the surfaces of its objects in great detail. The material character of things is given a vibrant voice, and the more intensively the photographer confronts the fundamental fact of the physical objects, the more animated they will emerge when transformed

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into images. Indeed, they can even be imbued with a truly uncanny life—for example, the way that toys can be photographed so that they recover the vitality and fantasy that they had for us in childhood. Illumination, cropping, and the relationship between the composition and its surroundings can evoke the sense of isolation that is the alpha and omega of the child’s imagination. This approach also opens up possibilities for abstraction. The still life, reduced to an ornament, is broken down into the optical components of its essence. Shadow and light take on a meaning of their own, the refractory effects of crystals are exploited for their visual form—and finally a sort of immediate imprint of nature can be obtained directly on light-sensitive paper, without the medium of the camera. [. . .] The photo report in magazines increasingly exhibits not only the banality typical of average commercial work but also individual achievements that strive to rise above the incidental and stake a claim to methodological validity. Even at first glance, the magic of experiences rendered visible raises such publications above the mass of illustrations that readers flip through with indifference. All of these are examples of what is meant by the title of this essay, “Photographic World View.” To capture and evaluate the real, to sense and to shape the nature of things in all the fullness of existence, by means of selection, perspective, illumination, and that sensibility of perception that characterizes the artist—to imbue matter with a soul—that is the task that urgently demands to be fulfilled. With this program, photography contributes its part to the productive currents of contemporary culture.

7. Lothar Rübelt The Work of the Sports Photographer First published as “Die Arbeit des Sportphotographen,” Photographische Korrespondenz 62, no. 3 (1926): 153–57. Translated by Kurt Beals. Lothar Rübelt (1901–1990) was the star among Vienna’s press photographers in the 1920s and 1930s. After making a name for himself with his dynamic sports photography, he branched out into politics and news in the late 1920s, while also putting his talents at the service of National Socialist propaganda even before the Anschluss. In this article, the twenty-five-year-old discusses the challenges of sports photography. This text combines the swashbuckling rhetoric common to journalists at the time with practical knowledge of visual aesthetics, technical connoisseurship with applied photographic theory. The attraction of sports photography, Rübelt knows, lies not only in its mechanical objectivity, but even more so in the tension between physical engagement and analytical distance that is captured in a wellcomposed image. The man of the camera faces circumstances and difficulties in the field of sports photography that are so peculiar, so distinct from those confronted by the studio and landscape photographer, that it may be worthwhile to attend more closely to the joys and sorrows of this beautiful branch of applied photography. The decisive difference: The sports photographer is a spectator who usually has no influence on the course of events. He stands alone with his camera, facing a spectacle that changes at lightning speed. The use of poses or constructed scenes is almost always

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out of the question, since they would scream with inauthenticity. Thus, there can be no recourse to shortcuts. Instead, our man is forced to seek out the most athletically captivating, visually beautiful moment—often a single, unrepeatable moment—as the events quickly unfold before him, to capture it in a flash and fix it on the plate with his steady hand. It is easy to see that this necessarily requires an in-depth knowledge of the subject: if ​​ I can fully comprehend a movement and mentally dissect it, that is, if I can anticipate its climax, it is relatively easy to snap a picture at just the right moment. However, whether this moment is the most visually beautiful is another question, and it is the task of the thinking photojournalist to bring the demands of sports aficionados into harmony with those of uninitiated laymen as much as possible. What is the really fascinating thing about a good sports photograph? It shows us things that we have not seen, it reveals the secret of the moment, in some cases the photo may even be an incorruptible judge that renders a verdict of victory or defeat. Unforgettable highlights of athletic performance, which unfortunately go by so quickly, can be immortalized and preserved for later contemplation. But where is the image that explosively captures a moment, offering the viewer the clearest possible insight into the nature, the flavor, the atmosphere of the sport? To attain that ultimate goal, the photographer must have a great familiarity with the individual character of each sport, a certain journalistic practice, and last but not least, a natural mastery of his camera, which has to sit like a trusty rifle in the hands of its master. Here we also touch on the mental attitude that truly determines whether a man is a good photojournalist or not: Only the passionate hunter will prevail. Those who do not feel the thrill of the chase, the suspense before each shot, the elation of the direct hit, will never know the proud joy and satisfaction of capturing and revealing the secret of the moment. But a man who is well suited to the job will also be immune to the distractions of raging, roaring spectators, the fever pitch of the starter pistol, and even his own sporting enthusiasm. Not even marshals and officials will break his focus. He must be careful, though, not to yield to the temptation of photographing without a plan in the midst of all this excitement. In the heat of the moment, he can easily convince himself that this event is extraordinarily important, and in the blink of an eye he will have spent the few photographic plates that he packed in a more sober mood. But even when all these difficulties are overcome, it is still too early to claim victory. For then it is time to return to the darkroom and make permanent these captured images, a process that is unfortunately not as simple as we might wish. Here the fierce battle against underexposure is fought with varying outcomes, and I do not doubt that more than 50 percent of the photographer’s success depends on this activity. This chronic underexposure stems from the high speeds necessary to obtain sufficiently clear images. [.  .  .] There are various means, most notably the selection of a suitable point of view, that make it possible to achieve satisfactory results even under unbelievably unfavorable circumstances. For instance, I personally prefer the so-called “worm’s-eye view,” which not only adds a certain sublime effect, it also has the great advantage that it captures the contours of the object outlined against the sky, so that even in the worst case you will end up with silhouettes. In addition to these technical problems, there are also aesthetic requirements. While speed and exertion are easy to see in pictures of men and animals, this is not the case with machines. Here it is only the accompanying circumstances, such as the clouds of dust, the position of vehicles at a curve in the track, fluttering ribbons, smoke, etc., which allow us

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to make inferences about speed. This is also the one case in which the distortions created by the focal-plane shutter have a desirable aesthetic effect, with the upper portions of the frame rushing ahead of the lower parts, which were exposed first. Some sports photographers take advantage of this by using relatively long exposures to produce blurry but very eye-catching pictures of races. But there is a better trick, which is to track the movement of the object with the camera, thus causing a deliberate blurring of the background. The result is a surprising lively picture. [. . .] There you have it, the modern sports photographer’s tool kit in just a few words. But do not forget the two essentials: Strong nerves—and a little luck!

“How Der Kuckuck is made.” Magazine spread revealing both the production and eye-catching visual montage characteristic of Red Vienna’s print media landscape, Der Kuckuck, April 6, 1930. (Courtesy of ANNO/Austrian National Library, ÖNB.)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

NEWSPAPER AND RADIO Erik Born and Richard Lambert

T

of print and broadcast media in Red Vienna embodied many of the contradictions and paradoxes of the entire Viennese social democratic experiment. As media “for all,” they were not only intended to be accessible and available in the sense of Jürgen Habermas’s “public sphere”; they were also characterized by forms of universal address in the sense of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities.” Therefore, the media needed to project both individual and mass appeal. In Red Vienna, determining the composition of the mass audience and developing means to reach them on the whole and in the singular were the main concerns for the party’s leading cultural thinkers and nonpartisan figures alike, from Oscar Pollak and David Josef Bach to Alfred Polgar, Joseph Roth, and Karl Kraus. Throughout the decade, the expectations of inclusiveness and inclusivity were increasingly haunted by the specters of partisanship and exclusivity. To promote their goals of social pedagogy in the service of class struggle, the Social Democrats engaged with thendominant media such as the party’s daily newspaper (Arbeiter-Zeitung) and the national radio station (Radio Verkehrs AG, RAVAG). The Social Democratic Workers’ Party also created an infrastructure of cultural organizations, ranging from libraries for workers through societies for film and radio enthusiasts to clubs for particular interest groups. In this period of heady technological innovation, the rejuvenation of print in the form of advertising columns, wall and street newspapers, and illustrated magazines were complemented by early experiments with television and image-based telegraphy. With a focus on the dominant media of radio and newspapers, this chapter documents the parallel development of partyrun industries for communicating and distributing information to the masses. The juxtaposition of the old medium with its new competitor reveals a surprising similarity: while Social Democratic print culture battled to assert itself against the entrenched forces of Vienna’s bourgeois and boulevard press culture, radio provided an opportunity to renegotiate longstanding concerns about neutrality, representation, and freedom of speech. The print sources included in this chapter, though not necessarily expressions of the new media themselves, illuminate Red Vienna’s struggle to harness the power of mass media in the service of its collective, egalitarian political project. Far more than a straightforward form of propaganda, mass media in Red Vienna reveal tensions between the bourgeoisie and the working class, the technological and the traditional, which resulted in a number of unresolved contradictions. In a critical reading, Red Vienna’s top-down, elite intellectual approach may seem hopelessly out of step with working-class realities, preserving anachronistic influences while touting social progress. In an ironic reading, on the other hand, he experimental qualities

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the media situation in Red Vienna can be taken to exemplify the paradoxes of “vernacular modernism” (Miriam Hansen), the inflection of industrial modernity through local concerns. Even though the content produced in newspapers, radio, and other mass media did not universally turn out to be “for all” in the intended sense, the media themselves served as the experimental testing ground for exploring the possibilities of political participation. Further reading Gruber 2000 Holmes 2006 Mattl 2000 Timms 2005

1. Alfred Polgar Intellectual Life in Vienna First published as “Geistiges Leben in Wien,” Prager Tagblatt, November 14, 1920, 4. Translated by Nick Somers. Alfred Polgar’s (1873–1955) concise essay about the living conditions in Vienna after World War I deploys a form of media critique aimed at shifting the heated debate to the question of media politics in the center and at the periphery.1 At the start of the essay, the Viennese journalist draws a distinction between living conditions in the prosperous “city center” (Innere Stadt) and the impoverished “districts around the center” (Vorstadt), which give rise to two markedly different forms of intellectual life. Through close analysis of each group’s media consumption, Polgar repeatedly undermines the rhetoric of intellectual nourishment with that of actual nourishment, and ultimately comes to a striking conclusion about inequality and the otherwise unstated “Jewish question.” His division of a presumed mass audience into more specific target groups also reflects a trend characteristic of subsequent audience research surveys throughout Red Vienna. The reports about Vienna’s poverty are true. The reports about Vienna’s prosperity are also true. The reporter must merely define what he means by “Vienna.” In the city center, enclosed by the Ringstrasse polygon, lives the Vienna that truly lives; the succulent Vienna, the city whose name, pronounced properly, should sound like a smile. All around this area, “gray and surly,”2 lives the Vienna that vegetates, the dried-out Vienna, the city whose name should be pronounced with the cadence with which the conductor of a rural passenger train would announce the name of a backwater station on a Dante-esque trip to the underworld. 1 Over

the course of his career, Polgar developed an idiosyncratic form of media critique, almost like media philology, in a number of feuilletons. See, for instance, Alfred Polgar, “Die Schreibmaschine,” Prager Tagblatt, October 1, 1922, 5; and “Aus Aufzeichnungen eines Radiohörers,” Der Tag, May 11, 1930, 3. 2 The quoted phrase “gray and surly” (grau und grämlich) may allude to a line in a poem written by Elisabeth of Austria (“Sisi,” 1837–1898): “Die Welt ist grau und grämlich, / Schaut grämlich grau auch aus.”

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In keeping with the dual economic climate in the two Viennas, intellectual life is also completely different in the one and the other. Outside the center it is more political, in the center more aesthetic. The question “How do I live?” has a completely different meaning in the city center and its surrounding districts. There, people talk about clothing, here about style. Those in the outer districts obtain practical instructions about fashion from the Rote Fahne [Red flag], while those in the Inner City get their information about society from Die Dame [The lady].3 The diverse inhabitants of Vienna used to be united by the emperor. Today it is the cinema. And in this regard, the cheerful center often lags behind the sad periphery. It can happen that while the Ringstrasse is still watching the fourth episode of The Mistress of the World, Ottakring already knows from the fifth episode that Consul Madsen (Michael Bohnen) has been captured while attempting to save the piquant Maud Gregaards and that his captivating bare chest will no longer delight the women of this unhappy city.4 The cinema is at the center of local intellectual interest. The frightful admission prices bar entrance to the fantasy world of the theater, and even books can be purchased only by those who have so much cash that they no longer need to read. It would appear that a major publishing company will be founded with German money to offer cheap reprints of the classics, but the outlook for this “enterprise of great pith and moment” does not appear rosy.5 A city that ignored a magazine as courageous and clever as Der Friede [Peace] and is incapable of putting up with and putting out even one single weekly or monthly literary magazine deserves the intellectual life that it does not have and the daily newspapers that it does.6 There is, by the way, a twice-monthly political literary magazine in Vienna. But it is too dignified by half. The editorial board reportedly felt obliged to turn down an article entitled “Bulgarian Vinegar Production in the Seventeenth Century,” however attractive its ideas might have been, because of its excessively daring material content.7 Far more exciting are the Blätter des Burgtheaters [The Burgtheater papers]—a pale specter of the literary future, an ancestor from a terrible day after tomorrow—that circulate in the Burgtheater to announce, in their strange and silent manner, the latest premiere.8 As the theater and books are too expensive, the existence of need is not fertile territory for philosophizing on the needs of existence, and as the discussions on communism unfortunately tend always to produce the same realization—namely that the only thing more stupid than communism are the arguments against it—all that remains, as mentioned, is the cinema to enliven intellectual life in the city. The poor can escape the hopeless confines of their existence in its world-spanning adventures, and 3

At the time, the communist Rote Fahne (Red flag) had much lower circulation figures than the Social Democrats’ Arbeiter-Zeitung. Polgar’s hyperbolic description calls to mind the protests at the start of the republic, when the Communist Party was very visible. 4 Die Herrin der Welt (The mistress of the world, 1919) was an eight-part serial film, which was released in weekly installments. 5 The quoted phrase, “Unternehmung voll Mark und Nachdruck,” is a line in Hamlet, commonly interpreted to mean suicide. 6 Der Friede was a political and literary weekly journal (1918–1919). Founded and edited by Social Democrat Benno Karpeles (1868–1938), it was conceived of as a pacifist response to the warmongering of the Reichspost. 7 The political-literary publication was probably Moderne Welt, an illustrated periodical founded in 1918 and edited by Ludwig Hirschfeld (1882–1942). 8 The Blätter des Burgtheaters was a short-lived publication (1919–1920), edited by the theater’s director, Albert Heine.

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the intellectually frozen can warm themselves in its idiotic tropical luxuriance. German Austria, nestled cozily between the child Znaim [Znojmo] and the adult Pressburg [Bratislava], also produces films; but they are not good. They are tame, simple, and poor. Like everything else, the imagination of the people here is undernourished and exhausts itself in the demands placed on it by the grind of everyday life. It is asking far too much of the imagination to make believe that foul corncakes can replace bread, pulverized brushwood is a substitute for tobacco, valueless paper will serve as money, and that God, who directed it all, is a just and benevolent divinity. After that, there is not much left over for the film industry. The fact that we have been forced, for so many years, to expend a maximum of intellectual energy to obtain a minimum of the most basic nourishment has corrupted our minds. The Viennese have become dizzy, partly from dancing around the golden calf, but also from dancing around for a piece of meat of any kind. To steady themselves, the inhabitants of the outskirts of the city cling to phantoms of the past and future. They hope for a world revolution or, in the case of those who vote Christian Social, that Emperor Karl will ride into the Hofburg on a white horse and put the shine back on the old imperial crown.9 At present, it is worth a measly 1.75 Swiss centimes. Those Viennese who find consolation for the toppling of the crown in the boom it has caused in the stock exchange struggle to maintain their balance in a different way. While they were forced by the war to turn their minds to blood, death, wounds, and sacrifice, they now numb their minds by turning and twisting with a passion in the opposite direction, guided by the tourist’s motto “carpe diem”—in other words, “kill time before it kills you!” There are not enough nightclubs, bars, cabarets, and entertainment palaces—not enough seats on the carousel to accommodate all of those wishing to ride. It is almost impossible to find a “Zimmer” in Vienna but there is no shortage of “rooms” or “chambres.” The bread is rotten but the caviar is first class. (I fear that those who gobble it down are not worthy of it. People for the caviar!) On All Saints’ Day, the day of the dead, the graves remain unadorned: flowers are too expensive. But in the dance halls of the living, fragrant ammunition is spent every evening in flower battles. What terrible contradictions! They show how horrid people make life (or perhaps how horrid life makes people). In their defense, it should be added that as they are themselves an image of God, their order is an image of the divine order. The havoc wreaked by the flu, for example, is more unbearable than any havoc wreaked in earthly hues.10 And the fact that my fellow man has perfect pitch while I am unable to tune a fiddle properly and all music is condemned through no fault of its own to be stifled forever in me, revolutionizes my heart against the intellectual capitalist world order more than any dichotomy between poverty and wealth. The contrast is possibly sharp enough for the Vienesse gemütlichkeit to scratch itself raw. But connoisseurs of the city’s psyche are in no fear of that happening. If the volcano we foxtrot on were to erupt, they reckon, it would be only on account of the wine [Heurigen] it produces. They claim that the street sweeper’s rage at the automobile clattering by with its boozy passengers is shot through with mild sympathy. It is not disdain 9 Karl

(or Charles) I (1887–1922) was the last Emperor of Austria. He reigned from 1916 to 1918, never abdicated, and spent the last years of his life attempting to restore the monarchy (see chapter 8). The “crown” (Krone) in this case refers to both the restauration of the imperial crown and that of the coin, the Austrian krone. 10 Presumably, Polgar is referring to the influenza pandemic of 1918, colloquially known as the Spanish flu.

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for the immorality of a wild pub crawl [Heurigenfahrt] but rather anger at the distance separating his own possibilities from theirs. Digression from the subject, but anyone who talks about intellectual life in Vienna inevitably also talks about its material life. And there must be a deeper racially motivated reason for all that.

2. Karl Kraus A Belated Celebration of the Republic First published as “Nachträgliche Republikfeier,” Die Fackel 27, nos. 712–16 (January 1926): 1–18. Translated by Nick Somers. Renowned for his work as a feuilleton author, the cantankerous and confrontational Karl Kraus (1874–1936) edited and published the satirical journal, Die Fackel (The torch). Within Red Vienna, Kraus’s frequent critiques of bourgeois culture endeared him to some party leaders and inspired a youthful following, while his criticism of the party itself alienated others. This piece is a transcript of a speech Kraus delivered in the Favoriten People’s House in Vienna on December 9, 1925. The speech—which was repeatedly interrupted by party functionaries—served as a flashpoint in a fierce public crusade against Vienna-based Hungarian newspaper tycoon Imre Békessy (1887–1951). Kraus accused Békessy of extensive corruption, and moreover, of cynical, capitalist instrumentalization of the popular boulevard press, which promoted sensationalist reporting over responsible journalism. Kraus’s strident defense of the serious press ultimately won out: Békessy, whose publications included Die Stunde (The hour), Die Bühne (The stage), and Die Börse (The stock market), was forced to flee Austria in 1926 ahead of criminal charges of blackmail and extortion. Since its inception, the notion of political freedom has been cursed by a terrible misunderstanding, to which political freedom itself falls victim: it has also brought with it freedom of the press, not realizing the power it thus delivers into the violent hands of the enemies of freedom and the dirty hands of the parasites of freedom, who are even worse enemies; not imagining the life-threatening and dishonorable use they will make of it. [. . .] The danger of this [type of sensationalist] journalism is that the only one who does not believe a word of it is the person writing it. And for that reason, its impact reaches far beyond its readers and is as intangible as a rumor. That is how this new form of intellectual corruption still distinguishes itself from the old one, which was infectious only through direct contact, whereas the new form is transmitted through the air. It deceives through its screaming headlines and the accompanying noise of the trash it peddles, in fact through its very existence, which forces itself noisily onto the market and makes a racket that in reality merely calls out the price of silence. The existence of this press is no longer a fraud presenting itself as culture, but naked criminality using the instrument of printer’s ink, making duplicates of a threatening letter; it is nothing more than a dangerous menace, which it or any private individual can use to intimidate neighbors and to commit any injustice that it sees fit. And this danger to the public, which was inflicted on us in the wake of the postwar pestilence of a morality gone bad, inevitably grows with each passing day on which the socialist party fails to counter it emphatically with all of the moral means at its disposal. The strange situation whereby socialist typesetters help to prepare these intellectual poison

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gases and work in the very battle zone and ammunition factory of their direct political opponents is gradually becoming a problem of socialist policy, even if its resolution is in conflict with the sociopolitical problem; it represents perhaps the most tragic case of a conflict between cultural and trade union interests, namely where cultural interests themselves have a vital political content. But possibly even more urgent and much less difficult is the fundamental and unconditional willingness to engage in a cultural polemic that could only be hindered by the sort of unpleasant tactical obstacles that should not exist in the face of a humanitarian question. What is missing here is the relentless educational work of a party journalism whose honest intentions and accurate assessment of this danger have in fact occasionally provided evidence beyond all doubts, though perhaps in opposition to the official party line. What is missing is the passionate desire for legislative reform that would resurrect Lassalle’s condemnation of the press and would have the courage, while safeguarding the right to a political opinion, to put an end to the idolizing of a freedom of the press that is in reality the kiss of death for freedom, while safeguarding the right to a political opinion.11 For more than a quarter of a century I have been in the vanguard of this truly global war against the destructive violence that gives rise to wars through the nationalistic and, even more so, intellectual brainwashing of humanity. And for just as long I have drawn on the slurry of bourgeois culture to write cautionary stories of deterrence and have carried out, above and beyond all social policies, the socialist work of renouncing the hell which the owners of this world have brought upon us. How can my senses, accustomed to such atrocity but not blunted by it, fail to be aware of its signs whenever they recognize them? And how can I not be entitled or obliged, how should tactical considerations prevent me from warning against becoming infected by a quintessentially tactical intellectuality, whatever fatal consequences it might have? As I prefer death if it will liberate me from this tactical approach, I should like to state that the leaders of the Social Democratic Party, whose noble banner flies high in the battle with the bourgeois press, have left me in the lurch in my particular campaign against the most shameful example of bourgeois press corruption. [. . .] There is a situation in Vienna at present in which, whether carelessly or for tactical reasons, a naturalized Budapest blackmailer has the city in his pocket, after having pocketed what the city had to offer. I am speaking of the owner of Die Stunde, who has taken the liberty, in order to add the finishing touch to his lucrative handwork, of chumming up with and profiting from Social Democracy. This rapprochement is not being met with a firm kick in the backside to support and implement my rallying cry, “Get this scoundrel out of Vienna!,” a cry that is even echoed by other countries, which show no desire to welcome him. On the contrary, weighty and measured circles have for some time demonstrated a marked neutrality in my war against the pestilence that has broken out in Vienna, abandoning this position only to hold talks with those spreading this plague, in contradiction to the resolution passed at that workers’ assembly. [. . .] If the branded publisher of a newspaper that lives from peddling scandal and from payments for keeping quiet about them can enjoy and even boast of such indulgence and support, it might be supposed that he has in fact extorted this favor or protection. I can accept any outcome in this combative endeavor except one: the idea that the reticence I complain of is justified by claiming that the battle is not as important or 11 Reference to Ferdinand Lassalle, Prussian political activist. While Lasalle is remembered for famously defending freedom of the press in opposition to state censorship, Kraus is referring to Lasalle’s critique of the press and in particular the Rheinische Zeitung in a speech (“Die Feste, die Presse, und der Frankfurter Abgeordnetentag”) held before the General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein) in 1863.

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serious as I make it out to be. [. . .] Even if it were conceivable that in the vast machinery of a major party that stands as one of the last moral bastions in this foul world, abuses and wrongs were to occur as a result of the dangerous attraction of bourgeois inclinations, it is nevertheless inconceivable that a belief in basic purity should be demonstrated not by immediate purification and by a profession of faith but by secrecy. Even in times of the most serious political pressure and constraint, there should be no better and more tenable tactical consideration than the tactic of a moral conscience! Nothing could ever have occurred that could not be rectified by actions and words. It is impossible for me to imagine that knowledge is the property not of the universe but of a blackmailer, that it could be a valuable instrument in the dirtiest hands used to persuade victims to give up their resistance and in doing so to suck in even more victims. Politics might always be tumultuous, but the workers’ movement should never consort with such company! [. . .] You know that my intention is no more and no less than to cut off the most shameless of this extortionist hydra’s heads and at least to rid Vienna of this Békessy—such is the name of the scoundrel. And you can believe that in my political endeavors I wish for nothing more than to protect the workers’ movement from being perverted by a depraved notion of freedom, and to protect the most sensitive souls not only from the toxic lies of bourgeois art but also from ruin by the bourgeois press. We would not be worthy of the freedom we speak of if we were to content ourselves with a revolt that could give the impression that it was this very act that had given rise to such a monster!

3. Friedrich Austerlitz The Real Kraus First published as “Der wahre Kraus,” Der Kampf 19, no. 7 (1926): 309–14. Translated by Nick Somers. Despite his criticism of the bourgeois press, the reception of Karl Kraus inspired fierce debate among party theorists of media and art. In 1926 Oscar Pollak (1893–1963) published a harsh criticism of Kraus, claiming that the latter’s rejection of the party disqualified him from offering valid social recommendations. Friedrich Austerlitz’s defense of Kraus, which is echoed in a similar piece by Hans Menzinger, rests on Kraus’s iconoclastic reputation. Austerlitz (1862–1931), who served as editor in chief of the Arbeiter-Zeitung reads Kraus as a crusader against corrupt establishments, a form of criticism that itself was central to the Social Democratic project.12 The stakes of this debate exceed the inclusion or exclusion of Kraus from Red Vienna. It reveals the ongoing project of reconciling the scope and goals of the party’s media program with the legacy and celebrities of prewar print culture, while also revealing anxieties that Social Democratic print media must be bolstered against these external forces. The contents of the spirited essay in the last issue by Oskar Pollak about the problem of Karl Kraus can be summed up, methinks, in a single sentence. Karl Kraus is not a true Social Democrat. [. . .] 12 For

other articles on the Kraus debate, see Oskar Pollak, “Noch einmal Karl Kraus,” Der Kampf, 19, no. 6 (1926): 261–67; and Hans Menzinger, “Karl Kraus und die Arbeiterschaft,” Der Kampf 19, no. 7 (1926): 349–53.

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It is all true: Karl Kraus is not a people’s writer, nor a people’s speaker, nor a true Social Democrat or party comrade who toes the party line. But does that make him any less of a revolutionary? And since I was the one who called him a revolutionary spirit and identified in this his significance for the proletarian struggle for freedom, I would also like to say why I find this solitary loner to be a truly great revolutionary. [. . .] Karl Kraus is one person not to have been impressed by this bourgeois culture, and by smashing all of the tablets proclaiming the glory of this culture, he is an incomparably more vehement iconoclast than the person who wrote them. He arraigns the entire bourgeois intellectuality and hurls it into the abyss along with the stigma of nonintellectuality. He is in reality the great incorruptible: he is not deceived by appearance or dazzled by authority. The thrust of the Social Democrats is directed above all at political and social privileges; it opposes the hierarchical structure of society, which is defined by capitalist power and social origins and which condemns the proletariat masses to obedience. We seek to break the influence of social traditions through democracy; the aim of socialism is to uproot capitalist power. But is the strength of the old powers not based primarily on the idea that they represent education, that the threat to their dominion is also inevitably a threat to culture? The historical achievement of this great satirist is that he has studied the worth and claim to ascendancy of this bourgeois culture relentlessly, implacably and from on high. We know how poorly this culture fared in his unerring eye and how it now stands when held up to the mirror of his ethically and morally ennobled satire. Because Social Democracy shows such reverence for real education, genuine science and authentic art, there was also a risk that it could be misled by appearances and that its attack on the bastions of bourgeois domination would be absorbed by the façade of culture that envelops it. Karl Kraus has couched the cataract and restored our sight so that we can see through these educational barriers. [. . .] We can therefore justifiably regard this heated and passionate struggle to purify the world as a revolutionary struggle. How is it not revolutionary of him to provoke such a vigorous commotion in people’s brains, to sweep them clean and liberate them from the superstitious worship of bourgeois authority? We don’t need Kraus to tell where we are going; we are certain in our “identification of the goal.” But, whether wedded to the party line or standing outside of it, Kraus has made the path we are taking an easier one by chasing away the specters that wanted to bar the way. What demands does Kraus make of Social Democracy that call into question whether he is competent to make these demands? Do not assimilate! That is the warning he shouts out to the party. And even if he were to be mistaken in his analysis of the facts that lead him to regard this warning to be necessary, even if he were to be doing the party an injustice in his assessment of it, a warning against assimilating to the bourgeois world might be superfluous, but never does any harm. Is it not surprising that Pollak, who rebukes Kraus for this admonition and warning and tries to demonstrate its invalidity so spiritedly, sees and warns against this very same danger?

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4. Oscar Pollak The Problems in the Calm First published as Oskar Pollak, “Probleme der Pause,” Der Kampf 22, no. 8 (1929): 370–79. Translated by Nick Somers. In his polemical piece, the Arbeiter-Zeitung’s foreign affairs editor Oscar (Oskar) Pollak reflects on the status of mass media—and in particular print journalism—as a source of party propaganda during fragile moments of political calm in Austria’s First Republic. The year 1929 marked the resignation of conservative Catholic chancellor Ignaz Seipel (1876– 1932), as well as the growing threat of right-wing militarism through the increasingly visible paramilitary Heimwehr. According to Pollak, in this moment of political exhalation—which he dubs “the interlude” between revolutions—the need for intellectual, politically charged reporting recedes. This vacuum of politicized content enables a decadent form of journalism descended from Imre Békessy’s sensationalist press and predicated on the whims of its readership to take root. Against the forces of inertia and entertainment, Pollak’s piece seeks to identify strategies for sustaining the collectivizing capacity of the party press beyond moments of political crisis. Problems of the Press. [. . .] Before the war, the workers’ press was the mouthpiece of an elite that concentrated deliberately on the political struggle. Those who read the party press in those days sought nothing but ammunition and reinforcement for the political class struggle and wanted only a socialist interpretation of social facts, disdainfully casting aside any nonpolitical current affairs. The socialist newspaper prided itself in not mentioning many things and reporting on all things quite differently than the rest of the press. This has now changed in many ways. Above all, the socialist press is affected by the general developments in the newspaper business. In German-language media, this involves a shift from opinion reporting, with long instructive articles speaking to the readers’ intellect, to news reporting (as has long been the case with the French press), seeking to influence readers in a different manner, through the selection and presentation of the news. This change is taking place extremely rapidly throughout the entire Germanlanguage press. Even the most serious bourgeois media cannot escape it. For the Viennese press, with its already lower-quality journalism which during the period of inflation also had to put up with the incursion of Budapest Békessy journalism, it has been devastating. This transition from viewpoints to reporting naturally shifts the focus from content to external appearance and unavoidably from the solid to the sensational. It is changing the way in which journalism works, focusing on form and placing emphasis on the dressing and arrangement of the material. The reader is in a hurry and wants to find out quickly what has been going on. He wants the information to be presentable, with pictures rather than pedagogy. It used to be ideas, now it is inspiration; it used to be the content, now it is merely the headline. The Social Democratic press is also caught up in this change in newspaper style. Some old-school editors might look down on the younger ones as journalistic “window dressers,” who overestimate the importance of appearance. But old-school readers have also given way to more modern ones. For the old readers it was of no consequence

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where an article began, how it was structured, what it looked like on the page. They read their newspapers from the front page to the small ads. New readers no longer do this. They have to be addressed differently. They are no longer willing to forego the tidbits of news and interesting reports that are found in other newspapers and now demand them from their party newspaper. The first and most difficult problem for the party press at a time when party affairs alone no longer hold the reader’s interest is to adapt to the new style without renouncing its underlying orientation, to report on sensational trials while keeping intact the basic principle of the socialist critique of society, in short to reconcile the journalistic duty to report the news with the socialist duty to educate, which, in a world of records and sensations, is becoming all the more important. There is a need to find the right relationship between reporting and opinion, between socialism and sensation. In addition, the readership of the party press has expanded significantly. It writes not only for fanatical party supporters, for politically minded people. New strata in the party membership now also have to be taken into account, and new interests have arisen. In just a few years, sports have begun to play as important a role in the newspapers as they do in the movement. There is no more difficult task than containing all this variety in a ten-page daily issue, complying with party obligations while satisfying readers’ interests, fulfilling the wishes of the organizations while producing an interesting newspaper. The second extremely difficult task of the Social Democratic press is to find a balance every day between a party and daily newspaper, between the demands of the organization and those of the readership. Moreover, it is no longer a party newspaper for a small and select circle of enthusiastic supporters. It has become the mouthpiece and tool of a large political party. Every word carries enormous responsibility for the actions of hundreds of thousands, and each word often weighs down the hand that is writing. Every page is charged with notes and news that are of importance for the party’s political activities but that are mere ballast for the newspaper. This is the third particular problem facing the party press today, namely the relationship between journalistic and political tasks, between the role of the party newspaper as a support for the onerous parliamentary or union struggle and its independent existence as a major journalistic outlet. How much should a party newspaper leave out, how much should it include, even if it restricts the real work of the newspaper? There are articles, often very long ones, whose only purpose is to be read by opponents or to demonstrate that the party attaches value to a specific question that is completely uninteresting to the general public. There are battles that are waged only for a small group, but that have to be waged with perseverance and a vast array of journalistic means, although they appear completely unimportant to those who are not directly concerned—and for that purpose the editor of the party newspaper must often set aside the most elegant, humorous, and interesting articles.

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5. Anonymous How Der Kuckuck Is Made First published as “So entsteht der ‘Kuckuck’,” Der Kuckuck, April 6, 1930, 2–3. Translated by Nick Somers. First published in 1929, Der Kuckuck was a party-sponsored illustrated magazine that sought to compete with popular, apolitical illustrated periodicals by offering a rich montage of text and image. The title of the periodical—derived from the cuckoo’s habit of laying its eggs in the nests of other birds—was meant as a retort to the ever-growing threat of fascism in Austria. In this self-reflective piece, the editorial logic and technological methods—including gravure printing—behind Der Kuckuck’s hallmark photomontage are revealed. The joy that Der Kuckuck finds in unmasking its own technical production serves as a prime example of the distinction between mass media in the fascist and social democratic contexts. Whereas fascist media work to obscure the means and motivations behind their production, Der Kuckuck revels in offering its readership a glimpse behind the scenes. In the beginning there was, naturally, the photographer. With his camera and natural talent for seeing things a little differently than others, he travels the world. Obviously, it is not just a single photographer but hundreds and thousands who work for Der Kuckuck, since our magazine is a reflection of the whole world, and its pages contain events from five continents. The work of hundreds and thousands of indefatigable photographers is thus spread on the picture editor’s desk. Their utility has first to be verified, and only then comes the difficult task of putting all of these individual pictures together. This technique is known as photomontage. It requires masterly skill but also reflects the development of illustrated magazines that are no longer content with simply juxtaposing pictures with a couple of lines of explanation. By cleverly combining the pictures, the modern illustrated magazine now seeks to make them speak for themselves. This is not always easy and demands precise knowledge of the material and a talent for combining text and images. The reader also has to get used to the new method. Once he is aware of their succinct clarity, he will relish these “narrative pictures.” But we want to talk about how Der Kuckuck is made. Text and image which the reader finds so intimately combined, each follow a separate path. These paths are long and tortuous but they eventually reach their destination. So, what happens with the neatly and finely pasted layout? It is retouched and photographed, retouched and photographed again, cut out, pasted together and photographed one more time, it’s quite dizzying to watch the photographer at work for a whole morning. Before being photographed for the last time, the text is added. It is created from the typesetter’s letter cases and machines, printed on wafer-thin cellophane paper and pasted onto and between the pictures. And then comes the last photograph with the pictures and text combined. This last photo is transferred to special pigmented tissue, which captures everything on a mysterious surface. Light and shadow, people, animals, objects, in short everything to be found in Der Kuckuck. This magical paper is now pasted onto a copper cylinder and rinsed with warm water. The paper dissolves and the gelatin layer remains on the metal cylinder, and all of the light and shadow, people, animals, and objects appear on the copper surface. But the main function of the mysterious gelatin layer is still to come. Its thickness varies depending on the shading of the picture, albeit only by fractions of a millimeter, and offers different

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amounts of resistance to the ferric chloride that is now washed over it. The less the resistance, the deeper the copper surface is etched by the ferric chloride. In this way the picture is engraved with all its detail onto the copper cylinder, which can then be fitted into the rotary press. As the etching is deepest on the darker areas, these absorb most of the ink. The lighter the tone, the less ink absorbed by copper, with the result that these areas appear lighter when printed. Once the pigmented gelatin, ferric chloride, and copper have served their purpose, the monstrous rotary press starts turning noisily and Kuckuck after Kuckuck—over four thousand in one hour—come off the press and fly out into the world.

6. Anonymous Freedom of the Airwaves! First published as “Radiofreiheit!,” Die Radiowelt, March 23, 1924, 1. Translated by Nick Somers. Even before the national radio station Radio Traffic Company (Radio Verkehrs AG, RAVAG) made its first official radio broadcast, there had been intense debates about the constitution of the medium. Developing arguments put forward in G. F. Hellmuth’s influential pamphlet Radiodemokratie, this short, anonymous essay, published in the unofficial Social Democratic radio journal, Radiowelt, agitates for the “struggle for radio democracy.”13 The author encourages readers to conceive of a “freedom of the air waves” (Radiofreiheit), a twentieth-century democratic phenomenon, similar to the “freedom of the press,” a nineteenthcentury bourgeois phenomenon, and concludes that the medium of radio cannot become a monopoly of any individual or any party: “Radio should belong to everyone.” As tends to be the case with everything to do with radio, our political attitude toward it has changed overnight. In the last few days we in Austria have been in the preliminary stage of a struggle for radio democracy, a struggle that must be waged everywhere and that promises to be particularly fierce here. There can be no question as to our position in this struggle. For general and particular reasons, as human beings, as Austrians, and as radio enthusiasts, we stand for radio democracy. We intend to put our best forces into the struggle, because we know that decisive issues are at stake. It is not enough to say that the struggle for freedom of the radio is part of the larger struggle for freedom of the press. This is not how things are. The struggle for freedom of the press, which had its heroic age and its heroes, villains, and victims, was one of the forms that confirmed the ascent of the bourgeoisie and its desire to liberate itself. The struggle for freedom of the press was a typical phenomenon of the nineteenth century and had all of its hallmarks. The struggle for freedom of the radio is truly of the twentieth 13

The anonymous essay can probably be attributed to Franz Anderle (1874–1957), a pioneering figure in the amateur radio movement designated as the journal’s editor. For the original pamphlet, see G. F. Hellmuth, Radio-Demokratie! Denkschrift zur Organisation des Strahl-Rundspruches (Vienna: Rubinstein, 1924).

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century, inseparable from it and understandable only in that context. Above all, the struggle for freedom of the radio is essentially a technical problem. Freedom of the press was a technical problem, too, just as freedom of the radio, apart from its technical aspect, also contains an indisputable aspect of power. But the relationship between these two aspects shifts decisively in the case of freedom of the radio toward the technical. As with everything even remotely connected with radio, it is also a sui generis problem, one that needs to be considered on its own terms. We are clear about our ideals, and hopefully most of our readers will agree with us: The ideal situation would be for everyone to be able communicate with each other over the radio freely and without hindrance.14  However, we have to be equally clear that this situation is unachievable today. On the contrary, if everyone today were able to use the radio freely, the inevitable result would be chaos. Chaos in the ether is certainly not what we want. We want to organize the chaos and to create a cosmos out of it. Radio should not be the monopoly of a single person or of a party. It is true that radio should belong to everyone. But how to arrange things so that this invention, whose very nature would appear to exclude the possibility of it being monopolized, benefits everyone indiscriminately? It is difficult to obtain a comprehensive, practical, and satisfactory positive proposal in this regard. It is clear that there are natural barriers to practical radio democracy in the utopian form described above. The main one is perhaps not even in the nature of the Hertzian wave but in the nature of the human brain and its receptiveness to the spoken word, a faculty that is not limitless. While a diversity of products, a large number of newspapers, is essential for the practical implementation of freedom of the press, the same requirement cannot be inferred as a basis for freedom of the radio, because listening is more tiring than reading, because the articles in a printed newspaper can be consumed in any order, whereas spoken newspapers cannot be, at least not at present. But it would be senseless to base radio regulations on the medium’s potential adaptability to our senses. These circumstances produce what may be regarded as a surprising requirement for the radio newspaper. it should be a short, compressed newspaper restricting itself to as conscientious a report of the facts as possible, objective in a way that no printed newspaper is. In our view, objectivity and a wealth of facts should be the defining style of the radio newspaper.15

14 A common media topos in the 1920s, the conception of radio as a multidirectional communication medium, rather than a one-way broadcasting medium, can also be found in Eugenie Schwarzwald’s prophecy for the radio at the end of this chapter. 15 While the previous paragraph discusses the “spoken newspaper” (gesprochene Zeitungen), the discussion appears to turn here to the “radio newspaper” (Radiozeitung). It is unclear whether this refers to a newspaper spoken over the radio or a printed newspaper about the radio (such as RAVAG’s official journal, Radio Wien, and the unofficial Social Democratic radio journal, Radiowelt).

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But we foresee that this objectivity, however honest it seeks to be, will always be questioned—and those who question it might well be honest themselves—if the publisher of the objective newspaper, the radio newspaper, is connected in any way with a party or tendency. Whether this question is one that the radio legislators can solve fairly is another matter. [. . .] Who should intervene by regulating, mandating, forbidding, penalizing? We believe it to be the responsibility of the state. The other solutions should be ignored for the time being. Very well, then, the state. But which state?

7. Fritz Rosenfeld Radio in Good Conscience First published as “Der Rundfunk und das gute Gewissen,” Bildungsarbeit 19, no. 10 (October 1932), 189–90. Translated by Nick Somers. Challenging widespread claims about the “neutrality” of national radio, Fritz Rosenfeld (1902–1987) made a call, on the occasion of the Second Worker’s Radio Day (Zweiter Arbeiter-Rundfunktag), for the medium to assume a more overt political function, pursuing an agenda set by the technology’s unique, medium-specific affordances. Like Bela Balázs and many other contemporary critics, the influential coeditor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung’s arts and culture section considered the radio to be a live, acoustic medium, which was being wasted on rebroadcasting recorded events.16 Like many authors in this chapter, Rosenfeld’s main concern was whether the necessary reorganization of the radio would be of “general interest,” exhibiting a similar anxiety about the (top-down) imposition of education and culture and the (bottom-up) interests of mass audiences. Ultimately, for Rosenfeld, wresting the radio from the “bourgeois capitalist order” and transforming it into the true “ear of the people” is a question of programming rather than a purely technical one. In the beginning the microphone was located in the radio station’s broadcasting studio. It transmitted to listeners only the musical and literary offerings from the studio. But soon it was taken outdoors to the scene of current events, turning it into an on-the-spot reporter. But a specific feature of the microphone is that it can only transmit the acoustic element of an event. The visual aspect must be communicated to the listener indirectly through the commentator’s description. This is not always easy and succeeds only when an able and intelligent speaker is at the microphone. The events that the radio generally transmits today are spectacles: soccer games, public festivals, sporting competitions of all kinds, historical processions, funerals, and the like. What they have in common, apart from the fact that they are the most unsuitable material for radio broadcasting imaginable, is that although they are current affairs, they are all innocuous and insignificant in terms of global import. Radio is limited to the broadcasting of incidental events in which the great clash of political opinions appears to be absent. Where radio helps to make political events known, these are almost always celebratory meetings and other festive occasions, whose dull course has been planned out in 16

See Béla Balázs, “Das Radiodrama,” Radiowelt: Illustrierte Wochenschrift für Jedermann, no. 14 (1924): 14.

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advance down to the last detail, thereby protecting the broadcasting company from any surprises whatsoever. However, an element of surprise is crucial for turning the radio into a true on-thespot reporter. It needs to make events tangible, to make the listener a witness to live and thus unpredictable occurrences. “Neutral” radio avoids these unpredictable occurences. Not everywhere: in Russia it has become a matter of course today for major political trials and meetings dealing with questions of general interest to be broadcast over the radio to a large audience. In doing so, the radio has become a truly democratic instrument, an instrument permitting public scrutiny. But only those who have nothing to fear will allow such scrutiny. Nothing against sport, but is a parliamentary session in which important laws are discussed not of greater public interest? Nothing against popular festivals, but are ministerial meetings in which the fate of the country is at stake not more important? A village festival is all well and good, but should radio not have the task, apart from public entertainment, of placing the judiciary under public review by broadcasting important trials? Radio is not just a matter of journalistic coverage, of commentated reports, in which the speaker can omit or add what he will, adding color or even falsifying the event. Radio is a matter of expanding the acoustic space where discussion and judgment currently take place, of enlarging the tribunal of listeners in both practical and moral terms, of including the entire people as the living witnesses of fateful events. The technical feasibility of broadcasting parliamentary sessions, trials, political discussions, and business meetings of all kinds is not in doubt. But these broadcasts require not only a microphone but also a good conscience. The powers that be in the bourgeois world do not want the people to be privy to their rule. Closed doors are the prerequisite for governance that is democratic in appearance but undemocratic in essence. For that reason, the only events deemed worthy of broadcasting by the microphones of the statecontrolled radio stations are small-town bowling club evenings or the landing of an airship. The knowledge obtained by a public witnessing the methods by which we are ruled, the protection and corruption, the hypocrisy and deceit, would undermine the power of the capitalist state. Like the theater and books, cinema and music, like every form of intellectual and artistic communication, radio in bourgeois society has also become a defensive weapon designed to prolong the existence of an endangered bourgeois capitalist order under attack from new ideas. If the masters of this world had a good conscience, they would not be afraid of the microphone as a silent witness of League of Nations sessions and banking negotiations, parliamentary debates and political trials. Because they fear the ear of the people, which radio could be, as the most dangerous threat to their power, they prefer to play light music, tavern songs [Heurigenlieder], evergreens about love, flowers, and moonshine, and to transform the microphone into a reporter of the trivia of life.

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8. Anonymous The RAVAG Listener Survey First published as Anonymous, “Die Hörerbefragung der Ravag,” Radio-Wien: Illustrierte Wochenschrift der Österr. Radioverkehrs-A. G. 9, no. 6 (November 4, 1932): 2–5. Translated by Nick Somers. Developing the methods of audience research surveys conducted in Austria throughout the  previous decade, one particular radio listener study would go on to form the  foundations for empirical communications research in many other countries.17 Commonly known as the “RAVAG study,” the survey was commissioned in 1931, conducted by members of the Vienna Psychological Institute and the private Austrian Research Center for Economic Psychology (Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle), including Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and completed by a number of listeners unheard of at the time.18 Summarized here in RAVAG’s official journal, some of the most interesting results, which can only be excerpted here, were that nearly half of the radio listeners were workers and employees; threequarters listened to the radio over speakers rather than headphones; their most popular listening time was the early evening; and the largest age group was in their thirties and forties. The reported results about listeners’ specific program preferences were highly debated. In late 1931, Ravag conducted a survey with the goal of identifying the program preferences of all radio subscribers and also obtaining other statistical data of importance for the radio station.19 The processing of the results by the Psychological Institute of the University of Vienna and the institute founded by it, the Research Center for Economic Psychology,20 unfortunately took much longer than originally anticipated. The reasons for trying the patience of our listeners for so long can be explained when the following information is taken into account. In total 110,312 listeners submitted their program preferences to Ravag. Every submission consisted of around eighty points, which together produced a clear picture of listener preferences. Consider the fact that if the submissions are processed by two people, one dictating and the other entering the results, it takes around 1.5 minutes 17

For a precursor to the famous RAVAG study, see Anonymous, “Was wünschen Sie zu hören? Programmgestaltung durch Volksentscheid!,” Radiowelt, December 13, 1924, 7; the results of this survey are published in “Sie haben gesprochen!,” Radiowelt, May 9, 1925; and the other texts are reprinted in Mark (1996). 18 The survey was completed by 110,312 listeners, still only one-fifth of the 500,000 licensed radio listeners in Austria in 1933, a number that surpassed even Germany in terms of listener-to-population ratio. 19 The German term for a radio listener, Rundfunkteilnehmer, stresses actively “participating” in the medium by “taking part,” teilnehmen, through the purchase of subscriptions. 20 Founded in October 1931, the Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungstelle was one of the world’s first research institutes for social psychology and market research. (See chapter 4.) At its height, the center employed 160 researchers, most prominently Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda, Hans Zeisel, and Herta Herzog. After their emigration to the United States, several former members of the center helped define the emerging field of communication studies with their audience-focused research.

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for all of the answers from just one listener to be entered into the tables. With two people, it would take 394 days to complete the entire survey. And then some six thousand computations have to be made to aggregate all of the figures to produce a clear and lucid picture of the numerous listener preferences. Add to this the fact that many listeners also included long letters that had to be processed separately. In spite of the extra time that this took, it was a very welcome sign, since it showed the lively interest of the population in this listener survey. [. . .] Conclusions. The large number of submissions and the carefully completed questionnaires demonstrate that the radio audience itself wanted a listener survey. The results have also had an influence on Austrian radio’s programming, since they provide authoritative confirmation of the program schedule for this winter. In keeping with the wishes expressed by the vast majority of respondents, the early evening, a favorite time for radio listeners, will feature whenever possible light entertainment programs. Only after these programs will more serious arts programs be broadcast, in order to meet the requirements of intellectual circles. Ever since the evening program, the most important listening period, has been divided in accordance with the stated preferences into light entertainment and serious programs, listener complaints have decreased considerably, an indication that this approach is the correct one. It should not be forgotten, however, that if radio is to live up to its significance as a cultural medium, it should be not only entertaining and distracting but also informative and uplifting. Austrian radio, in particular, is tasked with managing a rich heritage of the choicest art items that the great masters of the past have bequeathed to our people. Today, each country’s radio program is seen globally as a measure of its culture. We are fortunate to play a leading role in world radio thanks to our outstanding achievements, particularly in music, which are reflected in the international exchange of programs. Naturally, then, we are required—in addition to allowing for the basic need of a large majority of our radio listeners for entertainment—to ensure not only the quantity but also the quality of program wishes. This task is all the more important since radio has begun increasingly to raise the level of education of the masses and in the few years of its existence, it has developed into an education medium of hitherto unrivalled effectiveness. The answers to the questionnaire also clearly demonstrated that the interests of people of different occupations and ages do not always coincide. There is no really unanimous opinion regarding all programs. While the majority of listeners would prefer fewer talks about agriculture, for instance, the popularity of these programs among farming communities shows them to be a necessary component of the radio schedule. There are many examples of this kind. But radio has already taught its listeners the necessary tolerance to make suitable allowance for all interest groups. In the 4,473 hours of broadcasting in one year, all listeners can find in the Austrian radio schedule sufficient programs in line with their preferences, so that each one is justified in assuming that the same applies to those with other tastes. This inevitably begs the question of radio listenership. A leading British radio expert once summed this up quite radically. He believed that a usage fee should be charged for listening to the radio, in the same way as water and gas usage is measured.21 Then 21

Unlike the US model of funding radio through paid advertisements, the British model was based on revenue earned from a tax on radio receiver sets, which was called a license fee. The

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listeners would read through the program schedule carefully and restrict themselves to those programs that really interested them. They would find that there were still so many programs to listen to that they would be richly compensated for the small subscription fee. In other words, not to listen at random, but to select a program and listen with the concentration necessary to really appreciate it. This is the challenge that all radio listeners have to face for themselves.

9. Eugenie Schwarzwald The Prophesied RAVAG Published as “Die prophezeite Ravag [1924],” Der Wiener Tag, supplement, October 14, 1934, 4–5. Translated by Nick Somers. Half a decade before Bertolt Brecht’s famous assertion that “the radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life [. . .] if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear,”22 the communicative potential of the new medium was already apparent to Eugenie Schwarzwald (1872–1940), whose renowned school was attended by Brecht’s wife Helene Weigel among many others. Schwarzwald’s cosmopolitan, internationalist vision of the radio as a “gigantic means of communication” was originally printed in Der Tag in April 1924, then reprinted around a decade later in the renamed Wiener Tag. In a retrospective statement, the editors presented Schwarzwald as another Cassandra: “At that time, radio was just beginning. Everything good—and everything else—that was to come of the radio was already prophesied in this remarkable essay.” Recently, the world has witnessed the appearance of something new, something still hardly noticed. Soon, however, the whole world will know: the question of radio is very important. As is well known, the world’s misfortune is a result of misunderstanding. This causes wars, scientific disputes, party squabbles, trials, unhappy marriages. Communication is everything. Radio makes a gigantic means of communication a reality. With the world as it is today, this is naturally a cause for concern. How will things turn out? The radio is a new toy and a dangerous one. All of the stupidity, all of the evil, all of the prejudices, all of the tedium will now find even more outlets than ever before. The most frightful operetta music, the most wretched speeches, will penetrate into the deepest jungle. Does the world need more haste, banality, and bustle than it already has? Seen this way, it is easy to conclude that the radio is a terrible invention. But why such depressing pessimism for such a great achievement? Why not rather hope for hitherto-unrivaled new good fortune? Rest assured, it will come. In a few years, no city dweller will see the radio as a gimmick anymore. They will have simply had their fill of that. They will only want to listen to the most perfect works of art. For naïve brains and hearts, however, the radio will be more. In the remotest mountain village in Tyrol, a young mother will be able to learn BBC’s first director, John Reith, made repeated proposals for treating the radio not as a commodity but as a public utility, which was to be regulated in the service of education, information, and entertainment. 22 Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication [1932],” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 52.

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how to take care of her baby. In Croatia, people will learn the value of airing the house. In Oberhollabrunn, a poor young seamstress will learn beautiful Florentine Italian by means of distance learning. Hundreds of useful things will be possible, and thousands of good and eloquent things. [. . .] Listeners will be able to tune in to parliamentary speeches, and they will be glad to be able to switch off the radio right in the middle of them or to check the next day how much has been distorted by the various party newspapers. Anyone who knows that something is right should feel a duty to shout it out to the entire world. Until now, however, this has not been so easy. If anyone knows something truly worth knowing, they have the opportunity to write an entire manifesto about it: For everyone. This is not likely to happen soon, of course. First of all, the invention will be appropriated by business interests, it will fall into the hands of people who are not yet fulfilled by their sacred mission. But the cause of radio is too enormous; it must triumph! People will gradually come to respect the words they speak or the music they play on it. No one will dare to lie, show off, run anything down, because they will know how huge and heterogeneous the listening audience is. Anyone with anything to announce, to say, to impart, to teach, or to play will be forced to do so with greater authority, greater perfection, and greater subtlety. Not only those who act but also those who listen will have to liberate themselves if they want to become the kind of listeners worthy of the name, as Mozart said. When they become radio listeners of this caliber, they will eventually be able to rely completely on their ears. In only one hundred years, people will have developed such fine hearing that they will be able to say: “The man who spoke today about child geniuses was a delightful young man with beautiful dark eyes and a face like the monk in Giorgione’s Pastoral Concert.” It is a pity that we will not live to experience the new art that is about to evolve here. We have seen how cinema produced theater for the deaf, by no means perfect but certainly effective. Now something much more refined is possible: nonvisual theater for the blind appeals to an even more finely tuned sense. Who knows how it will develop? Soon people will be inundated by countless waves. They will be able to choose freely from among them. It will be a matter of luck and instinct. May many of these waves be viewed with spirit, truth, beauty, and feeling, and may everyone succeed in finding the right one.

Part X Exchange

“America in Vienna,” a three-quarter page advertisement, featuring an illustration of a huge, stylistically incoherent skyscraper that dwarfs the familiar landmarks of the Viennese skyline. Neue Freie Presse, May 9, 1926. (Courtesy of VGA.)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

AMERICANISM Rob McFarland

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ven in the throes of defeat,

Austrians had an ambivalent relationship with the American victors who had helped to conquer their empire and break it down into the tiny “rump state” known as German Austria. While the Mission to Austria of the American Relief Administration (A.R.A.), European Children’s Fund (E.C.F.) of 1919 prefigured the massive scale of the various public welfare programs of the Social Democrats and kept many of the city’s children from starvation,1 American profiteers were seen as exacerbating Austria’s economic recovery, and the United States became associated with the excesses and dangers of unfettered capitalism.2 Many German-speaking intellectuals, including citizens of the newly minted Austrian Republic, pondered the demise of their once-great empire and the rise of the new, powerful nation across the Atlantic.3 In 1918, a Viennese press published the first edition of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), a pessimistic comparative study of the decline of history’s great cultures.4 In his work, Spengler (1880–1936) argued that every organic, creative culture in world history had enjoyed a golden age of art and beauty, but eventually ossified into a technocratic, superficial civilization. Just as the clarity and genius of classical Greece had devolved into the decadent excesses and metropolitan perversities of Rome, so Europe’s profound and productive culture was nearing its end. The end of Western culture, Spengler argued, was brought about by the overwhelming force of American civilization with its ubiquitous mass culture, rationalized factories and cinema.5 Spengler provided a tangible enemy to those Europeans who saw themselves in a deep and irreversible cultural crisis, mourning the loss of the great gilded age that had not only cemented the privilege of the aristocracy but also given security and immense cultural and financial capital to the denizens of the Bildungsbürgertum, Europe’s newlydefunct educated middle class. The delicate, nuanced and deeply individualistic European experiences of art, literature, and music stood no chance, as Stefan Zweig famously states 1

See Friedrich Reischl, Wiens Kinder und Amerika: Die amerikanische Kinderhilfsaktion 1919 (Vienna: Gerlach and Weidling, 1920). 2 See Henrietta Herzfelder, “Dollarika,” Neues Wiener Journal, February 25, 1923, 9. 3 See George Kuh, Das wahre Amerika (Vienna: Ed. Strache, 1918). 4 See Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. 1, Gestalt und Wirklichkeit (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1918). 5 Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. 2, Welthistorische Perspektiven (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1922).

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in his 1925 feuilleton “The Monotonization of the World,” against the onslaught of schlock art, simple dances, popular music, and mass-produced American goods that are quickly taking over the world. Worst of all, America represented the soulless pursuit of profit and the end of the well-rounded, educated human subject. While Zweig fretted about America’s role in the European cultural crisis, other Austrians were fascinated by the vitality and seductive enthusiasm that pulsed across the Atlantic from the United States. Zweig’s “The Monotonization of the World” appeared one week after Helene Scheu-Riesz gave a glowing review of a book about the emerging American culture and its meaning for Europe. Zweig’s vitriolic essay sparked a polemic discussion in the pages of the liberal Neue Freie Presse newspaper about America and Europe’s cultural crisis, including front-page feuilleton essays by Felix Salten and Ann Tizia Leitich. Beyond the 1925 discussion surrounding Zweig’s essay, many other Austrian writers and journalists were fascinated by Americanism and made the pilgrimage to the “land of limitless possibility,” writing about their experiences for a Austrian and German reading public that was fascinated with all things American. Anna Nußbaum’s Africa Sings, a collection of translated poems by members of the Harlem Renaissance, showed the beauty and vitality of the African American culture that countered Spengler’s superficiality and ugly racism. Americanism was not only found in Vienna’s newspapers and literature: During the 1920s and 1930s, the city’s cinemas were packed with audiences watching American films, jazz clubs sprouted throughout the city, and Viennese magazines and department stores showcased American fashion, hairstyles, body culture, and lifestyles. Even though only one fifty-meter “skyscraper” was actually built in Vienna in the interwar period (the Hochhaus Herrengasse, 1930–1931 designed by Siegfried Theiss and Franz Jaksch), images of American-style skyscrapers were ubiquitous in architectural competitions, magazines, posters, advertisements, art, and even in films. It was not only the icons of American mass culture that fascinated Viennese, many of them were also inspired by the strength and vitality of the United States economy. Vienna boasted several organizations dedicated to the promotion of the organizational principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor and the industrial rationalization theories of Henry Ford.6 The Neue Freie Presse serialized Ford’s writings, and a film about Henry Ford’s massive factory complexes was shown to sold-out audiences in popular education centers and other venues across Austria in 1926, including a screening in Vienna’s Konzerthaus. Viennese business owners could purchase a copy of the TaylorZeitschrift published in their city. Ernst Streeruwitz, the former conservative chancellor of Austria and member of the Christian Social Party, was the director of the Austrian Economic Efficiency Board (Österreichisches Kuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit, ÖKW), which served to facilitate the American-style rationalization of Viennese and Austrian industry.7 Red Vienna’s Social Democrats did not share this optimism for American industrial practices. From the beginning and right through the drafting of the central Social Democratic documents known as the Linz Program, Otto Bauer and many others resisted American rationalization as a model for Austria’s economic future. As a counterweight to the conservative Taylorist ÖKW, Red Vienna’s Chamber for Workers and Employees (Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte) produced a detailed guide to industrial rationalization but also included long discussions of the potential misuse of American theories. While 6

See Edgar Herbst, Der Taylorismus als Hilfe in unserer Wirtschaftsnot (Vienna: AnzengruberVerlag, 1920). 7 See Ernst Streeruwitz, Rationalisierung und Weltwirtschaft: Grundzüge der Rationalisierung vom Standpunkt künftiger Weltgemeinschaft (Vienna: Julius Springer, 1931).



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American-style skyscrapers served as an initial inspiration to Red Vienna’s huge housing construction projects, the imagined towers were soon displaced by a unique Austrian modernism influenced by Habsburg palaces and bourgeois historical ideals (see chapter 20). The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression called many aspects of Americanism into question. In Frank Ward Rossak’s Das Notizbuch des Mr. Pim (Mr. Pim’s Trip to Europe, 1930), a propaganda film for the election held on November 9, 1930, the Social Democrats tried to finally exorcise any lingering fascination with American capitalism. The film’s protagonist, the wealthy American expatriate and die-hard capitalist Elias Pim, takes a tour of Red Vienna guided by his daughter and her Austrian husband. As the young couple shows Mr. Pim the many ways that Vienna has been transformed from a city of poverty and misery into a modern, organized, and prosperous city, he is gradually converted into a supporter of the Social Democratic city government. The defeated Austrians, at least in this film, are able to conquer American hegemony. Further reading Bischof and Pelinka 2004 Gramsci 2000 Mattl 2000 McFarland 2015 Warren 2009

1. Helene Scheu-Riesz A Culture in the Making First published as “Kultur im Werden,” Neue Freie Presse, January 24, 1925, 11. Translated by Rob McFarland. Helene Scheu-Riesz (1880–1970) was a Viennese novelist, journalist, publisher, educational theorist, and women’s rights advocate. She married Gustav Scheu, a prominent Social Democratic lawyer and member of the Vienna Municipal Council from 1918 to 1923. Scheu-Riesz was a regular contributor to the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna’s premiere liberal newspaper. In January 1925 she wrote a review of Kultur im Werden, a collection of travel essays by the German sociologist Alice Salomon. In this review, Scheu-Riesz expands upon Salomon’s positive reception of American culture and considers Americanism as a solution to postwar Europe’s cultural malaise. She even goes so far as to suggest a recolonization of Europe’s shores by the idealistic American pioneers, an idea that provoked Stefan Zweig to respond a week later with “The Monotonization of the World,” his famous diatribe against American mass culture. It is impossible to have too many travel memoirs from America, so long as they are written in a way that helps to overcome the prejudices about the Old World and the New World that are still rampant in our own country. Alice Salomon, who has done so much to plant the ideals of social work into the hearts of generations of German women, recently came out with a series of seventeen essays about her travels in the United States. Her collection has been published by Ullstein under the excellent title Kultur im Werden [A culture in the making]. This book is a fascinating, captivating read for anybody who likes

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to catch a whiff of the future that is on its way. The book includes wondrous images of nature, showing how the fertility of this massive continent—where it is always simultaneously summer and winter—has led to the unique social and personal development of its inhabitants. The book intelligently explains the interdependencies between humans and the earth where they dwell: how pioneers settled the land, made it fruitful, and built up the New World through their hard work and indomitable spirit, but also how the land, for its part, continuously took immigrants from the Old World and civilized them, built them up, and made fruitful, dynamic pioneers out of them, citizens of a New World. Alice Salomon is, of course, interested in the position of women in the cultural life of America, especially those that she considers the most influential of America’s women. She focuses on three women elected unanimously by different entities to stand at the head of the movement: Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Lillian Wald.8 The author’s affectionate portrayal of Lillian Wald and her work makes this book especially valuable to me. [. . .] We seem to be of the opinion that we Europeans, taken as a whole, possess a higher culture than the Americans. This line of thinking was buried by the Great War. It is instructive to compare the “culture in the making,” as Alice Salomon has designated America, with the “culture in decay” that Europeans are currently dismantling piece by piece and carrying off to the pawn shop. Anybody who thinks that we can eke out a living from the cultural achievements of the past, meeting all of our needs with old traditions, will soon discover how quickly the capital of culture can be squandered. The naked brutality of excessive emotion cannot be calmed by turning our gaze backward instead of looking ahead. Over there in that part of the world, where children of different races have learned to live together, everyone—even those who just recently arrived from some dark corner of the world—is unified by passionate patriotism, by a belief in a national ideal. They all want to be Americans. Over here it is different. The atomized states and atomized nations keep splitting into smaller and smaller parts, painting their borders with increasingly hostile colors. More and more groups are attacking each other with raised cudgels, and the new gospel of nativism seeks to bind people to the towers of their village churches from the very moment they are born, so that they cannot see anything else. Who is still thinking about Europe? There are no Europeans anymore. We need pilgrim fathers to emigrate and set foot on Europe’s savage shores. We need people performing fruitful labors in ancient forests or among burgeoning skyscrapers, reclaiming the kind of freshly pulsing blood, the vitality for life and the passion for hard work that were once embodied by the pioneers. We need simple, pure, idealistic people who are willing to make sacrifices, like the Puritans were. People who are ready to suffer and to die for an idea (but not to kill other people for the idea, or make other people suffer for it). We need people that do not consider it unavoidable and normal to put up with oppression, injustice, lies, hypocrisy, vice, and evil in all of its individual and collective forms. These pioneers should come over here and fell the ancient forests of superstition, prejudice, barren hatred, and deeply rooted cowardice to make room for fertile fields. They should found settlements of pure and vital life, and raise their common ideals of loyalty, duty and truth in place of the fraudulent, selfish and lazy mechanisms that are posturing as Western civilization. 8 Jane Addams (1860–1935), Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947), and Lillian Wald (1867–1940) were American women at the forefront of the fight for suffrage, the eradication of poverty, and the promotion of women’s health.



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That is why one cannot possibly write or read too many books about new life and the new kind of people who can lead us to the spring of rejuvenating energy that flows in the new continent of promise. We must build spiritual bridges over the great ocean, peaceful armadas on the sea and in the air must bring us messages of self-confidence and a spirit of activism. They must carry us away to that magic shore where the nature of freedom rises high into the heavens as a symbol of the time that is to come.

2. Stefan Zweig The Monotonization of the World First published as “Die Monotonisierung der Welt,” Neue Freie Presse, January 31, 1925, 1–4. Translated by Rob McFarland. The novelist, journalist, biographer, and playwright Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was an international celebrity and Austria’s most widely read writer; and he exerted a huge influence upon the literary world during the Red Vienna period. In “The Monotonization of the World,” Zweig counters Helene Scheu-Riesz’s positive view of American mass culture that she had published a week earlier. Rejecting her call for an American colonization of Europe, Zweig encourages Europeans to defend their individuality against the stultifying, all-enveloping American schlock that was flooding Europe in the cinema, on the radio, in fashion, in sports, and in other areas of mass culture. All of these superficial media, Zweig claims, feed a dark, uniquely American boredom that is toxic to European bourgeois culture. His essay unleashed a polemic discussion that appeared in the paper over the following months (see the following two texts). Monotonization of the World. The most potent intellectual impression from every journey in the last few years in spite of individual moments of pleasure: a silent horror in the face of the monotonization of the world. Everything is becoming more uniform in the external manifestations of our lives, everything is flattening out into a unified cultural pattern. The individual customs of nations are being scraped away, our clothing is becoming more uniform, our manners are international. Countries increasingly seem to have been conflated, people live and work according to the same formula, cities look more and more alike. Paris is three-quarters Americanized, Vienna Budapested: Increasingly, the fine aroma of the particularities of each culture is evaporating, the colors chip off ever more quickly, and underneath the cracked veneer you can see the steel-colored pistons of the mechanical apparatus, the modern world machine. [. . .] Symptoms: You could list hundreds of examples in order to demonstrate the problem. I am just going to choose a few of the most common examples, which everyone will recognize, in order to show how much our customs and manners have been monotonized and sterilized over the past decade. The most obvious: Dance. Twenty, thirty years ago, dance was still connected to individual nations and to the personal inclinations of each individual. In Vienna you danced the waltz, in Hungary the czardas, in Spain the bolero, each according to the incalculable number of different rhythms and melodies formed by the visible genius of an artist as well as by the spirit of a nation. Today millions of people dance the exact same steps from Capetown to Stockholm, from Buenos Aires to Calcutta, using the same five or six shortwinded, impersonal melodies. [. . .]

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A second example: Fashion. Never before has fashion resulted in such an instantaneous uniformity in all countries as it does in our times. In the past it took years before a fashion trend made its way out of Paris into the other major cities, and years more before it made it to the cities and into the countryside. There were still certain borders between peoples and customs that resisted the tyrannical demands of fashion. Today it takes only a heartbeat for fashion’s dictatorial decrees to become universal. New York dictates short hair for women, and within a month fifty or one hundred million feminine manes fall to the ground as if mown by the same scythe. No emperor, no Khan in the history of the world had this kind of power, no spiritual commandment enjoyed similar speed. Christianity and socialism needed centuries and decades to make their commandments efficacious in the lives of so many people. A Parisian tailor can have the same effect in eight days. A third example: Cinema. Again, incomprehensible synchronicity across all nations and languages, creating the same programming for an audience of thousands of millions, and the development of the same taste (or lack of taste). Complete abolishment of any individual characteristics, even though the manufacturers promote their films as patriotic: the Nibelungen conquer Italy and Max Linder from Paris takes over the most patriotic pan-German precincts.9 In the film world, the instinct of mass phenomenon outweighs the power of the intellect: Jackie Coogan’s triumphal entry was a more moving experience for our time than Tolstoy’s death fifteen years ago.10 A fourth example: Radio. All of these inventions have only one purpose: Synchronicity and thus uniformity. A Londoner, a Parisian, and a Viennese listener hear the same exact thing at the same exact time. And this synchronicity, this uniformity intoxicates us with its massive dimensions. [. . .] We are losing our sense of independence; our time is flooded with the passive nature of entertainment. It is already becoming easier to make a list of the similarities between countries than it is to make a list of their differences. Consequences: The end of all individuality right down to the outward appearance. It is not without consequence that everybody walks around dressed the same way, the women coiffed and made up the same: monotony’s next step is to force its way inside of us. Our faces will start to resemble each other because we have the same passions, our bodies look alike because we all play the same sports, our minds become more alike because we all have the same interests. Unconsciously a uniformity of the soul will arise, a collective soul forged by the uniformity industry. Our nerves will atrophy to the benefit of our muscles, the individual will dwindle to the benefit of the standardized strain. Conversation, the art of speaking, will be out-danced and out-sported. Live theater will be brutalized in the name of the cinema; literature will be dominated by the “hit of the season,” the business of ephemeral fashion. [. . .] Source: Where does this horrible flood come from, this tsunami that threatens to wipe out everything that is colorful and unique? Everyone who has been over there knows exactly where it comes from: America. Someday the historians of a future era will characterize the period after the Great War as the moment when America began its conquest of Europe. Or worse: the conquistadores are already overpowering us, and we are just not noticing it (all conquered peoples have always been a little slow on the uptake). For now, 9 Max

Linder (1883–1925) was a French actor, film director and comedian. Coogan (1914–1984) was a child actor who starred with Charlie Chaplin in the silent film The Kid (1921). 10 Jackie



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every single country that gets a dollar-based loan is full of newspapers and politicians that are falling all over themselves with joy. For now, we are still deluding ourselves into thinking that America has philanthropic and economic motives for what it does. In reality, we are becoming colonies of American life and the American lifestyle, slaves of a concept that is deeply foreign to Europeans: the mechanical paradigm. But this kind of economic bondage is nothing compared to the spiritual danger. A colonization of Europe would not be the most terrible thing, politically speaking. The true danger for Europe seems to me to lie in the realm of the mind, with the infiltration of American-style boredom. This repulsive, specific kind of boredom, seeping out of every brick and house on their numbered American streets, is not like the good old European sit-down-on-a-Biergarten-bench-smoke-a-pipe-and-play-dominoes kind of boredom, a bit lazy perhaps but not a dangerous waste of time. American boredom is agitated, nervous, and aggressive, tripping over itself with its hurried hotheadedness. It wants to numb itself with sports and sensations. It has lost all playfulness, but pushes forward with a rabid obsession, always running away from time itself. American boredom constantly invents new artificial means to feed itself with mass-produced products, such as cinema and radio, turning the business of pleasure into huge corporations like its banks and trusts. This terrible wave of uniformity comes from America and gives the same thing to everybody: the same overalls on your skin, the same book in your hand, the same pen in your fingers, the same discussion on your lips, and the same automobile instead of your feet. The same will to monotony is lapping at us ominously from the other side of the world, from Russia, but in a different form: the will to subdivide the human subject, to homogenize our worldview, the same terrible will to monotony. Europe still stands now as the last bulwark of individualism and perhaps this jittery spasm of its peoples, this worked-up nationalism—in all of its senselessness—is just a sort of feverish subconscious rebellion, a last desperate chance to defend itself against sameness. But the spastic state of our defense betrays our weakness. Rome, the genius of rationality, is already well on its way to wipe Europe, that last remnant of Greece, from the blackboard of history. Defense: What can we do? [. . .] Whatever you may write, it will remain a piece of paper thrown up against a hurricane. No matter what we write, it will never reach the soccer-match crowd [Fußballmatcher] and the shimmy dancers, and even if it did reach them, they would not understand us anymore. In all of these things that I have pointed out, mentioning merely a few—in cinema, in radio, in dance, in all of these new means toward the mechanization of humanity—there lies a monstrous power that cannot be defeated. For each of them, in their own way, fulfills the highest ideal of the average man: they all provide enjoyment without requiring any effort at all. This is their greatest, insurmountable strength: they are incredibly convenient. The dopiest servant girl can learn any new dance in three hours, analphabets enjoy cinema because it does not require a single ounce of education. In order to enjoy the radio, you just have to pick up the headphones from the table, put them on your head, and the waltzing tones flow right into your ears. Even gods would fight in vain against this kind of convenience. Rescue: It seems there is only one thing left for us to do, because we consider the fight to be in vain: Escape, escape into ourselves. [. . .] Even though all of those things that we call our culture are being parceled out and rationalized, the “most basic asset of humanity,” as Emil Lucka calls the elements of spirit and nature in his wonderful book,11 11

Emil Lucka (1877–1941) was an Austrian author. Zweig is referring to Lucka’s philosophical treatise Urgut der Menschheit (1924).

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cannot be manufactured and passed out to the masses. It lies too deep in the caverns of the soul, in the corridors of our emotions, it lies too far from the streets, too far from convenience. Here, in that eternally shapeless element, constantly waiting to be shaped, the willing explorer will still find endless variety, even today, even in an increasingly mechanized civilization. This is our workshop, our very own world that can never be monotonized.

3. Felix Salten Monotonization of the World? First published as “Monotonisierung der Welt?,” Neue Freie Presse, February 8, 1925, 1–3. Translated by Rob McFarland. Novelist, essayist, and feuilletonist Felix Salten (1869–1945) was fascinated by the American phenomenon. His 1923 novel Bambi took American readers by storm, later forming the basis for Walt Disney’s film. In 1933 he published a collection of essays about America titled Fünf Minuten Amerika (Five Minutes of America). Salten’s rebuttal to Stefan Zweig’s provocative anti-American essay “The Monotonization of the World” focuses upon the possibilities of technology. Whereas Zweig saw radio, film, and mass production as antithetical to the future of European high culture, Salten outlines the ways in which technology could lift, teach, and ennoble the very masses—American and European—that Zweig dismisses so vehemently. Certainly the “Mechanization of our existence, the preponderance of technology is the most important phenomenon of our epoch.” Surely: “It is possibly the most incendiary, most decisive phenomenon of our time.” Agreed. “Let’s be clear about this,” says Stefan Zweig. Every day when I am outside of my apartment building and see giant trucks make it to the top of that steep hill, it is all very clear to me. I remember the miserable horses that suffered as they pulled heavy wagons up that same hill, I remember the trembling of their sweat-covered flanks, I remember the martyred looks of their good, honest faces, the despair that shone out of their beautiful eyes. I remember how the silent, defenseless animals were subjected to the heartless abuse of malicious wagon drivers. And then I praise the mechanization of our existence, then I bless the preponderance of technology. As far as I am concerned, the whole world could be mechanized, even in the face of all the danger that Stefan Zweig foresees which I do not see at all. If this results in less torment for the innocent creature, it means we can live better, easier, more peacefully in this mechanized world. That is only a small, insignificant example. For I am not talking about animals, but people, even though people really only possess as much culture as they deserve, based upon their kindness and charity toward animals. But of all of the many signs that Stefan Zweig recognizes as proof that “Everything is becoming more uniform in the external manifestations of our lives,” he calls out dance, which reveals “the white race in America, Europe, and all of their colonies” moving toward a new identity “following the same five or six short-winded, impersonal melodies.” [. . .] I am afraid that these observations are stuck in the realm of the superficial. In the days of Louis Quatorze, the white race also danced the same dance wherever it was, be it in America, in Europe, or in the colonies. [. . .] Just like the minuet, the waltz, and the quadrille, today’s foxtrot and shimmy are not the dances of the white race but a certain urban subsection of this race. [. . .] Modern



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dances are decried and vilified today as immoral, just like the waltz was vilified one hundred years ago when it was new. These modern dances come from native tribes and were formed in their encounters with the metropolis. These dances get their rhythms and their freedom from the rhythms of sport, from the emancipated sensibilities of today’s modern humans. And the melodies that are played along with these dances are neither short of breath nor impersonal. We need a serious investigation to establish just how deep the roots of these modern dances reach into the primeval forest and into the metropolis—into the wilderness and into the realm of civilization—in order to explain how the pace of these dances and the intoxicating allure of jazz represent the calm, level-headed demeanor of modern humans in the face of the prodigious noise of modern life. Just as the Catholic catechism is only the outward, visible sign of an inner, invisible grace, phenomena such as dance and sports (and especially radio and film) are merely the outer signs of an imperceptible change in this world, omens and symptoms of the dawn of a new era. It is really too bad that a sensitive soul like Stefan Zweig interprets these phenomena so pessimistically. Too bad that he draws comparisons between the huge spans of time which Christianity or socialism needed in order to establish themselves, and the rapidity with which today’s fashions are disseminated. He can hardly compare the eternal nature of religion or the weighty effects of a social theory with the quickly changing, trivial, and thoughtless manifestations of fashion. [. . .] Maybe there is something terrifying about the way that every major or minor happening, every fashion, and every convention spread across the world at lightning speed. Maybe there is a horrifying sameness in the world, brought about by the instantaneous nature of modern existence. Otherwise how can you explain the resistance against film and radio? In calmer, more primitive times, were the common people better, more knowledgeable, more discriminating in their choice of amusements? Never before has an unsophisticated person in San Francisco or Kentucky known more about Paris, Rome, or Constantinople, and unsophisticated people in Vienna or Berlin have never had such an informed idea of America as they do today. How can you complain that the horizons of the masses have become endlessly broader, endlessly richer? Radio is still in its early phases, but what if it has the capacity to comfort prisoners, the lonely, the sick, and people who are cut off from any kind of culture? What if it allows them to speak, to sing, to listen to orchestra music? Is this not a blessing beyond measure? These technical inventions can simultaneously raise the standards of people from all lands and cultures. They can free people from apathy and ignorance. Technology may level people off in a uniform way, but in doing so it can take them to a higher level. [. . .] Europe does not need to be afraid of being crushed by American influence. Europe was defeated in the war, and even as a defeated power it has thrust its own culture upon the victors. In bracing pulses, we receive stimuli and impetus from that tremendous life force that surges to us from across the Atlantic Ocean. In contrast, America is being inundated, immersed, infused with European culture, more quickly, surely, and completely than ever before. Monotonization of the world? Never before has this world been more diverse, richer, more colorful, more wonderful than it is right now, when people can fly through the air, dive under the sea; now that they have the capacity to see the rushing waterfall and dancing flames of fire reproduced photographically before them as well as the subtlest moods of their faces and the movements of their bodies; now that they are in a position to listen across entire continents. [. . .] The unbelievable achievements of technology—and the way that they have disrupted our era—force individuals to rise to the occasion if they want to survive intact with their own ego, if they want to assert themselves and succeed.

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4. Ann Tizia Leitich A Word in Defense of America: One More Response to “The Monotonization of the World” First published as “Ein Wort für Amerika: Noch einmal ‘Monotonisierung der Welt,’” Neue Freie Presse, March 25, 1925, 1–4. Translated by Rob McFarland. A former teacher and member of a respectable middle-class Viennese family, Ann Tizia Leitich (1891–1976) was so unmoored by the decline of Imperial Austria that in 1921 she left her secure position and went to work in Chicago as a cook, maid, and nanny. In 1923, while in New York working as a secretary, Leitich began publishing insightful feuilletons and other articles that interpreted the American phenomenon for her Austrian and German readers. In her rebuttal to Zweig’s “The Monotonization of the World,” Leitich reminds her readers about the vast difference between the real America and the fantasy America that Zweig uses as a bogeyman, laying bare the class privilege that underlies his annoyance with American mass culture. With considerable reservations, Leitich addresses the figure of Henry Ford: not as an economic model for Austria, but as a force that helped to facilitate America’s cultural development. A few weeks ago this newspaper published such an interesting feuilleton, full of the kind of longing that is drawn to fading beauty. But the piece was also full of assertive energy, its conclusions full of pathos. Its writer is a poet and author of international acclaim with an artistic and humane soul drenched in every fiber with the scent, the sensibility of that culture whose inexorable demise he laments. A culture that unconsciously, and with an endearing haughtiness, sought to universally encompass the “heavens of the soul” and provided an enclosed garden for its emotional life. A place where great minds could ponder eternal questions in a state of noble leisure, while gazing on constant beauty. Assuming, of course, that you were born into this leisure, because otherwise you were expected to stay outside of the gates. For this lovely and doomed culture, our own European culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, now completely destroyed by the war: this was respectively an individual, aristocratic, and bourgeois culture, like every other culture before it except for the ancient Greeks. This culture belonged to those people who inherited it in their cradles thanks to their birth, class, and station. This culture was precious to all of us who grew up with it. We all bleed out of the wounds that were left when it was torn away from us, and our suffering is eloquently described by poets like the man who wrote “The Monotonization of the World.” But I have not taken up my pen so that I might lament about the past. I am in America, and over here we only have a present and a future, not a past. I am writing because there is a sentence in “The Monotonization of the World” that states: “Where does this horrible flood come from, this tsunami that threatens to wipe out everything that is colorful and unique? Everyone who has been over there knows exactly where it comes from: America.” I would like to take this sentence and put it under a magnifying glass. How do I find the courage to do this? It has only been a few years since I was sitting in a coffee house on the green Salzach River, where the respectable artist community of Salzburg held their customary Quartier-Latin meetings in those postwar years. [. . .] And Stefan Zweig was sitting at the same table where I sat. Not that he would have noticed me. I was young and immature, but thankful for the hour that the writer spent at my side. [. . .]



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What silvery days, what a silvery place. Salzburg! The perfect place for building a fortress against the forces that lurk in the claws of the metropolis, stultifying time, people, and thoughts. And from there, straight to America, you could say that I traveled through endless space from one planet to another. Especially the part of America where I landed: I was thrown right into the beating heart of the New World, Chicago. And there was no carefully warmed hotel suite waiting for me. [. . .] I did not come because of hunger for bread or gold, for I had turned my back on a pretty good living in the old country, and I knew enough about gold to know that it would not be lying in the streets here, either. I came out the collapse of an epoch, out of the collapse of a life, in order to find the possibility of a new life. I stood facing America with a blank mind, all of the past burned out of it, and I asked: What are you, where are you, who are you? What do you have to offer to me, to the world? Me, a little mosquito, to America the Giant! And the giant spoke: “go ahead and find out!” [. . .] America is more than the monumental audacity of its wellequipped skyscrapers, with a plentitude that almost borders on frivolousness. It is more than Broadway, New York’s white-hot glowing market of vanities, desire and sensations, more than Wall Street’s dollar chase. It is more than its sixteen million automobiles and the uncanny mechanical competence that asks us to “just press the button,” providing us with everything from a cup of coffee to the concert of a famous virtuoso, hundreds of miles away. America, the land of opportunity to get rich—as it exists in European fairy tales—is more or less a thing of the past. But America, the land of limitless possibilities for the evolution of humankind: that may yet come to pass. Europe itself does not know where it is headed. It is stumbling in the dark. It cannot climb back over the rubble to its old ways, and it is not quite sure how to move forward. Europe is too self-conscious, too entwined in a thousand different currents and subcurrents, in its inhibitions and wishes. The European as an individual is thought to be more consequential and certainly more interesting than the individual American, but the country as a whole? Boring, flat, superficial? No. The longer you live here, the more you are convinced that there is still much more that you can learn. [. . .] After the long, painful endeavor of devoting time and energy to building an infrastructure for their vast continent, Americans have turned their work-hardened muscles and the buoyant momentum of their successes toward the task of expanding their lives. In only a few decades, these efforts have resulted in an outward form that outshines everything that came before it. America has sprouted up with amazing speed, growing and surpassing the height of its former mentor Europe. How could it possibly have found time to fill this outer form with adequate content? Europe took centuries to develop its culture, pollinated by the Asiatic culture but uniquely and wholly its own. Now America is in the process of developing its own culture. It started with imported, adapted elements of culture, still bearing the stamp of European guidance. Now it has begun to emancipate itself. [. . .] It listens to what Europe has to say. But this listening should not be mistaken for mere absorption. America is absolutely going its own way. Who can tell today where that way may lead? But anybody who is living here with a finger on the pulse of this country will tell you from experience: there is a distinct sense that something is in the process of being born, that a soul is stirring, slowly opening its great eyes. [. . .] Europe has two kinds of people: the commanders and those who let themselves be commanded. In America there exists a small but far-reaching difference. Here in America people divide themselves into employers and employees, masters and servants. The ones with the big money are the masters, those without money are the servants. But they are only servants for so-and-so many hours a day. When an employee lays aside his overalls and steps out onto the street, he is the same as

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his boss. Sure, he cannot buy everything that his boss can buy. But maybe he does not even care. He certainly does not find it necessary to turn into a Bolshevik. He is satisfied; he will have a good dinner. [. . .] He has a factory-made suit that is a dead ringer for his boss’s own suit. [. . .] His wife drives to the store in the afternoon in her Ford car, just like his boss’s wife. The fact that she has to drive the car herself is good for her, also the fact that she has to prepare the meal. That will save her a trip to the masseuse. These may all seem to be course, material things, but we must not forget: hunger and envy turn people into beasts. And let us not forget that clothing and shelter are the most primitive and necessary ways that people develop a sense of culture. [. . .] Now back to our average Joe: In the evenings, Pablo Casals, Jeritza, and the Philharmonic Orchestra perform in his living room, and Secretary of State Hughes delivers a speech for him. The richest man in the world could probably hire Pablo Casals and Jeritza for an evening but certainly not Secretary of State Hughes. But here they are, all in a five-room house! So: Factory-made wares, machines, cinema, and radio may be horrors for the cultivated, sensitive European, absolutely. But why should they be seen as dangerous? No artist needs to worry that his concert hall will be empty because of radios. [. . .] By listening to radios, people develop the desire to hear the artist in person. When you have heard the Wagner aria “O, du mein lieber Abendstern” [“Oh Thou, Sublime Evening Star”] one hundred, two hundred times on the Victrola (an excellent brand of gramophone), you are eventually influenced by the beauty of the music, and you want to hear the whole opera performed live. Maybe it is the Victrola that is causing opera companies to shoot up out of the ground in America. There are huge expanses in America that could never be reached by the cultural institutions that we had at our disposal before the advent of radio. Many millions of people live in these expanses. For them, a new world is suddenly opening up. [. . .] I consider one of the most notable, possibly the very most notable American of our era to be the man who runs the factories that pay each insignificant errand boy a living wage, a salary that covers more than just a crust of bread. Not out of idealism, not as a publicity stunt, but out of a very sensible intuition—more sly than wise—that allows this man to see the shape of things to come. This man is Ford. I hesitated to even write down his name, because Ford has a terrible reputation in Europe as the proponent of the Taylor system, the extreme, stultifying specialization of labor. You cannot look myopically at one isolated piece of a complicated mechanism such as an industrial system, for you will draw the wrong conclusions. For good or for evil, the unfolding chapter about Ford is a chapter right out of American cultural history. As far as our errand boy is concerned—and there have to be errand boys, why should they be outcasts? [. . .] I am neither a Bolshevik nor a socialist, just an American (for our purposes here), and as such, I say: “Anyone should have the chance to shape his own life, no matter where he was born.” [. . .] Yes, you might say, in America it is easy, people are simply materially better off. But that is not at all what makes the most fundamental difference. It lies deeper, where the shiny patina of money cannot reach. These boogeymen—jazz, factory-made products, machines, schlock art—are stereotypes, they are not America. We, as European hero worshippers who value individual personalities above all else, may not care if millions of people are better educated or happier. We ignore these people because they are not as refined as we are. But we should care, for it is important for the formation of our times, for the very essence of things. [. . .] Every century has its own content and its own responsibilities, building a foundation that allows growth above and beyond what we have known. But here in the heart of America you can feel it, much more clearly than behind Europe’s



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barricaded fortresses: On the crest of this wave, swelled by the barbaric powers of “The Monotonization of the World,” new and greater values may be on their way, indeed, they are arriving even now.

5. Otto Bauer Failed Rationalization First published as “Fehlrationalisierung,” in Kapitalismus und Sozialismus nach dem Weltkrieg, vol. 1, Rationalisierung und Fehlrationalisierung (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1931), 166–83. Translated by Rob McFarland. Henry Ford’s theories of mass production, as Ann Tizia Leitich argues, provided inexpensive goods and reasonable wages for broad masses of the American public, lessening their material needs. Indeed, European economists and politicians were fascinated by the industrial efficiency ideas promoted by Americans such as Henry Ford, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank Gilbreth. European economists were particularly taken with the concepts of industrial “Rationalization” that grew out of the ideas of these American theorists, including radical restructuring of the workforce for the sake of profit. This fascination was not limited to European capitalists. While Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci and other Marxists saw great potential energy in the production practices of American industrialists, the Austrian Social Democratic leader Otto Bauer (1881–1938) broke from Socialist dogma and rejected the American model of rationalization. His rejection of American theories became a central part of Austro-Marxism, codified in the 1926 Linz Program. In this summation of his rejection of American-style industrial rationalization, Bauer attacks the limited scope that had previously weighed the costs and benefits of such practices. He convincingly demonstrates that the American concentration on profit overlooks the greater social and economic suffering that results from “rationalizing” workers out of their livelihoods. The goal of all rationalization is the reduction of production costs. For the entrepreneur, this means the reduction of his own production costs and the costs of his company, not a cost reduction for society at large. He can take actions to reduce his own production costs and simultaneously cause an increase in the costs borne by society. For the purposes of this essay we will call this kind of rationalization a failed rationalization. Failed rationalization increases the profit of an individual entrepreneur, but it diminishes the net profit of the collective labor of society. It may increase the profitability of the individual corporate entity, but it reduces the productivity of an entire society’s work. It makes individuals richer but impoverishes the population in its entirety. [. . .] Dr. Vögler, the chairman of the board of United Steelworks [Vereinigte Stahlwerke], cited a German study that illustrated a case where rationalization—from the standpoint of a capitalist reckoning—drove a company right to the limit of what is economically feasible: “We completely modernized a small smelter works that was equipped with three blast furnaces. Through the modifications in one area we reduced the number of employees from 120 to 10, thus saving the cost of 110 workers. Each worker cost us about 4,000 reichsmarks each year, thus we saved 440,000 reichsmarks. The modernization cost us 2.8 million reichsmarks, which averaged out to a cost of 420,000 each year, eating up our profit through interest and amortization.”

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[. . .] In this example from Dr. Vögler, the United Steelworks saved an annual amount of 20,000 reichsmarks through the rationalization of a small smelter works. This was the amount left over from the saved salary costs after paying the overhead for interest and amortization. From the standpoint of a capitalist cost-benefit analysis, the rationalization was still justified. But things look different from the standpoint of the costs to society. If the 110 workers who were replaced by the modernization remain unemployed for a long period or if they finally have to move to another location in order to find work, the societal outlay required for welfare payments and moving costs is doubtlessly greater than the 20,000 reichsmarks saved by the United Steelworks through the retrofitting of their works. Now, as we have seen, it is advantageous for capitalists to drive rationalization to the outer limits, where the saved cost of labor equals the fixed cost of overhead. A capitalist system will thus always have the tendency to drive rationalization beyond the limits where the fixed overhead costs are smaller than the difference between the saved wages and the societal overhead caused by unemployment. Failed rationalizations in a capitalist system are not random or arbitrary. In fact, it is in the interest of capitalist systems to drive every rationalization into the realm of failed rationalization. Rationalization is best carried out in times of general prosperity, in which the labor force replaced by technical innovations can quickly find work in other establishments or vocations. Where this is the case, society is not burdened with the costs of maintaining the unemployed. This was the case in the years of prosperity in the United States from 1922 to 1929. [. . .] Failed rationalization is much more common in countries and times where there is an oversaturated labor market, where employees displaced by rationalization often remain unemployed for years. In countries such as Great Britain and Austria, who have lost major portions of their sales markets in the economic and political turmoil of the postwar era, and who have retained masses of unemployed workers throughout the rationalization craze, workers displaced by rationalization have been unable to find jobs. At this point, the cost of supporting unemployed workers rose with the rate of rationalization. The individual entrepreneur who retrofitted his production apparatus lowered the cost of his production, but he simultaneously burdened unemployment insurance, welfare institutions, and thus the entirety of employers and employees with the costs of maintaining the workers affected by rationalizing measures. But because so many businesses rationalized at the same time, each one of them was subject to a palpable increase in the cost of societal overhead, in the form of increased unemployment contributions and higher taxes. Businesses fought bitterly against “taxes and social burdens” and defended themselves against having to shoulder their part of the overhead costs for the maintenance of unemployed workers. The gains they made through rationalization were lost to taxes, and thus they ended up paying for the societal costs of their own failed rationalization. [. . .] The source of this failed rationalization could only be obstructed in a society where industries belonged to the state, and where the state would cover the costs of supporting, relocating and reeducating unemployed workers. A social reckoning of production costs would replace its capitalist predecessor. The state would only have an interest in processes of rationalization when the savings of production costs in any given company would be greater than the costs accrued by the unemployment [. . .] of the temporarily displaced worker. The state would, of course, rationalize its own entities, but only at a sustainable



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pace that would allow it to absorb the retraining costs for its own workers and their replacement in other establishments, careers, and branches of industry. [. . .] In a socialist society, rationalization would not be bought at the cost of long-lasting unemployment for its people.

6. Anna Nußbaum Introduction to Africa Sings: A Collection of Recent African American Poetry First published as Afrika singt: Eine Auslese neuer Afro-Amerikanischer Lyrik (Vienna: Speidel, 1929), 8–11. Translated by Rob McFarland. Working closely with the educational reformer (and her aunt) Eugenie Schwarzwald (née Nußbaum), Anna Nußbaum (1887–1931) translated works of literature for children, especially literature that promoted peace and international understanding. She also wrote German versions of international literature, including American works. Although pessimists such as Oswald Spengler saw America as an artless civilization bent on destroying the once-great European culture, Nußbaum joined Alice Salomon, Helene Scheu-Reisz, Felix Salten, and Ann Tizia Leitich in their defense of America as the locus of a unique, emerging culture with the potential to influence Europe in productive ways. Her collaborative translation Africa Sings brought the work of African American poets to a Germanlanguage audience, allowing her readers to experience the Harlem Renaissance and its unique discourses of race, justice, beauty, and power. The productive race consciousness of the African American poets could serve as a model for Vienna’s Jewish Renaissance as well as Vienna’s class-conscious proletariat. In her eulogy of Nußbaum, Helene Scheu-Riesz praised the way that the collection had “brought our European continent closer to the wonderful rhythms of a waking nation.”12 This is the first time that an attempt has been made to create a cohesive German-language selection of African American poetry, songs of Negros living in America, rooted in their sense of race and in their affinity to Africa. Hence the meaning of the title, and an introduction to the intellectual project that we would like to join. One of the young Negro poets, Countee Cullen, an enthusiastic disciple of the English poet John Keats, calls his collection Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets. He states his position with no hesitation: the poets of his race belong in the company of other Englishlanguage poets. “Negro poets, dependent as they are on the English language, may have more to gain from the rich background of English and American poetry than from any nebulous atavistic yearnings toward an African inheritance.” (We will see, however, that even Cullen’s poetry—luckily—is not free from this exhilarant longing.) Alain Locke, a more dedicated connoisseur of his people and the editor of The New Negro, opposes this notion. He sees racial consciousness as a strong, propulsive force for the development of the Negroes and their literary expression. “This deep racial sensitivity has become the driving force in Negro life” and “indeed, race is a primordial, unmediated impetus for all 12

Helene Scheu-Riesz, “In Memoriam: Dr. Anna Nußbaum,” in Die Österreicherin 4, no. 7 (1931): 2.

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colored writers.”—Nothing more needs to be said. It seems to us that avowing oneself as a member of a race—independent of language, citizenship or religion—is a fruitful, creative impulse. More than that: it is a means toward a considerate understanding of other races, a thoroughly noble feeling rising from the human soul that has nothing to do with that ugly, ominous, corporate-political force known as “nationalism.” Needless to say, our work does not arise from a fashionable goodwill for the exotic, the new, the never-before-seen. We are not trying to glorify the Negro. We consider our work as a contribution to the pursuit of truth. It has been necessary to limit the material content of this book. The old profane and religious folk songs, the battle, marriage, funeral, and incantation songs of the African tribes, the spirituals of the American Negroes: a large part of these have, as far as we know, already been translated into the German and French languages. Especially the spirituals, long performed in the concert halls of Europe’s capital cities, have contributed to the insight that syncopated ragtime and jazz (possibly a corruption of “Razz Band,” those groups of four colored musicians that first appeared in New Orleans at the beginning of the eighties and played improvisations of their folk songs on new-fangled instruments) are not the only valid expression of the Negro soul. We must search for the Negro soul through those spiritual and worldly songs that served as a beacon to an oriental, mystical race, enslaved in a strange land. These songs rescued them from the terrible reality of their daily existence, conjuring up the miracles of a Christian paradise or the beauty of their lost homeland. These spirituals are not completely foreign to Europeans, for not only are they the most beautiful of the Negro songs, they are also among the only folk songs that America can claim as its own. For this reason, we have focused our attention upon Negro poetry in its artistic form, the high art of African American poetry, because the intellectual and spiritual renaissance of the colored race is taking place in America, in spite of intense persecution from all sides. Within this framework we cannot ignore the “blues,” the old folk songs that Langston Hughes infuses with a new spirit and modern sensibilities. It is to his credit that he inspired something like a modern dialect movement. No more fake, grotesque sentimentality; the foolish, cheeky plantation idiot that long served as the stereotypical Negro to white audiences (and some colored ones as well) has disappeared. These young poets have managed like never before to capture a deeper, livelier, minimalist version of the folk soul. In addition to the blues, Claude McKay’s “Songs of Jamaica” can be added to the list of dialect poetry. Elsewhere there has developed a new push for more accomplished linguistic and rhythmic forms like those racial rhythms coming out of the of the new “Jazz School.” These tonal shapes did not arise out of the cheap thrills of popular syncopation (used in lyric poetry to double up on the word imagery), rather they emerge out of the sorrow- and joy-soaked musical nature of the black race. [. . .] Africa sings with young voices: the longing for an enchanted ur-homeland, a longing as old as time; the pain of a millennium of repression in strange lands; childish, fervent faith in a coming salvation; deep humiliation as well as joyful shouts in praise of life; but also a knowledge of their own value; the masculine call to action; powerful self-assertion in search of a higher purpose. The race problem turns into a class problem. Both of them will find a solution, they must find one. These voices—so disparate—all of them deserve to be heard. Their songs are a harrowing plea for liberation and promising evidence of the light that can come from an ascendant humanity.

“The Red Metropolis is the hope and the ennoblement of the working people of all capitalist countries in the world. Therefore, may Vienna forever remain red!” Shortly before the 1932 election, the Social Democratic illustrated magazine Der Kuckuck (April 17, 1932) declares Red Vienna to be the model for all socialist cities. (Courtesy of VGA.)

CHAPTER THIRTY

GLOBAL RESONANCES Werner Michael Schwarz

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hen considering Red Vienna’s international presence, it is important to keep three different facets in mind: first, the advertising aimed at international recognition of the institutions of Red Vienna which became increasingly professional over the course of the 1920s; second, the way that this recognition was successfully maintained vis-à-vis Red Vienna’s base of support and its political enemies; and finally, the evidence that would substantiate this recognition. The city’s active advertising campaigns sought to reach both an international socialist audience and a wider bourgeois public. This strategy reflects Red Vienna’s interior publicity efforts as well, which were often seen as being at cross purposes when they tried to reach both their own base and the moderate bourgeois voters. Evidence for the massive advertising campaigns can be found in all of Red Vienna’s political fields, from educational politics to the massive communal building program. Brochures were printed in different languages for distribution through the socialist parties in England or Holland. The strategic center for the dissemination of the advertising was the Social and Economic Museum (Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum), which used innovative methods to communicate the aspirations and accomplishments of Red Vienna both nationally and internationally. To accomplish this task, new photo formats were developed, and the so-called Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics (later referred to as Isotype) was developed and successfully implemented by Otto Neurath (1882–1945) and his team. International reaction to the public relations campaigns contain proof of the active policy of inviting visitors to Vienna. In addition to these measures, the city hosted huge international events such as the International Socialist Youth Meeting in 1929 and the Second Workers’ Olympics in 1931. Claims of international legitimacy were primarily aimed at forces within Austria. Beginning in the late 1920s, these assertions of legitimacy became stronger in response to the economic crisis and increasingly heated altercations with the National Socialists. Vienna was showcased as a model for the world. The full-length campaign film Das Notizbuch des Mr. Pim (Mr. Pim’s Trip to Europe), produced in 1930, is built around this narrative. It follows an American newspaper editor as he witnesses first-hand the achievements of Red Vienna. In this phase, the Social Democratic media portray a global perspective that integrates even nonsocialist ideas from around the world, such as Gandhi’s struggle for Indian independence or the political and cultural developments within the African American community in the United States.

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The attention garnered by Red Vienna on an international level—a topic that has never been systematically investigated and is only touched upon in this chapter—had much to do with the dramatic crisis following World War I. Vienna was dependent upon international aid, which was distributed primarily by the delegations of the allied powers that were in the city. For the international media, Vienna came to represent the massive political and social developments after the war. Specifically, the city represented the transition from a monarchy to a republic, the fall of a metropolis to the capital of a small country, and the fall of the elites and the rise of the working class in Red Vienna. Beginning in the mid-1920s, the news was dominated by the political developments of Red Vienna itself. When the city got its first big chance to present its own status as a model city at the 1926 International Residential Building and City Planning Congress in Vienna, the reactions were unexpectedly disappointing. In spite of their fundamental recognition of Red Vienna’s building accomplishments, the majority of the visiting architects and city planners criticized the decision to construct multistory residential units and densely built urban spaces instead of graciously spaced settlements on the periphery of the city in the spirit of the garden city ideal. After the economic crisis, however, this criticism faded into the background. English and American newspapers and academic journals undertook the first systematic international analyses of the specifics of Vienna’s apartment building policies. Much of the international interest came from the question of how the city had overcome the crises of the postwar years. Although observers were still reluctant to fully accept Vienna as a model city, the assessments were noticeably more positive. Critics considered the city’s initial constraints, yet they were skeptical whether Vienna’s politics and financial model, especially their dependence upon specifically levied taxes, could be applied internationally. With the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, Red Vienna gained international visibility. The ideas and forms of the Vienna municipal housing complexes finally were treated as viable examples that could be copied, as in the case of the Quarry Hill Flats complex in Leeds, England, which in terms of function and form was clearly inspired by the Karl-Marx-Hof. Further reading Blau 1999 Mattl 2009 Nemec and Schwarz 2019 Rahman 2019 Sandner 2014

1. Erwin Zucker Vienna—Moscow: Two Cities—Two Worlds First published as Anonymous, Wien—Moskau: zwei Städte—zwei Welten (Hamburg, Berlin: Verlag Carl Hoym Nachfolger, 1932), 45–48. Translated by Richard Lambert. This brochure for the Communist Party of Austria was published for the state and municipal election of 1932. The author was the youth functionary Erwin Zucker (1903–1985) who was brought back to Vienna for the election campaign from Moscow’s International Lenin

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School.1 With his fresh impressions from the capital of the Soviet Union, Zucker compares the local politics of the two “red” cities, especially in the areas of apartment construction and social welfare. Socialist and capitalist building styles According to the existing regulations for the entire Soviet Union, only 10 to 30 percent of the total area allocated for construction may directly be built upon. The specific restrictions are imposed by the local and district soviets, since, for instance, land is more costly in the center of Moscow than in the outlying areas. The regulations further stipulate that complexes enclosing a courtyard on all four sides are prohibited, and that all courtyards must have street access. The construction of tenement complexes in the old style has thus finally come to an end. The area allocated for usable floor space within the building project stands at 70 to 80 percent, meaning that wide stairways and hallways with natural light, etc. will be built. The rooms in the new complexes are bright and spacious, from around twenty to twenty-five square meters in size. Rooms with low ceilings, as are common in Viennese municipal housing, are unheard of here. In nearly every building there are rooms intended for kindergartens, common dining spaces, club activities, and so on. In general, 10 percent of the built spaces will be utilized for cultural purposes. None of the Viennese municipal housing projects have central heating, but in Moscow there is not a single new building without it. Barely any apartments in Vienna’s municipal housing program have their own bathroom; in Moscow—with very few exceptions—all new apartments have a private bathroom, and many also have a telephone. The deputy chairman of the Moscow Soviet, who visited Vienna in the winter of 1931, described the Viennese municipal housing complexes as follows: “It is true that the buildings are beautiful from the outside, but can we really be excited by them after having seen the inside? Bathrooms and central heating, these are, in our opinion, the most basic requirements of modern domestic culture. There is no trace of either in the Viennese municipal housing complexes.” In Moscow, the law stipulates that 80 percent of the apartments in new construction must be given to workers currently laboring at the bench (in other words, not former workers). On average 73 to 75 percent of the occupants of new housing complexes are workers. Such a provision does not exist in Vienna. In “socialist” Vienna, other measures have been implemented. There, the housing applicant must show that he is perfectly suited for the apartment before he lands in the good graces of the housing authority. The homeless and jobless are not “suited” for this, as we know from practice. We could also glean this much from the words of city councillor Weber, who has explained: “Individuals [as registered by the Housing Office] will be granted apartments in new construction in the city insofar as their economic and cultural situation is suited to these apartments” (according to a report by [Vienna’s official classified publication for renters,] the Amtlicher Wiener Anzeiger für Wohnungsaustausch und Untermiete from April 11, 1925). In reality, the share of workers living in municipal housing complexes in the workers’ city of Vienna is only 27 percent. The [majority of occupants] are tradespeople, professional workers, and a large percentage of white-collar workers, primarily employed by the city of Vienna, various social insurance companies, reformist trade unions, and the Social Democratic Party and its peripheral organizations. 1

See Julia Köstenberger, Kaderschmiede des Stalinismus: Die Internationale Leninschule in Moskau (1926–1938) und die österreichischen Leninschüler und Leninschülerinnen (Vienna: LIT, 2016), 325.

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2. Günter Hirschel-Protsch The Municipal Housing Complexes of the City of Vienna First published as “Die Gemeindebauten der Stadt Wien,” Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst und Städtebau 10, no. 9 (1926): 357–62. Translated by Richard Lambert. In this article written for Wasmuths Monatshefte, a well-respected German architecture magazine, the Bauhaus student, architect, and interior designer Günter Hirschel-Protsch (1902–1938) wholeheartedly praises the accomplishments of Red Vienna. He pays special attention to hygienic aspects, including laundry facilities, public baths, and the crematorium. His euphorically positive account appears in the same issue of the magazine as Werner Hegemann’s strong rejection of the architecture of Red Vienna.2 Hirschel-Protsch was forced to emigrate from Germany after the National Socialists took over in 1933. In August 1925, through the kindness of the Building Office, I was granted the opportunity to learn more about many of the extensive social housing construction initiatives of the city of Vienna. Even this brief report should convey the impression that in Vienna, we are dealing with a highly cultivated and socially progressive construction initiative on a grand scale, even by Europe’s current standards. The sheer fact that in five years, twenty-five thousand move-in-ready apartments have been built (not including the countless public swimming facilities, new hospitals, the Intake Center for Children, etc.) is reminiscent of American entrepreneurship, which was inspired by an enormous housing shortage. The photos and statistical material that were generously made available in Vienna provide only a vague idea of the generosity of this undertaking. You might be interested to learn how the Vienna municipal administration was in a position to finance its construction projects. The immense sums required were raised exclusively through the housing construction tax. In terms of social hygiene and financial feasibility, every measure has been taken and tested on a project-by-project basis. The Social Democratic parliament [the municipal council] sought to create apartment complexes of enormous scale, which, in spite of the tremendous number of residents, can guarantee a hygienic and peaceful lifestyle while keeping power consumption at the lowest possible levels. They have succeeded in their efforts in every way. City leaders, members of the municipal council, and architects should be warmly invited to tour these buildings as instructive examples of an objective, hygienic, and yet artistic building style. The Viennese deserve full credit for being the first to employ some 170 freelance architects, in addition to 7 civil servant architects; they recognized at the right time the double advantage of a private-public partnership in which public and private architects collaborate, giving jobs to otherwise starving artists while constantly putting to the test their understanding of the social dimension in architecture and thus gaining valuable knowledge while working on their urban renewal projects. Internationally acclaimed artists compete with hungry new talents whom the city is lucky enough to be able to support. Looking at the pictures, everyone will be able to judge the level of artistic achievement for themselves. It should also be noted that the Viennese have succeeded in adding color to the streetscape, which lends a particularly genial charm to the buildings and their spatial presence. 2

See chapter 20.

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3. Heinrich Peter The 1926 International Residential Building and City Planning Congress in Vienna First published as H. Peter, “Der internationale Wohnungs- und Städtebaukongress 1926 in Wien,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Wohnungswesen 2, no. 1 (1927): 7–9. Translated by Richard Lambert. The Swiss architect Heinrich Peter (1893–1968) reported from the 1926 International Residential Building and City Planning Congress in Vienna. The conference, which was a prestigious event for the city’s Social Democratic leadership, unexpectedly led to harsh criticism of Red Vienna’s housing policies. Peter, like so many other attendees, spoke out against Vienna’s decision to favor multistory apartment buildings and called for a return to the ideal of the singlefamily house. Peter goes so far as to use the term “rental barracks” (Mietskasernen), a term long used to criticize the crowded, profit-oriented housing that was ubiquitous in nineteenth-century European cities. Peter did, however, have good things to say about how the congress was organized. The highpoint of the congress was the wonderfully well-organized visit to the municipal housing complexes of the city of Vienna. After Vienna had constructed seven thousand apartments between 1919 and 1923 without resolving the dire housing shortage, the Vienna Municipal Council decided to build 25,000 public housing units in September 1923. The program will be undertaken with unparalleled energy, such that it was completed ahead of schedule by the end of 1927, and preparations for an additional 5,000 apartments are already underway. These Viennese public housing apartments, with the exception of 3,500 single-family homes in somewhat large settlements, are all located in typical “rental barracks” [Mietskasernen]. These houses are incredibly expansive, with four, five, or six stories, at some sites even as many as eight stories. At the same time, however, these apartments have incredibly small living areas: three quarters of the apartments consist of a live-in kitchen, one room, toilet, and an entryway totaling 38 m²; and one quarter consists of two room-apartments totaling 48 m². The ceiling height is on average 2.80 m. Three, four, or five such little apartments are located on each floor, opening to a stairwell. It is thus clear that this form of construction and housing creates unusually tight living conditions, which were rejected by the majority of the congress attendees. [. . .] In opposition to the congress’s recently expressed opinion that Vienna’s housing needs should have been met primarily by low-rise buildings and ideally by founding a “satellite town,” the city administration and in particular the director of city planning, Dr. Musil, made clear that the necessary land for twenty-five thousand apartments was either not available or was too far removed from the city. Beyond these considerations, the costs associated with site exploration, expansion of the sewer system, new public buildings, and new commuter rail lines with bridges over the Danube would have been much too expensive. The scale of the housing crisis also demanded the most rapid course of action. For this reason, the community made use of those parcels most suitable for building and with the best connections to public transportation throughout the entirety of the city. But even if particular conditions existed in Vienna that led primarily to the construction of high-rise buildings, this rationale does not explain why this principle of scarcity was expanded to the creation of such massive building complexes as, for instance, the

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Fuchsenfeldhof, the Reumannhof, and the Metzleinstalerhof, all of which have only tiny apartments. In Zürich, too, similar efforts were made to combat housing shortages with large-scale projects. In contrast to private high-rises, however, the tendency here toward communal and cooperative multistory homes successfully limited the number of floors and led to less boxy buildings. It is hard to understand why Vienna could not have adopted a more exemplary style of high-rise construction, even if the Viennese were used to poor living conditions. Evidently political interest still plays a role here. [. . .] The financing of these municipal housing projects and the low cost of rent is also unusual. Working under the assumption that incomes in today’s Austria must be lower than elsewhere in order for the country to remain competitive in the export industry, then it is necessary for Vienna to depress housing costs as much as possible, as the cost for groceries, clothes, entertainment, and education cannot be reduced without sacrificing quality. For this reason, rent control in Austria, which limits rents to 2 percent of income on average, is considered an economic necessity. If the owners of the old residential buildings cannot reap interest from their own invested capital, then the city cannot reap interest either. For this reason, Vienna is not building with borrowed money, but rather with the revenue from a housing construction tax which is levied against all apartments and business locations. And because this tax revenue is insufficient, it also draws on other forms of tax revenue. [. . .] The private construction of residential buildings in Vienna is impossible because of these developments. The production and distribution of new apartments rests entirely in the hands of the city, which, because of its political orientation, only looks after a particular class of renters. This fact and in particular the exclusion of all private initiatives are signs of abnormal conditions. The system is enduring strong challenges in Vienna itself, and abroad, every mention of its achievement is accompanied by sharp criticism. It will be interesting to follow its development.

4. Hermann Tobler Learning School or Helping School? A Presentation Given to the Vienna Teachers Assembly on October 4, 1923 First published as “Lernschule oder helfende Schule? Vortrag vor der Wiener Lehrerschaft am 4. Oktober 1923,” Schulreform 3, no. 1 (January 1924): 1–5. Translated by Richard Lambert. In this address given to the Vienna teachers’ assembly, the Swiss pedagogical reformer Hermann Tobler (1872–1933) discusses the Austrian school reform movement initiated by Otto Glöckel, the first education minister of the new republic. Glöckel’s reform called for the abolition of educational privileges for certain classes of society as well as for a general shift from so-called “drill schools” to “learning and work schools.” After the Social Democrats and the Christian Socials broke their coalition and the Social Democrats thus lost their position in the federal government in 1920, their ideas lived on under the term “Viennese school reform.” As the president of the Vienna State School Council, Glöckel was the driving force behind the reform movement. I have followed the Austrian school movement from the beginning and, in the last few years, have also reached out to countries in the West in order to assess their various aims

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in the area of school reform. Everywhere there is a push for progress and positive ambition, and it can be said—at least on the most basic level—that the old school is a thing of the past. If people are not busy applying reforms everywhere, it is only because they lack the necessary means or face political resistance. In the West, they are also anxious to move beyond the chaos of the war and its aftermath in order to find peace for the necessary reform work. The world has become a more tightly knit place because of the war. We have become more objective and honest. Now we come together in order to work together and not—as before the war—for celebrations without labor. Here in Austria you have gone the furthest and are the most generally advanced. Personally, I would like to express here my heartfelt thanks to the goal-oriented leadership, the leaders of the Austrian school movement, and all of its collaborators, in the name of the pedagogical circles outside of Austria. Not everywhere has the reform movement proceeded as rapidly and as directly as it has in Austria; not everywhere have boulders from the old days been blown up as quickly or as courageously as here in Austria. In other nations it is, for example, unheard of that the minister speaks directly to teachers in the most far-flung regions and asks them about their hopes for school reform. I have only found this to be the case in Austria. Too often there is a strong feeling of patronization among the bureaucrats, the jurists, the theologians, and the journalists. You in Austria were the first to recognize that you must take the education of the people into your own hands in order to ascend. You were the first to recognize the great resources that the parents can provide. You have small classes—we know that the cause of this is a great deal of misery—but it is also true that you have made the most of this circumstance. You also have the financial resources in Vienna. Other cities do not have these resources and I can assure you that the entire pedagogical world, as far as I know it, is looking toward Austria. This was revealed with utmost clarity at the pedagogical congress in Montreux in the summer of 1923, where an Austrian delegation was in attendance. On the strength of its accomplishments, Austria stood out like no other nation. I do not say this to flatter you, but rather, as a fact. We also know that the Austrians are sometimes skeptical, and perhaps some of you skeptics are assembled here as well. The Austrians—at least in the earlier days—were often lacking confidence in themselves. Fatalism and ambivalence were well-known Austrian qualities. Now, there is movement and energy in your country. And I would like to encourage you to stand by your leaders and to carry those school reforms that you have already so successfully started even further. You will not only serve your own people by doing so but the entire pedagogical world. Because you are working here with means—and I am also thinking of your beautiful new schoolbooks—that are not available in the rest of the world. You have completed the reform of the elementary schools, and you are in possession of the national institutes of education! Austria is the only nation that has such institutes, no other country is so advanced! Work so that we who live outside of your borders can look to you as an example! Do not disappoint us, we stand enthusiastically behind you and use you as a model in so many ways!

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5. Solita Solano Vienna—A Capital Without a Nation First published in The National Geographic Magazine 43, no. 1 (January 1923): 77–102. The author and journalist Solita Solano (1875–1975) was part of the American bohemian circles in Paris in the 1920s. In this article Solano writes about the dramatic economic and social changes that came about in the early postwar years in Vienna. One of the spaces that she frequents are the provisional “wild gardens,” the cooperative housing and garden settlements on the outskirts of Vienna. The residents shared in the work of creating and maintaining these settlements. The author is very concerned with the social plight of the bourgeois middle class, which, she claims, has lost dramatically in social standing. Under the Social Democratic government, in Solano’s mind, the once-powerful middle class has been replaced by the members of the rising working class. Bankrupt Vienna has nothing left except an incomparable geographical situation on the Danube. Until recently one of the richest and gayest cities on the continent and the center of Europe’s oldest empire, she is today the capital of a few mountains and rivers that occupy a small corner of her former dominions. The dissolution of an immense polyglot empire has brought ruin to Austria and put Vienna in pawn to the world. On the edge of a shriveled little republic of six million insolvents, Vienna has been waiting for a rescue party and living on alms. While waiting, her currency has dropped until now it takes many thousands of her twenty-cent pieces to make one American dollar. Surrounded by countries that are nursing ancient grudges against her, dependent on them for nearly all her food and fuel, and with only worthless money with which to pay her bills—this is the fate which has brought almost unparalleled national misery upon a highly civilized people in a famous center of learning, art, and culture. [. . .] In this splendid setting an economic upheaval has completely overturned every normal social condition and changed the destinies of all classes of the population. The workingman is now on top of the heap and will be provided for as long as the Social Democrats are able to make their governmental machine function. Next down the new economic scale come the titled aristocracy and the other upper classes who used to live by “unearned increment.” Many of these have spent their principal since the revolution and have come to bitter poverty. Lowest on the scale is the middle class—the real tragedy of Vienna. Forming a fourth of the population and including the intelligentsia, this entire class, to whom the city in large measure owes its greatness, is beggared, hopeless, and apparently doomed to extinction. The plight of this middle class is the last thing the traveler sees. If he is a casual person, who lives on surfaces, he may even leave the city with the impression that all is going well with the Viennese. There is nothing in the hotel district on the ring to indicate to him that there is a city that is running along on mere hope. He will be served plenty of good food. He will see many luxuries in the shop windows priced beyond his pocketbook. Opera tickets are unobtainable, he may find, unless he tips a hotel porter to stand in line at 7 o’clock in the morning. [. . .]

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The city is surrounded by small gardens On the edge of the city the traveler will come upon curious little patches of gardens, each with a makeshift fence and a wooden building that looks like a child’s playhouse. Women and children are weeding and carrying water. They do not waste ground by having paths, but step carefully between the plants. Blocks of scarlet poppies, raised for their delicious seeds, dot the hillside. The traveler is told that there is no end to these garden homes. They surround the city like a ragged girdle, and are the result of a housing famine that has driven thousands of families to live here in huts, even in cold weather, where they add to the city’s food supply by raising vegetables about the front door. These are the Schreber Gardens, modeled after the famous ones of Berlin, and are all that save their owners from a diet of black bread and noodles every day in the year. Each cluster of gardens has as a center a miniature delicatessen stand and an openair beer hall, where men, women, and children refresh themselves after a hard day’s gardening. [. . .] Living rooms commandeered by government The housing crisis in Vienna is the worst in history and is not yet solved, in spite of heroic efforts and city government control. All building activities having ceased during the war, the congestion was increased by war profiteers, who flocked to the capital from the provinces, followed by thousands of recalled Austrian officials. To avoid riots, the city adopted forcible billeting, which still obtains. All dwellings, whether palaces or tenements, are listed by the Wohnungsamt and the number of rooms compared with the number of persons. After the comparison, all available space is commandeered. Baronesses and wives of workingmen alike are forced to take in lodgers. No one may have an extra room while homeless thousands are sleeping in barracks, parks, and freight cars; nor may anyone have a house in the city and another in the country. He must give up one and keep lodgers in the other. One titled family that did not believe the Wohnungsamt was in earnest did not heed the warning and returned to town one day to find that wagons had taken away their belongings and their home was filled with laborers. Paying for homes in hours instead of money The billeting regulations and the law that was passed at the beginning of the war to prevent the raising of rents may have spared Vienna from riots, but they ruined the landlords, many of whom are now receiving only a few cents a month from their property (at the present value of the crown), while their tenants’ incomes have increased many times. In consequence, buildings are in bad condition and landlords are unable to make repairs; sometimes the tenants themselves club together to have a leaking roof mended. A landlord may not sell his property without a payment to the city of 55 per cent of the sale price. Growing out of the housing shortage is the movement of the Land Settlement Societies, financed by funds from America and England, which has brought together

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700,000 homeless of the middle and working classes throughout Austria. The settlers are building garden cities by cooperative labor, partly maintaining themselves by keeping pigs and poultry and raising vegetables. In payment they must give the Land Societies from 1,500 to 2,000 hours of free labor in three years. As a result, thousands of women and children are working continually in several settlements on the outskirts of Vienna, earning their future homes. They make bricks, dig foundations, sift sand, and mix mortar. On Saturday and Sunday the men arrive and work from dawn till dark. The first settlement was founded by war invalids, on the imperial hunting grounds near Schönbrunn Palace, and is named “The City of Peace.” The park walls were pulled down for material with which to build the first houses. The bricks, each stamped with the double eagle of the Hapsburgs, will now help to shelter the human wrecks that fought in vain to preserve the great empire. These invalids and their families are excavating rock, rooting out stumps by hand, and building a church and schoolhouse on which to center their community life. Soon two thousand homes will stand where royalty once maintained its celebrated shooting-box. While these settlements have adjusted the difficulties of a few thousand families, the city’s most important problem has been left unsolved. The half million perishing members of the middle class, who have made Vienna famous for her university, clinics, music, and art, have gone to the wall in coping with the cost of living, whose curve for 1922 looks like one of Austrian’s mountains. Being a capital, Vienna enrolls in its middle-class persons of highly diverse occupations. It embraces field marshals, lawyers, doctors, university professors, admirals, civil servants, artists, scientists, clerks, teachers, officials, and many others whose source of income is a fixed salary, rents, or a pension.

6. J. Alexander Mahan Dark Hours and the Dawn of Today First published in Vienna of Yesterday and Today (Vienna: Vienna Times, 1928), 37–61. In his travel account, J. Alexander Mahan (1869–1951) focuses his interest on the contemporary city of the twentieth century. With a slightly ironic tone regarding Red Vienna’s claims of wide-reaching welfare for its inhabitants (“from the cradle to the grave”), Mahan credits the accomplishments of the new Social Democratic city government with having averted a Soviet-style political radicalization. In another passage he discusses the consequences that Social Democratic policies have had upon different social groups in the city. It is interesting to compare the two opposing portraits that he creates: the happy resident of a municipal housing complex, and a property owner who has lost all of his money because of rent control and inflation. This text had substantial influence on the broader American interest in Red Vienna. Later writers referred to Mahan’s travel reports or quoted entire passages word for word. So influential is the city of Vienna in the councils of the Republic of Austria, that it is able to manage its own affairs and even dictate, to a certain extent, to the nation. It supplies more than half the funds and a still greater proportion of the brains of the country. It is extremely difficult for the Christian Socialist [sic] Party, which is really not a socialist party at all, to force any measure through the state legislative bodies without modifying it to meet the approval of the Social Democrats of the city. Furthermore, the municipality

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is not responsible to the League of Nations, and hence free to do about as it pleases in arranging budgets and taxation. This is in one sense fortunate, for the city is thus enabled to give the world a free and untrammeled object lesson in socializing a large city government. The transient visitor who looks at the art collections, streets, palaces, cathedrals and places of amusement and then passes on, has missed noticing one of the most interesting things in the world: a city government conducted along purely socialistic lines by competent men. Socialistic legislation provides for the inhabitant from a few months before he is born till he is cremated or buried in the soil. It looks after his health, regulates wages and employment, provides doles for unemployment, makes suggestions as to his marriage and divorce, undertakes to house him, provides care in sickness, bathes him and does other things too numerous to mention. All this is carried cut according to the best knowledge of the day, commensurate, of course, with the financial ability of the city. The avowed intention of the municipality is to make luxury provide for the sanitation and other needs of those unable to supply themselves unassisted. It is not the intention here to express any opinion as to the justice or advisability of any or all of these measures, but, granted that what they are doing is desirable, one may say that it could not be better done. Of all the socialistic measures, the housing plan is the one most criticised and condemned. It will be fully discussed in another chapter. Taxes of those living in luxury, and also upon industry are heavy—almost too heavy. This criticism is answered by saying that the conditions are most unusual, which no one can deny. Stock in Vienna was certainly quoted very low just after the war. The Social Democrats have at least held the population together and enabled it to live, and probably kept the country from going into red bolshevism. At the present time the city has very little indebtedness and a nice surplus of cash in the treasury. Inflation wiped out pre-war debts, radicalism closed the doors of credit at the world’s great fountains of money and high taxation provided the funds. There are complicated restrictions thrown about the dismissal of employees that cause complaints on the part of employers. The number of people in the employment of the city is more than fifty thousand, but anyone who knows the cost of living will agree that they are not overpaid. Tramway conductors receive less than ten dollars per week. Skilled workers in electricity but little more. The wages of unskilled workmen are considerably less. These samples furnish a fair idea of the prevailing wage scale. The Social Democrats are supposed to be anti-Catholic and the population of Vienna is predominantly Catholic except on election day. In matters of government, the city, once in a while, breaks out with some demonstration to prove that it can do as it pleases in secular affairs. It built a large modern crematorium, something that is not tolerated by the Catholic church, and had a lawsuit with the state upon attempting to use it. The Catholics do not allow divorces, so the city made some divorce law and ground out a few divorces. This started some very embarrassing lawsuits that are as yet unsettled.

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7. Louis H. Pink Vienna Excels First published in The New Day in Housing (New York: The John Day Company, 1928), 58–66. This is one of the earliest American academic examinations of Red Vienna, focusing especially on housing policy. Louis H. Pink (1888–1952), a New York sociologist and housing expert, discusses different examples of communal housing policies in European cities (including London, Amsterdam, Cologne, and Frankfurt). Pink thoroughly explains the specific economic and social prerequisites for Vienna’s housing policies, but because of the city’s use of taxes to finance the policies, he does not consider Vienna’s model to be useful to other cities. Doing so would go too far, he claims, even for workers in the United States. Vienna is erecting the finest apartments in the world for workers and is the only city that expects no return on the capital invested! Rent is nominal: the tenant pays only for the upkeep of the building. In other cities rent consumes from a quarter to a third of the tenant’s income; in Vienna, but 2 per cent. An apartment costs from $1.05 to $2 a month, depending upon size and location. A one-family cottage in one of the Garten-Siedlungen can be had for about the same rental. Such a financial policy in the United States would be unthinkable. Free rent is not needed, is contrary to all traditions, and would be resented by our workers—although no one seems to mind having the city pay two cents additional every time a passenger drops a nickel in the slot of the New York subways. [. . .] What makes these Vienna tenements stand out is their cheerfulness, their architectural beauty, the wide courts, the balconies, the play spaces, the kindergarten, nurseries, laundries, gymnasiums, the fountains and flowers and statuary. The combination of these create a home in the fullest and best sense—not a mere place in which to exist. Vienna leads the world in creating for her workers an atmosphere of culture and happiness. This is where Schubert and the Strauss waltzes come in. Proceeding on the theory of Stadt-rat [sic] Franz Siegel, now so popular in Central Europe, that “nur in einem gesunden Körper kann auch ein gesunden [sic] Geist wohnen [a healthy mind can only live in a healthy body],” the city has erected the Amalienbad, one of the largest and certainly the finest public path in Europe. There is a huge swimming pool, with diving platforms, and a variety of smaller pools and baths, providing every imaginable kind of therapeutic service; electric, heat, massage and gymnastic, radium, medicinal. Prices range from three or four cents for shower baths, and sixteen cents for the pool, to forty or fifty cents for some of the medicinal baths. The floor and walls of the building are finished in the finest varicolored tiles imaginable. The good Franz Joseph would turn in his grave could he see the socialist tradesmen, mechanics, and laborers of Vienna reclining on cots and covered with huge towels, in thermal luxury undreamed of in the Hofburg. [. . .] How does Vienna pay for this extensive building program? While in the beginning money was borrowed, no loans are now sought. There is a special housing construction tax, but it is not sufficient. The deficiency is met from the general tax rate. Vienna’s contribution to world housing is indeed great. Its financial plan has nothing to offer London or Amsterdam, New York, or Chicago. But its very existence as a great

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city threatened, unemployment rife, all private capital consumed in the War, it set itself to the task of providing not only houses, but the very best possible homes for its workers—thereby putting to shame wealthy and powerful municipalities which have talked but not built.

8. Anonymous Europe Revisited. III.—Vienna: The Dawn First published in The Spectator, October 5, 1929, 430–32. As part of a series about Central Europe, this report appeared in the tradition-rich and conservative-leaning English journal The Spectator. It describes Red Vienna as a shining example for England’s urgently needed reform of working-class housing policy. The text shows admiration for the careful details and lovely design of the housing developments, kindergartens, and communal spaces. The article draws the interesting conclusion that the social projects of Red Vienna do not smack of any kind of “institutionalism” but are conducive to individualism, especially the kindergartens. The article also praises the professionalism and hospitality of the city administration hosting foreign guests. I am now going to turn to one of the wonders of contemporary Europe—the way Vienna is tackling the slum question—and I will try with the minimum of statistics to make the readers of the Spectator see some of the wonders of social reform which I saw during several days spent wandering round the new working-class dwellings, children’s kindergarten, welfare centres, public baths and children’s baths. A visit to Austria to-day is simultaneously a painful and a stimulating experience. Painful because you see before you a microcosm of the suffering caused by war and chauvinism and stimulating because in Vienna you see also what a great city, which has been through years of much tribulation, has achieved in the face of unparalleled difficulties. If after what she has been through Vienna were nursing her grievances, sitting still and crying out for help, we could sympathize with her in her slough of despond. How different is the reality. I wonder if these men of vision who have done so much for Vienna and made her a place of pilgrimage for social workers and students from two hemispheres can understand just how an Englishman feels after a stay among them? By far the strongest feeling I took away was one of shame for my country and for our national lethargy. Our country, one of the two richest in the world, the envy of much of Europe, has been content to let the years go by and has done practically nothing to come to grips with the slum menace which is eating away the vitals of our people. [. . .] My first visit to some of Vienna’s new working-class dwellings was under the guidance of a young University man, a housing enthusiast who had been sent by the municipal authorities (Burgermeister’s office) to pilot me round. Subsequently I went unescorted. Those Englishmen who think that workmen’s dwellings must be ugly and uninvitinglooking should come to Vienna, for they will find charming six-story buildings by the leading architects of the day which would adorn any city. One great block of workmen’s dwellings is very much like another, so for the purpose of description I will take the Wohnhausbau Reumannhof, built in 1925, consisting of 400 flats and containing about 1,400 inmates. The great six-story building enclosed three sides of a large stone-paved

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courtyard with plots of grass and flower-beds and a large pool of water in which the flowers were reflected. There were flower-boxes everywhere and many balconies, and I took away with me a vision of colour. The woodwork of the pergola in the courtyard was painted bright green and blue. The fountain, which is such a feature of these buildings, is called a “splashing basin” (Plautsch Becker [sic; Planschbecken]), and here in the shallow water the children splash about naked in the hot weather and keep cool. My guide took me along the veranda with its spotless mosaic floor past the boxes of petunias to the kindergarten for the children of the block. A kindergarten is provided in all the up-to-date buildings. I found myself in a magic world of white and blue tiled corridors and cheerful, colourful rooms. On the threshold of the sanctum I was made to put on felt overslippers such as the tourist is given when he visits Santa Sophia, Stamboul, or some other mosque. The ages of the children ranged from three to six, and each child had its own peg with its own particular sign, which represents it instead of a number, and this sign remains its emblem during its career here. The signs are simple objects, such as a bird, an animal, a tree, a house, a watch, or some other familiar object. These emblems appear on all the child’s possessions. They are embroidered in red on its clothes-bag—where the clothes in which the child arrives each morning are kept for the day and on its pinafore; even on each drinking-glass is painted in oils each child’s emblem. Never have I been in a more cheerful place and I almost wished I were a Vienna “slum” child. Even the canary was extra cheerful; I think he was the most cheerful canary I have ever come across, and no wonder, for his cage was kept open and he flew about the room wherever the fancy took him. The door of his cage is never shut. The children were drinking their morning cocoa out of attractive blue and mauve mugs, sitting at diminutive little white tables in a spotless room and they themselves looked spotless too. I have never seen such clean children, nor happier-looking ones. In the corner was a railed-off section in which the toys were kept. Round the walls were bright-coloured friezes of amusing scenes out of story-books. I asked what kind of children they were, and was told by the intelligent matron that they were “the children of the very poor,” and corresponded to our poorest slum children. The visit reminded me of visits to happy nurseries in the homes of prosperous parents in a large English country house. I had expected to find an atmosphere of institutionalism, but it was conspicuous by its absence. I was then switched off to the grown-up amenities—always in the same building—which included an office where mothers got advice on health matters, a library for work-people, a steam laundry, and bathing tubs. I went next to the communal washhall, a large room where fifty women can wash at the same time with every imaginable steam and electric contrivance for washing, ironing, and drying clothes. Each woman is given a numbered drying-bin into which she puts the clothes when they are washed, and in twenty minutes they are dry. They reminded me of the lockers in modern golf clubs in America, being made of metal, only they are larger and they shoot out from the wall, and inside you find a large clothes “horse” or towel rack on which the clothes are hung, and then the whole contraption, contents and all, glides back into the wall and there is not a piece of white linen to be seen. In the most modern building erected during the last two years the wash-halls are now divided into cabins, so that there can be no invidious comparison between the inmates as to the paucity or excessive quality of their washing. Such is human nature even in a Utopian Viennese workmen’s dwelling.

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9. Edward L. Schaub Vienna’s Socialistic Housing Experiment First published in Social Service Review 4, no. 4 (1930): 575–86. The sociologist Edward L. Schaub (1881–1953) focuses on one question: Why would Vienna favor the model of multistory housing instead of the idyllic model of the garden city? According to Schaub, visitors from the United States or England are in for a bitter disappointment. Schaub details the reasons for the Vienna model, citing the lack of buildable property and the high infrastructure costs for developing settlements in the city’s hinterlands. He praises the municipal housing complexes and justifies the relatively small apartments (a frequent criticism) by pointing to the generous public infrastructure surrounding the buildings. In addition, Schaub thoroughly explains the funding model (housing construction tax) and leaves it to the reader to conclude how well this “experiment” will be able to be replicated in the future. Hence it was that the Social Democrats who acquired the political control in Vienna in May 1919, soon found in the housing conditions of the city the most urgent of the problems confronting them. Here, it seemed, lay the supreme test of their theories and the outstanding challenge to the vision and the constructive capacities of their leaders. It was apparent that novel measures were imperative, and that the municipality faced the necessity of engaging on a large scale in the construction and operation of dwellings for its employees and the working classes generally. [. . .] The structures as a whole impress visitors differently according to the standards they have in mind when examining them. Those familiar with the garden city and the superior suburban developments in America and England may perhaps experience a shock of disappointment when they see what has been done in Vienna. Probably, however, this will yield to a feeling of gratified surprise and of genuine admiration once the actual conditions are understood under which Vienna achieved her results. To her, garden-city projects on a large scale were simply out of the question for reasons of cost as well as of dearth in available and possible transportation facilities. Satellite cities, set apart by open spaces and having industries of their own, could not be considered because already existing industrial plants far exceeded the needs of the severely reduced state and its limited opportunities for export trade; neither the financial conditions nor the economic outlook permitted any thought of founding new industries or of transplanting to new localities those already established. As for an extensive residential community within the confines of Vienna, this was impossible for various reasons. The city did not itself own a sufficiently large or a suitable tract of land for the purpose, nor could this be purchased at any price that could be paid; the city lacked the legal powers of condemnation for the acquisition of land for housing purposes; the cost of extensions which would have been necessary to provide water, sewerage, gas, electricity, and transportation would have been prohibitive; new school buildings, fire stations, etc., would have imposed further heavy burdens. Hence the only practicable alternative was to utilize vacant parcels of land in scattered districts of the city that were already fairly well built up. Even so, one of the greatest of all the difficulties confronting the enterprise was in securing adequate and suitable building sites. For in 1919 the city owned but little vacant property, and much

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of this had been specifically dedicated to use for schools or official buildings. During the war vacant lots had been turned into vegetable gardens, and it was not easy under the existing economic conditions to secure the abandonment of this source of food supply. Moreover, inasmuch as Vienna was without adequate powers of damnation for purposes of building homes, the owners of vacant and suitable ground areas were inclined to demand exorbitant, and in many cases even prohibitive, prices for their property. But these obstacles were surmounted. Lots were secured convenient to industries or transportation, in some instances close to public markets and baths, and in localities already served whit the requisite public facilities. On these lots the city, through its own constituted bureaus, constructed apartment buildings or groups of buildings. Those thus far in use house families ranging in number, as it happens, from 16 at the smallest to 1,600 at the largest. [. . .] By affording relief in the matter of rents, the municipality was enabled to impose a heavy tax upon tenants, and by this means to acquire an immense sum of money to be used for purposes of building. This building tax represented on the average about one-eighth of the pre-war rental. It was, however, levied on a sliding-scale basis, so that the half-million cheapest apartments, representing 82 per cent of the total number taxed, contributed but 22 per cent of the total taxes, whereas the 3,400 most expensive apartments, representing but 1/2 per cent of the whole number, were compelled to furnish 45 per cent of the total housing construction tax levied upon tenants. In epitome: Vienna landlords of earlier years were practically deprived of all income from their properties, though provision was made for assessments to cover necessary repairs; they received in return nothing save a realization that, even if the rent laws were at some time to be repealed, their properties would confront the competition of an immense number of new and municipally constructed buildings, whose costs were defrayed through taxes that have been collected and upon which no interest returns were sought. Tenants on the other hand, paid in rentals plus building taxes but a small fraction of their pre-war outlay for rent alone. The city acquired a large fund, which is used for the construction of domiciles. [. . .] Most amazing is the way in which the city of Vienna thus made good through municipal activity what private capital was under the conditions unable to accomplish. Without resorting to loans—or making any drafts upon the future it transplanted its workers from congested and unsanitary quarters into livable and even attractive quarters. As the older buildings demand replacement, additional construction will be imperative, and so long as the economic conditions demand that wages be kept to low levels in order to keep industry active, this task will continue to fall upon the city. This leads the Social Democrats to the conclusion that the construction of healthful and satisfactory homes for the wide masses of Vienna will remain a permanent task for the municipality. Not unnaturally, however, the rent laws and the building program have become the storm center of municipal politics. With every city election they are in the forefront of interest and capture the headlines of the papers. Recent upheavals in the general political situation may very well require the addition of quite a different story as the sequel to the forgoing.

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10. Charles O. Hardy The Housing Program of the City of Vienna First published as “Introduction,” in The Housing Program of the City of Vienna (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1934), 1–4. Written by economist Charles O. Hardy (1884–1948), this report of the Viennese housing program was the first international monograph on the subject. The book appeared directly following the violent end of Red Vienna, as the author notes in his first sentence. Hardy was made aware of the Viennese phenomenon by the well-known German economist and demographer Robert René Kuczynski (1876–1947). Their planned collaboration came to an end when Kuczynski had to flee Nazi Germany in 1933, after which he emigrated to England where he taught at the London School of Economics. Hardy’s approach is deeply colored by the Great Depression and by Vienna’s capacity to overcome its social crises after World War I. According to his own accounts, Hardy was supported in his study by the Social Democratic city councillors Julius Tandler and Anton Weber as well as by the economists Otto Neurath and Ludwig Mises. In February 1934 Dollfuß’s heavy artillery knocked at the doors of the Karl Marx Hof to announce the end of one of the most elaborate and carefully thought-out programs of municipal social service which modern history records. The city of Vienna hat been continuously under the control of the Social Democratic party for nearly 15 years. Throughout this period, it had been the continuous policy of the party that the city government should render to the people of the city gratuitously, or at nominal cost, as extensive services as its financial resources, accumulated by drastically progressive taxes, would permit. In this program by far the most ambitious undertaking was the provision of housing capital at the expense of the community. The Social Democratic party professed as an ideal the general principle that housing ought to be furnished free to those inhabitants of a city whose demand does not exceed the normal standard of living of the community. The actual program never went this far, since only capital costs, not operating expenses, have been met out of public funds. But the program has been defended on the ground that the provision of normal housing is not merely a public utility—that it is a public service to be rendered without charge, just as is the provision of schoolhouses, hospitals, and jails. [. . .] Though no effort has been made to carry out such a program of absolute free housing as these statements of principle imply, the Social Democratic party undertook to alleviate housing conditions by public activity as soon as it came into power in 1919. Even before the war, housing conditions in Vienna had been notoriously bad. In 1914 there were more than 400,000 homes, or about three-fourths of the whole number in the city, which consisted of only one or two rooms and a small kitchen. Families—even those with steady incomes—were crowded together in cramped and ill-ventilated quarters. Very few small dwellings were vacant—of the smallest sized group which alone could be afforded by an unskilled labourer, less than 1 per cent. The homes of the poor were filled with lodgers, and public refuges for the homeless were chronically overcrowded. The war and its aftermath changed chronic distress into acute crisis. During the war Austria, in common with most warring countries, adopted a policy of rent restriction, and this policy to a larger degree than everywhere else has become a fixed feature

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of the country’s economic life. As revised after the war, the rent restriction laws almost completely expropriate the landlord for the benefit of the tenant. [. . .] This policy has helped the situation of many tenants who are fortunate enough to have been in possession of apartments at the time the restrictions went into force, but it has aggravated the difficulties of newcomers and of newly founded households, because apartments are almost never given up by those who hold them. There was almost no construction of homes, either by public or by private effort, during the war, and since then there has been almost no private building. In large part the municipal building program was the result, therefore, of an acute shortage in the quantity of available dwellings, a condition which private enterprise under the post-war conditions seemed to be unable to remedy. But a closely related element in the decision to build houses at public expense was dissatisfaction with the quality of the available housing. The shortage was the prime reason for starting the program; its continuance, however, was primarily due to a desire to raise the standards of quality. [. . .] The dramatic costing of the Social Democratic city government by authority of the national government in 1934, though the actual destruction of homes which accompanied it was very small, abruptly interrupted the progress of the housing project. We have at this writing no information as to the housing plans of the new government; in any case we may be sure that the program of 1919–33 will not be continued—this story is at an end.

11. John Gunther Danube Blues (from Inside Europe) First published as Inside Europe (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1936), 287. The American author and journalist John Gunther (1901–1970) became famous during the 1930s with his “Inside Books.” Inside Europe became the impulse that eventually led Gunther to all of the world’s continents over the course of the following decades. His observations of the political and social conditions in Austria focus on the conflict between Austria’s Catholic hinterlands and the Social Democratic capital city, although he makes no secret of his sympathies for the latter. The disequilibrium between Marxist Vienna and the clerical countryside was the dominating motiv of Austrian politics until the rise of Hitler. Vienna was socialist, anticlerical, and, as a municipality, fairly rich. The hinterland was poor, backward, conservative, Roman Catholic, and jealous of Vienna’s higher standard of living. The socialists, to defend themselves in what they thought was their impregnable citadel, founded a private army of young workmen and intellectuals, the Schutzbund. The countryside promptly countered with a similar army—but recruited from primitive and hungry peasant lads, in leather breeches and green hats—the Heimwehr. The struggle between these two forces resulted in the civil war of February 1934. In Vienna the socialists produced a remarkable administration, making it probably the most successful municipality in the world. By means of an ingenious if Draconian taxation system they financed paternalistic reforms of unparalleled quantity and quality; they built health clinics, baths, gymnasia, sanatoria, schools, kindergartens, and the imposing

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sunshine dwellings which, in decency and cleanliness if not luxury, housed sixty thousand families—socialist families. They eliminated slums, they cut down drastically the tuberculosis rate; they took money from the rich, who could spare it, and used it for the benefit of the worthy poor. The achievements of the Vienna socialists were the most exhilarating social monument of the post-War period in any European country. Result: the clericals bombed them out of existence.

Part XI Reaction

“And you would vote Social Democrat?” Poster (1928) of the anti-Marxist Lower Austrian Farmers’ Federation, denouncing the leaders of the Social Democrats as “Jews.” (Courtesy of Bildarchiv/ÖNB.)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

ANTI-SEMITISM Nicole G. Burgoyne and Vrääth Öhner

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he rise of political anti-Semitism as a populist strategy of slander, discrimination, and repression of Jewish citizens and refugees is associated in Vienna above all with the name of Karl Lueger, the founder of the Christian Social Party and mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910. Lueger was not the first Viennese politician who exploited antiJewish sentiments for political purposes, but he was the first who, on the basis of these sentiments, succeeded in uniting the varied anti-liberal, conservative petty bourgeois, and antisocialist reform movements of the 1880s into a mass party and thus put an end to the liberal hegemony in Vienna. Lueger created a coherent political narrative out of the “popular” articulation of anti-Semitism that imagined Vienna as the epitome of a preindustrial-bourgeois, corporatist-familial, and above all Christian city pitted against the Jewish other. In Lueger’s Vienna, Jews (who, by constitutional law since 1867, had been citizens with equal rights) were held responsible for just about every development that threatened the existence of the petty bourgeoisie, including industrial and finance capitalism, which replaced the traditional forms of economy; secularism, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism which loosened religious as well as local bonds and therefore supposedly led to a decline of values and morals; and materialism and abstract rationalism which demystified the world and spawned Marxist socialism. If anti-Semitism was but a populist strategy, firmly rooted in the city’s political discourse because of Lueger, after the collapse of the monarchy and the lost world war it became further radicalized through the spread of racialized anti-Semitic sentiments. This radicalization is usually attributed to the pan-German People’s Party (Großdeutsche Volkspartei) which as the successor of the pan-German (völkisch) movement sympathized with Georg von Schönerer’s radical anti-Semitism, and to the pan-German students at Vienna’s universities who were predominantly inclined toward German nationalism and among the first to turn on their Jewish classmates. However, after the end of the war, a wide range of Christian intellectuals thought that the so-called Jewish question could only be solved with discriminatory laws, internment, or expulsion. This included Christian-conservative intellectuals such as Richard von Kralik or Joseph Eberle as well as a new generation of Christian Social politicians including Leopold Kunschak, Emmerich Czermak, and Anton Jerzabek, who founded the Anti-Semites League in 1919. Ideas for such policies were discussed in and supported by the Reichspost, the official daily newspaper of the Christian Social Party that was founded in 1894 to counter the supposedly Jewish-dominated liberal bourgeois press with an emphatically Christian Social publication. In the interwar years the Reichspost became the foremost publication of Christian

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Social anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitic attacks were also common in political speeches, fliers, posters, and brochures. The anti-Semites used two closely related issues to justify their radicalization. On the one hand, Jews were but one minority among many during the monarchy. In the republic, however, they constituted the largest minority when Pan-Germans, Christian Socials, and other political groupings (from the paramilitary Heimwehr to the Rural League and Farmers’ Federation, and the National Socialists) already saw their dream of an ethnically and religiously homogenous population come true in a country relieved of its non-German speaking territories. On the other hand, the presence of a large number of Eastern Jewish war refugees brought renewed attention to a differentiation that had already existed under the monarchy, namely between the assimilated, worldly Jewish members of the bourgeoisie and the recently immigrated, mostly orthodox Eastern Jews, who often held fast onto traditional morals and customs. The latter were the preferred targets of anti-Semitic attacks, although this did not mean that Jewish bankers, factory owners, politicians, and artists were spared. Whereas politicians such as Leopold Kunschak accused the Eastern Jewish refugees of taking away apartments from Viennese workers, others used the same argument with regard to teaching positions at universities. Political antiSemitism, even in its Christian Social form, was never shy to apply clichés primarily associated with the Eastern Jews to the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie as well. Moreover, when the Social Democrats took control of the Vienna city government, not only were many of the party’s leading personalities of Jewish heritage but their opponents also identified them collectively as Jews. If, following a thesis promoted by historian Steven Beller, political anti-Semitism was at the beginning an extreme means by which to redistribute wealth along ethnic instead of class antipathies, a party that had raised class struggle within its program necessarily fell into disrepute as a protector of Jewish business interests. Above all, socialism was viewed as part of the “Jewish world conspiracy” in light of its Marxist origins. However, this did not mean that the Social Democrats were free of anti-Semitic sentiments, rather, their anti-Semitism was aimed not against Jews as an ethnic minority but rather as representatives of big business and finance capital. Further reading Beller 1989 Boyer 1995 Maderthaner and Musner 1999 Pelinka 1992 Wasserman 2014

1. Joseph Eberle The Jewish Question First published as “Die Judenfrage,” Das Neue Reich, January 30, 1919, 309–13. Translated by Nicole G. Burgoyne. Joseph Eberle, editor in chief of the conservative right-wing Catholic newspaper Das Neue Reich (The new empire) contributed an early document of political Catholicism in the immediate post–World War I period on the “Jewish question.” The article’s central claim,



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that the Christian majority is ruled by the Jewish minority and that for this reason it is necessary to take up defensive measures against “Jewry’s drive to conquer,” is one of the pillars of a Christian-conservative ideology that bound together anti-Semitic resentment with Catholic, pan-German, anti-socialist and anti-democratic elements. The position of Das Neue Reich as the leading newspaper for Catholic intellectuals in the German-speaking world—and not just an obscure publication on the periphery of the Right—shows just how deeply rooted antiSemitism was in the Catholic milieu. As Janek Wasserman has emphasized, the positions first presented in Das Neue Reich by Eberle and others were even more radical than those of the Christian Socials and the Pan-Germans. They thereby played a part in the authoritarian turn of the Christian Socials at the end of the 1920s. The Jewish question is in some respects the most important question today. Hardly any problem can be solved without taking a position on it, without solving the Jewish question. Many speak today of democracy, of the people’s right to self-determination, and Christians speak of such things too. But what does all that mean when the Jews are living among us acting like a little aristocracy? They own the banks and the wholesale trade almost in their entirety, and two thirds of industry, especially that which is based on stock shares. They own a quarter of property and control another quarter as tenants. What use is the talk of spiritual liberation and renewal of Christians when the Jews control the daily news, lead the theater, set the tone in literature and fashion; when Jewish lawyers replace the Christian-German interpretation of the law with a Talmudic interpretation; when the Jews, who occupy nearly half of all university professor positions, fight against Christian philosophy as teachers; when the Jews champion egotistical materialist principles as preachers of liberalism in matters of politics and the economy! Since the Reformation, the Jews have come up in society as financial backers of the absolutist princes; after the French Revolution of 1789 they have forced their way, step by step, to emancipation. Shortly thereafter resounded the cries of Christians about this uncanny expansion of the Jews’ power at the expense of Christians, indeed the enslavement of Christians. As early as 1850, Richard Wagner (in “Jewry in Music”) regretted that Mr. von Rothschild was too clever to make himself the king of the Jews. Instead, he managed to remain the Jew of the kings. According to Wagner, “Completely unnoticed, the faithful sponsor of the kings became the king of the faithful and we can but find this king’s request for emancipation extraordinarily naive, since we find ourselves in a situation where we must fight for emancipation from the Jews. As it currently stands, the Jew is far more than emancipated: he rules. .  .  .” In the intervening sixty-eight years, the Jews’ property, the Jews’ power, the Jews’ influence has grown quite monstrously. Everywhere the Christian population experiences the situation that Franz von Liszt prophesized: “The moment will come when all Christian nations, in which the Jew lives, will recognize that the question of whether he is to be kept or expelled will be a question of life and death. The question is one of health or progressive illness, of social peace or ever more infection and constant fever.” [. . .] A central issue for the solution of the Jewish question is the renewal of the Christian spirit in the public and private spheres of life; the debunking of an array of idols (capitalism, liberalism), whose recognition by Christians grants support to Jewry. An array of external measures must go hand in hand with the renewal of the Christian spirit. There are several defensive measures that Christians should take against Jewry’s demonic drive to conquer them. [. . .] The first is: restriction of Jews in all branches of culture and business to a percentage corresponding to their number in the general population. The second (which goes hand in hand with the first) must be: setting the Jews under a special set of laws. This

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may sound harsh in a time of tolerance to the point of self-sacrifice; but it reflects the experience of centuries and it reflects the insight of free men up to and including the present day such as Goethe, Fichte, Bismarck, Richard Wagner, and others. If the Jews’ character, worldview, and practice is such that their emancipation has led in the shortest time to the “mancipation,” that is enslavement of Christians, then the freedom of Christians in states overwhelmingly populated by Christians lies in special laws for the Jews. Following the Christian way, these laws would respect the Jews as people but make it impossible for the Jews to subvert and supersede Christian society. As Thomas Aquinas declared as a sociologist of the thirteenth century, society must respect the natural and godly law regarding Jews as people; additionally, however, he declared the Jews to be slaves (servi) of society in that their possessions beyond whatever was necessary for daily life belonged to the church and the prince; in other words the latter should be able to command the Jews in the interest of society as a whole. In the same way, the interest of society today demands the confiscation of numerous Jewish fortunes above a certain amount. Additionally, a numerus clausus is necessary for many professions. For other professions, as well as certain institutions, the interest of society demands the exclusion of Jews entirely. [. . .] The experience of eighteen hundred years shows that everywhere and in all circumstances the Jews remain a people unto themselves, while other scattered and repressed people always melted into the surrounding tribes over the course of centuries, sometimes even despite prohibitive laws. . . . The great men of the last century have said the same with few exceptions, even the “freest” and “most tolerant.” At this turning point in time, it is necessary to take renewed note of the ideas that have been silenced and denied by the Jewish press. The conclusions of these ideas must be put into practice. Not out of hatred for the Jews but rather out of love of our poor enslaved Christian brothers.

2. Jacques Hannak Jewry at a Crossroads First published as “Das Judentum am Scheidewege,” Der Kampf 12, no. 27 (1919): 649–53. Translated by Nicole G. Burgoyne. In his analysis of modern (political) anti-Semitism answered by efforts of Jewish nation building, Jacques Hannak (1892–1973), a Social Democrat journalist and himself of Jewish heritage, broadly captures Social Democracy’s thoroughly ambivalent position toward Jewish citizens. The text could just as well be titled “Social Democracy at a Crossroads,” as the party stood before the question of whether they would take the offensive for Jewish people or rather continue to fight anti-Semitism as a reactionary means of obscuring class antipathies. Hannak’s choice of the latter was based on a number of considerations, including the conviction that anti-Semitism would disappear along with class struggle in a socialist society—not least because the Jewish proletariat would have overcome Judaism on the path to socialism, in other words Jews would become completely assimilated. The upswing of national Jewry is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the revolution.1 After the election success in German Austria, the Czech municipal elections also 1 The

revolution to which Hannak refers is the Austrian revolution, that is, the fall of the monarchy and the proclamation of the republic on November 12, 1918. See chapter 1.



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brought noteworthy victories for the Jewish national and it is worth the effort to take a principled position in regard to this new “national question.”2 One can speak of a Jewish problem having existed ever since there have been Jews. This concept is best understood today as a question of modern anti-Semitism. The liberation of Western European Jews from the ghetto at the beginning of the last century was the prerequisite of this modern development. A sharp demarcation is thereby drawn between the Western European and Eastern European Jew, the latter of whom had to remain in the ghetto. This difference in destinies is, however, deeply rooted in economic conditions. While Eastern Europe remains in a feudal, agricultural paradigm, Western Europe is prepared to pass over the threshold into the age of capitalism. It is the time of idealistic youthful fancies of capitalism. Economic liberalism is closely bound up with political liberalism and vice versa. Into this enthusiasm for general freedom stepped a people who had vegetated in the deepest darkness of degradation, contempt, and persecution and who survived all this misery purely by means of the elemental force of their naked will to live. The minds most sharpened by the principles of selection step into the battle of life in the moment when this battle for life is raised from a means to an end and for which “the free play of economic powers” is the dogma. In truth, the times have called forth the people that it needs. And so we see the intensity of the Jewish spirit, which has been concentrated and pressed together in the ghetto, stream into the sea of capitalist competition. These fresh, unused powers are overpowering in the first onslaught, liberalism itself has helped to tear away all impediments. Without drawing notice, the Jew has taken economic leadership into his hands. Yes, from the outside it seductively appears as though the capitalist era were a product of the strength of Jewish will and not, conversely, as if the liberation and rise of the Jews were only a product and a necessary consequence of capitalist development. This supposition mistakes cause for effect. Yet in the battle against the rising socialist movement, the system of capitalism uses this supposition as a core statement to defend itself. [. . .] Capitalism’s instinctive defensive movement is the attempt to push social tension to the periphery and to overshadow the idea of class conflict by pushing forward other slogans. Slogans such as nationalism but even more the new anti-Semitism. It builds on the cursory outlook of the simple man of the people, who concretely sees capitalism as Jewish money­ lenders, Jewish sellers of furniture by installment, Jewish deliverers of groceries, Jewish manufacturers, Jewish lawyers, Jewish stockbrokers, press moguls and those who define public opinion. Thus, even in the class-conscious layers of the proletariat, people are easily inclined to seek the malady not in the abstract system, but rather in the concrete, in the flesh, in the Jews who embody the system. Only slowly and with work to raise consciousness can the masses learn that they are on the wrong track and that nothing would be any better even if a death blow were dealt to all Jews and all those in the world descended from Jews because though perhaps the bearers of the system would be dead, the system itself would not be. Capitalism is something completely impersonal, it is a mechanism that is not bound to the destiny of nations, confessions, nor generations, and the hour of its destiny will only come when we have grasped the innermost being of this mechanism as an international, interconfessional front of exploiters on the one side and the exploited on the other. Even though, however, the politics of socialism rejects and fights anti-Semitism as a reactionary means to confuse the worker’s spirit of class struggle, still Jewry immediately 2

With the election of the Constituent National Assembly on February 16, 1919, Robert Stricker, a journalist and member of the executive board of the Jewish Community Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien), was able to achieve a mandate for the Jewish National Party.

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recognizes, and quite rightly, that fighting anti-Semitism is not at all identical with protecting Jewry. Socialism is fundamentally lukewarm toward the Jews, it does not ask whether one is a Jew or not, it only asks if one is bourgeois or proletariat. And thus, socialism unifies the proletariat of all countries and all nations, but it does not give any special right of protection to any country or nation. Thus Jewish capital sees itself threatened from two fronts: first, by the class struggle of the proletariat, which threatens the Jewish money purse just as much as the Aryan one, and second, by the enemy that comes from the ranks of their own “comrades in arms,” from the ranks of Aryan capital, which, lusting for the spoils of their Jewish competitors, gladly uses anti-Semitism as a means of popular propaganda, to kill two birds with one stone: their Jewish competitors on the one hand and the proletarian class movement on the other! The Jewish bourgeoisie has naturally taken up arms. Its method is assimilation, baptism of Jews, a Teutonic attitude. Assimilation, however, is a farsighted game, and promises only for later generations the success of really and completely blotting out their heritage. For the moment, the anti-Semitic theories of Chamberlain and his consorts stand in the way.3 Thus, the Jewish bourgeoisie needs another means of protection. So their prophet, Theodor Herzl, who died a little over fifteen years ago, speaks the saving word of their own Jewish state, of their own Jewish nation. No assimilation, but rather the organized unification toward a nation! Now of course there is nothing more absurd than forming a nation, especially one made up of the bourgeoisie and intellectuals alone without the support of a farmers’ class and with only very little support from a manual proletariat. A giant bloated bourgeoisie on the weak dwarfed little feet of a tiny physical working class! The leading issue of this movement is, however, the question of Eastern European Jewry. Because this question is truly a burning question for the proletariat. [. . .] If Jewry among us stands at a crossroads, then it is not the Jewish bourgeoisie whose roads and crossroads fills our hearts with worry. Rather it is the Jewish proletariat which, having significantly aligned itself quite closely with international socialism today, stands before the question of how it can bring the heated drive and the religious passion of its people into agreement and in the service of the duties of internationalism. Because as paradoxical as it may sound, it is still deeply true: Jews lack the radicalism of a socialist manner of thinking. The step of overcoming oneself, which the Jews have yet to take, is the step from the all-Jewish Internationale to that of the Internationale of all proletarians of the world.

3. Anonymous The Jewish Question in the National Assembly First published as “Die Judenfrage in der Nationalversammlung,” Reichspost, April 30, 1920, 1–2. Translated by Nicole G. Burgoyne. The immediate occasion for the debate in the Austrian Parliament on April 30 was a protest rally “against the progressive poisoning of the native people,” 4 which took place on April 29, 1920, in the People’s Hall (Volkshalle) of the Vienna City Hall and was called 3

Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s (1855–1927) The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1911 [1899]) became a standard work of theoretical racial anti-Semitism. 4 Anonymous, “Gegen das jüdische Schmarotzertum,” Reichspost, April 27, 1920, 3.



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by the Anti-Semites League (Antisemitenbund). According to the Reichspost, the meeting of April 26 was attended by ten thousand people. Apart from Anton Jerzabek, the founder of the Anti-Semites League and a member of the right wing of the Christian Social Party, the leader of the Austrian National Socialists, Walter Riehl, also spoke. Building on the fact that the first public anti-Semitic outpouring of pan-German students took place on the same and following day, the Christian Social representative Leopold Kunschak gave a speech in Parliament that is emblematic of the radicalization of anti-Semitism within the Christian Social Party. Kunschak himself was an ardent anti-Semite, although as head of the Christian Social Workers’ Association he was actually a representative of the left wing of the party. His demand for immediate expulsion or internment of Jews in concentration camps anticipates a program that the National Socialists in Vienna would systematically enact beginning in 1938. Today, the National Assembly has addressed the sections of the budget devoted to the interior, to education, and to culture. The Jewish question, perpetually associated with the name of Secretary of the Interior Eldersch as well as the repercussions of the [anti-] Jewish riots at Vienna’s universities and colleges, led to a debate about the Jews that peaked in Christian Social Party leader Kunschak’s comprehensive reckoning with Eldersch’s system.5 Kunschak drew reasons from the deepest soul of the people that make the demand for protection from the Eastern Jews in Vienna ever more elementary. In earnest words he warned those who have vacillated regarding the Jewish question up until now that he sees the riots as a prelude to a large people’s uprising, born of necessity and outrage. The uprising is unavoidable if the emigration or internment of the foreign Jews is not successfully undertaken. The fact that the Social Democratic workers themselves are also ripe for such an uprising, is evident enough. [. . .]  

The “either-or” of the Jewish question. Representative Kunschak (Christian Social) declared that the student riots were not an isolated incident, but rather only the acute expression of our serious illness, which consists of holding fast to war refugees of a certain kind, the Eastern Jews, to this day in Vienna, who, apparently, cannot be made to leave. The refugees of other nations went of their own accord back to their homeland, regardless of the situation that awaited them there. A true love of homeland was alive in all of these Aryan refugees. Only the Eastern Jews who have remained here are those who—like all Jews—lack a feeling of love of homeland. The Jew’s homeland is the soil where his oats grow, and it is only his homeland as long as oats may be reaped. (Laughter and agreement.) And precisely because a socially and economically diseased organism is a rich and fertile soil for speculation and selfenrichment for people with neither morality nor further conscience, the Eastern Jews stay with us, like locusts, who will not leave a country until it is eaten bare. (Shouts: “Very true!”) We insist that they finally for once and for all be removed from our country (lively agreement), and if they will not do so of their own free will, our people expect the government and in particular the state office of the interior, to end the sorrows of its native people, even at the risk of bringing sorrow to one or another group of the Eastern Jews. 5 The Social Democrat Matthias Eldersch (1869–1931) was minister of the interior and education from October 17, 1919 to July 7, 1920 and would therefore have been in charge of implementing Kunschak’s demand of expulsion or imprisonment.

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(Lively agreement.) Now, our people demand—without regard to whether they are Christian Socials or Pan-Germans, no, even broad masses of the Social Democratic workers (Shouts: “Quite right!”)—that Vienna finally be freed from the plague of Eastern Jews who have become a plague on the city. (Shouts: “Bravo.”) And precisely the workers call for the removal of Jews because they, above all others, suffer most under the terrible shortage of housing, because they must look on as hundreds of their countrymen and fellow workers are housed in wretched wagons, while foreign people make themselves at home in Viennese apartments. Profiteering and hedonism and the need for luxury are for the most part the direct qualities of or morally supported by the Eastern Jews. (Lively agreement.) All seats in the universities and high schools are occupied today by Jews, who, having immigrated from Galicia, have extricated themselves from military duty with all manner of clever tricks, even with the excuse of candidacy for the rabbinate. And they take every opportunity from the students who, having returned from the war, seek an independent existence after completing their studies. Jewish intellectuals have also spread out here, while the Aryan lawyer fulfilled his duty in service to the fatherland. We have also been flooded by innumerable Jewish doctors. Where a Jew sets up shop, the whole mishpocha follows shortly. (Laughter and agreement.) But also in the bureaucracy, Jewry forces itself in at unheard-of levels. Many believe that since the founding of the republic, they must bow before every Jew thrice in the name of democracy and a citizen’s freedom so that they will not complain of being slighted. So they find unhindered entrance to every public office, even if it is only as a contract officer, despite a hiring freeze. (Shouts: “Listen! Listen!”) Think your way into the views of the students and the people, then you wouldn’t say that the demonstrations are an outpouring of backward convictions, a decline into barbarism, but rather you would grasp: this is the elementary outpouring of a repressed people’s soul, that helplessly looks on as it is given up to these vampires! (A storm of applause.) What is expressed in the student riots is the outpouring of a people’s rancor long held back, a people who feel themselves abandoned by its leaders and its government. The fact that the students were the first to express this feeling can be explained by the youth and enthusiasm of such people. What we have experienced from the students and what we so completely regret, you can experience as a people’s uprising in the truest sense writ large, with the participation of thousands of Social Democratic workers. (Shouts: “That’s how it is!”) [. . .] Expulsion or internment! The State Office of the Interior should expel the Eastern Jews who will not go of their own free will. People always mention the difficulties that are associated with our relationship to Poland. The Poles have no desire to have their countrymen back! (Laughter.) But we cannot be sentenced on that account to bear their pleasant company forever. We could put before the Jews the choice either to emigrate of their own free will or be put into a concentration camp. There can be absolutely no objection to such a choice on the basis of human rights or the peace treaty. We demand—if the Jews are not expelled nor go of their own free will—that they be interned in such concentration camps without delay. When our people learn that they will no longer be strangled by these elements, they will gladly agree that the costs for the sustenance of the Jews be taken on from federal funds, possibly from raising a dedicated per capita tax. Incidentally, it could all be paid quite easily by means of the collective liquidation. I thank Representative Stricker



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for describing the Jews as a unified people of fourteen million.6 If the Jews constitute a nation, then they are foreigners among us and only have claim to those rights which are afforded them by protection of minorities. We therefore request that a law be made by the National Assembly that officially recognizes the legal relationship of the Jews as that of a foreign minority. (Vehement applause.)

4. Hugo Bettauer Have You Already Read? The City Without Jews: A Novel of the Day After Tomorrow. The Author on His Book First published as “Haben Sie schon gelesen? ‘Die Stadt ohne Juden.’ Ein Roman von übermorgen. Der Autor über sein Buch,” Die Börse, July 13, 1922, 15–16. Translated by Nicole G. Burgoyne. Hugo Bettauer’s (1872–1925) Die Stadt ohne Juden opens with an anti-Jew law passed in Vienna on a calm day unmarred by the usual violence against “people with hooked noses or dark hair.” All Jews and the children of mixed marriages must leave Vienna within six months’ time. Vienna’s Jewish citizens wait at home and plan their immediate departure. As one reporter explains to a recently arrived colleague from London, the collapse of the economy had led to electoral victory of a staunchly anti-Jewish Christian Social Party. After a few scenes of those who must leave, all of whom seem bound for England or America, claiming no interest in Jerusalem, the novel follows a young Jewish man as the protagonist who boasts a completely devoted Christian fiancée. While posing as an Italian aristocrat, he uses his business sense and pure gumption to re-start some of Vienna’s faltering business and inspire the reversal of the anti-Jew law. The largely economic incentives for the anti-Jew law and its unexpected negative repercussions ranging from currency devaluation to international trade disruptions make up the more serious plot of the novel. Culminating in an apologetic speech in Parliament inviting the Jews back, Bettauer ends his novel on a positive note of a lesson learned. Political motivations led a Nazi sympathizer to murder Bettauer in 1925.7 Once, as I sought out one of those places where you do not stay any longer than absolutely necessary, I saw displayed among other inspiring inscriptions on the wall the repeated categorical proposition: Out with the Jews! This cry of longing from what is surely an otherwise goodly man—a cry also found on posters under the sweet swastika, heard often enough in street cars and described as the Christian Teutonic cleansing program in the “Viennese voices” [“Wiener Stimmen”] column—this cry of longing excited my fancy to playful thoughts about how this Vienna would most likely unfold, if the Jews at one point really did follow this polite suggestion and leave the city. From then on, for days on end, I began to study the company signs, the donors’ lists, and the personal ads in newspapers, and people in theaters and entertainment locales. I looked at flowery and plain names, at crooked and turned up 6

Robert Stricker was a representative of the Jewish National Party in the Constituent National Assembly, see footnote 2. 7 See chapter 25 and the 1924 film of the same name directed by Hans Karl Breslauer and related scholarship on the subject, including Geser and Loacker (2000).

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noses, and the result was this little novel of the future, which has just appeared with the Viennese Gloriette Publishing House under the title “The City Without Jews.” [. . .] As I said, I have written an amusing book, which shows a cinematographic picture of Vienna as it would look without Jews through a series of sketches held together by a harmless narrative. Without Jews, which means without people who have a businesslike temperament, people with a need for luxury, with a proclivity for grandeur and good living, with exhibitionist instincts and with that certain lightheartedness that seems to be necessary for progress and pushing forward. Vienna, the city of operettas, cannot produce any more operettas because the composers or librettists, usually both, are Jews. Vienna’s luxury shops decline because it is not the autochthonous people from the mountains who love expensive clothing and furs but rather the immigrated Semitic ones. The coffee houses must close, because the true Viennese values a quarter liter of wine over a mocca, reading the newspaper, and rabulistic conversation. Vienna sinks into poverty, withers, and next thing you know, if the anti-Jew law is not repealed, a cattle market will be held on Stephansplatz. I have made every effort to write this little novel without prejudices, to illustrate rather than to criticize. I was fearful of suggesting that I think the Jews are an absolutely important part of every major city. Oh no! Jews are not absolutely important for every major city but rather only for Vienna. Precisely because the Viennese, these delightful, highly cultured but incurious and lazy citizens, are in many ways absolutely un-metropolitain. These people lack that generous sense of purchase, that certain worldliness. (Hence the particularly Viennese sense of the word “Wurzen” [to fleece], which can be roughly translated as: “it is better to quickly make a gulden off of one person than to make one hundred gulden off of a thousand people.”) A citizen of Vienna thinks broadly but not deeply, he is thoughtful and adverse to rash reactions, he would rather curse the competition than overcome it, in short, he lacks the characteristics that define the Jew but also that of the Roman and even the North German. To show all this in a funny, quickly sketched manner was the goal of this book.

5. Joseph Roth Ghettos in the West: Vienna Published as “Die westlichen Ghettos. I. Wien,” in Juden auf Wanderschaft (Berlin: Verlag Die Schmiede, 1927), 53–64. Translated by Nicole G. Burgoyne. Joseph Roth (1894–1939) was a well-regarded journalist of his day, though he is now best known for his works of fiction, such as The Radetzky March (1932). These pursuits were not mutually exclusive: Roth’s novella Das Spinnennetz (The Spider’s Web), concerning a young man’s increasingly violent entanglement with the Fascist movement, was serialized in the Viennese Arbeiter Zeitung (October 7, 1923 to November 6, 1923). Of The Wandering Jews, from which this excerpt is taken, Roth wrote in a polemical foreword: “This book was not written for readers who will hold it against the author that he handles the subject of his portrait with love instead of ‘scientific objectivity,’ which one might also call boredom.”8 In a tone of sympathy and frustration maintained throughout its pages, 8

Joseph Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft (Berlin: Verlag Die Schmiede, 1927), 7. The novel was translated by Michael Hofmann as The Wandering Jews (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).



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the text “clandestinely,” as Michael Hofmann put it in the translator’s preface to the Norton edition, highlights Roth’s personal connections to the subject of his work. 1. The Eastern Jews who come to Vienna settle in Leopoldstadt, the second of twenty districts. There, they are close to the Prater and the Nordbahnhof. Peddlers can make a living in the Prater—from selling postcards to tourists and from the sympathy, which tends to accompany gaiety everywhere. They all arrived at Nordbahnhof, through its halls wafts the scent of the homeland and it remains the open door for their possible return. Leopoldstadt is a voluntary ghetto. Many bridges connect it with other districts of the city. Traders, peddlers, stockbrokers, those looking to make a deal, thus all unproductive elements of Eastern Jewry that has immigrated cross these bridges during the day. But in the morning hours the progeny of these same unproductive elements crosses these same bridges, the sons and daughters of traders, who work in factories, offices, banks, editorial offices, and workshops. The sons and daughters of Eastern Jews are productive. It might be that the parents play chess and peddle. The young are the most talented lawyers, doctors, bank officials, journalists, and actors. Leopoldstadt is a poor district. There are small apartments, inhabited by families of six. There are hostels in which fifty, sixty people spend the night on the floor. The homeless sleep in the Prater. The poorest of all workers live near the train stations. The Eastern Jews live no better than the Christian inhabitants of these parts of the city. They have many children, they are not accustomed to hygiene and cleanliness, and they are hated. No one feels responsible to take in their own. Their cousins and religious brethren, who sit on editorial boards in the First District, are “already” Viennese und do not wish to be related to the Eastern Jews and certainly do not wish to be mistaken for them. Anti-Semitism is an important point in the programs of the Christian Socials and the Pan-Germans. The Social Democrats fear a reputation as a “Jewish party.” The Jewish Nationals are fairly powerless. In any case, the Jewish National Party is a bourgeois party. The large majority of Eastern Jews is, however, made up of the proletariat. The Eastern Jews are sent off to bourgeois charitable organizations for support. Jewish compassion is held in higher regard than it deserves. Jewish charity is just as incomplete an institution as any other. Above all, charity satisfies the donor. In a Jewish charity office, the Eastern Jew is often treated no better by his religious brethren or even his fellow countrymen than by Christians. It is terribly difficult to be an Eastern Jew, there is no heavier burden than that of a foreign Eastern Jew in Vienna. 2. As he steps into the Second District, he is greeted by familiar faces. Greeted? Well, he sees them. Those who came here ten years ago certainly feel no love for those who came after. Yet another one has arrived. Yet another one wants to earn money. Yet another one wants to have a life. The worst of it is: that you cannot get away from him. He is not a foreigner. He is a Jew and a countryman. Someone will take him in. Someone else will advance him a bit of capital or get him some credit. A third will allow him to take over stops on the route he takes to ply his

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wares or put a new one together for him. The new guy becomes a salesman of goods bought on credit. The first, hardest path leads him to the police station. Behind the counter sits a man, who likely cannot stand Jews in general and Eastern Jews in particular. This man will require documents. Improbable documents. Such documents are never required of Christian immigrants. Apart from that, Christian documents are usually found to be in order. All Christians have European names, easy to comprehend. Jews have incomprehensible and Jewish names. Not only that, they have two and three family names designated “false” or “recte.” One never knows their name. Their parents were only married by rabbis. This marriage has no legal validity. If the man was named Weinstock and the woman Abramofsky, the children of this marriage are called Weinstock recte Abramofsky or Abramofsky false Weinstock. The son was given Jewish first names: Leib Nachman. Because this name is difficult and could have a provocative sound to it, the son calls himself Leo. Therefore his name is Leib Nachmann, known as Leo Abramofsky false Weinstock. The police have problems with names like that. The police do not like difficulties. If only it was just the names. But also the dates of birth are not correct. Usually the papers have been burned. (In small Galician, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian towns the registry offices were always burning.) All papers have been lost. The citizenship was not specified. Citizenship is even more of a tangle after the war and the Treaty of Versailles. How did this person get over the border? Without a passport? Or perhaps with a false one? So then his name is not his name and although he submitted so many names, which in itself suggests that they are false, they are really also objectively false. The man on paper, on the registration form, is not identical with the man that has really come. What can you do? Should you lock him up? Then you would not be locking up the right person. Should you expel him? Then the wrong person is expelled. But if you send him back so that he brings new documents, proper ones with indubitable names, then in any case not only is the right one sent back, but potentially a proper person can be made of an improper one. So he is sent back, once, twice, three times. Until the Jew has noticed that nothing is left for him to do but provide false information, so that it seems correct. Stick with one name, that is perhaps not your own but is nevertheless an innocuous, believable name. The police have given Jews the good idea of hiding their real and true but confusing relations behind mendacious but orderly ones. And everyone wonders about the Jews’ ability to make false statements. No one questions the police’s naïve requests. [. . .] 9. The war brought many Eastern Jewish refugees to Vienna. As long as their homeland was occupied, they were given “support.” Their money was not sent to them at their home address. They had to stand in line on the coldest of winter days, in the earliest hours of night. Everyone: the grey-haired, the sick, women, and children. They smuggled. They brought flour, meat, eggs from Hungary. They were locked up in Hungary because they bought up all the food. They were locked up in Austria because they brought unrationed food into the country. They made life easier for the Viennese. They were locked up.



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After the war they were repatriated, at times with force. A Social Democratic governor expelled them.9 For the Christian Socials they are Jews. For the Pan-Germans, they are Semites. For the Social Democrats they are unproductive elements. They are unemployed proletarians. A peddler is a proletarian. Though he does not work with his hands, he makes do with his feet. If he cannot find better work, it is not his fault. What is the point of such self-evident statements? Who believes things that are self-evident?

6. Felix Salten Impossible Choice! Letter to our Editor in Chief First published as “Unmögliche Wahl! Brief an unseren Chefredakteur,” Wiener Sonnund Montagszeitung, April 4, 1927: 1–2. Translated by Nicole G. Burgoyne. In this letter to the editor, Felix Salten (1869–1945)—a feuilletonist for the Neue Freie Presse (New free press) and one of the most prominent authors of the interwar era—reacts to the lead article of the previous week by Ernst Klebinder, the editor in chief of the Jewish liberal weekly newspaper Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung (Viennese Sunday and Monday newspaper). In his article, Klebinder had explained that despite his sympathy for the currently serving chancellor Ignaz Seipel it would be impossible for him to give his vote to the Unity List (Einheitsliste) because of the List’s anti-Semitic party program. The Unity List was the single list of candidates introduced by the Christian Socials for the approaching state and national elections. Salten supports Klebinder’s argument by elaborating on the symbolic meaning of Walter Riehl’s candidacy, as the latter had founded the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei, DNSAP) in 1918 and in 1927 was still the leader of an Austrian splinter group of the National Socialists. One of Salten’s most notable ideas can be found in his reaction to a common fear that anti-Semitism could represent less of a risk to the Jewish bourgeoisie than social democracy: “Dr. Riehl and all those connected to him strive backward into the darkest past; (City Councillor Hugo) Breitner, however, seeks the future.” The fact that the Christian Socials have added Dr. Riehl to their Unity List for the Second District of Vienna is a sign of how completely they are prepared to relinquish Jews’ votes. Not only Jewish votes in Leopoldstadt but also Jewish votes in Austria as a whole. I cannot begin to comprehend the meaning of this kind of symbolism. Therefore, the name of a known Hakenkreuzler in the coalition list seems to me an insult to all Jewish elements. And apart from that I hear an overconfident, threatening: “Eat poison or die!”10 [. . .] 9 Roth is referring Albert Sever (1867–1942), Social Democratic governor of Lower Austria from May 20, 1919, to November 10, 1920, whose “Sever-Erlass“ of September 9, 1919, made a residence permit (Aufenthaltsbewilligung) mandatory for all Jewish refugees from Galicia who wished to remain in Austria. Although this permission to remain was seldom granted, the ordered expulsions could not be executed because the countries to which they were to be expelled would not accept them. See chapter 9. 10 The phrase “Friß, Vogel, oder stirb!” suggests that there is not actually a choice because both options amount to the same thing, namely death.

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Despite all of this there are still some among the Viennese Jews who canvas for the Christian Social Unity List. Baptized and unbaptized Jews who are making efforts to gain votes for the Christian Socials. Only with difficulty did I decide, respected sir, to believe you. Still, it must be correct. Unfortunately. Unfortunately! Some will dare to warm up the mendacious comforts of the Lueger years. In the name of Seipel. You say, respected sir, that the disgusting gossip of appeasement is growing just as it once did in Lueger’s heyday. The point in the Christian Socials’ party program that pointedly insists on antiSemitism is not meant earnestly, but rather is only a formality, it has always been there . . . and other such remarks in this kind of tone. The people really need to be reminded that circumstances are no longer as harmless as they were in Lueger’s days under the emperor. They need to be reminded that today we all face an important decision that will fundamentally change the face of this world. The people must be reminded that the whole comedy of the Lueger times, accompanied by the tootling of Schrammel music, was child’s play compared to the violent uproar that has only just begun and whose outcome we may well not live to see. The people must be reminded that in such times of crises and catastrophes only those who remain true to themselves remain upright. Those who renounce their being, their blood, and their parents will be swept away as un-savable. The Jews who can even contemplate voting for a Riehl—and I hope, honored sir, that they are very, very, few—these Jews find themselves in a psychotic state of confusion. These Jews should come to their senses. When Dr. Riehl paints them as strangers, they should answer him that they have lived here in this country just as long as—if not longer than—the Riehls and the other Hakenkreuzler. When he threatens to set them under a law for foreigners, they must reply that the Jews have suffered for this country for more than one thousand years, three and even four times as much, and have paid for it with more blood than some Aryans. That for the past one thousand years they have received less than a tenth of the justice, nor possessed the rights that every Aryan freely enjoyed and that they will not let themselves be robbed of their equal rights to this native soil by any terrorism at the hands of the Hakenkreuzler. When Dr. Riehl thunders that all Jews who have immigrated after the war—especially those from the East—must be chased away, he should be told that these Jews did neither shape the policies nor start the war, but rather that they were the trampled victims of the emperor’s—and czar’s— policies, of the emperor’s and czar’s war, that they suffered more terribly under this war than did the agitators in the hinterlands. Indeed, even in the time before the war they had to bear the unbearable, while their persecutors felt secure and overconfident lolling about in their office armchairs. However, when Dr. Riehl calls the God of our fathers, Jehovah, a criminal, it is important to establish that all Christians pray to this God. Even Chancellor Seipel. [. . .] I expect the worst of politics, but perhaps because I am no politician, I cannot imagine the degree of moral insanity which would be required for a Jew to give his vote to the lists of Christian Socials. Perhaps because I am no politician, I hope that this psychosis from which some Jews seem to be suffering will weaken as election day approaches. Perhaps, because I am no politician, I do not like to believe that hate for Breitner can lead some to vote for Dr. Riehl. Allegedly, Breitner has annihilated commerce. But Dr. Riehl will not only annihilate commerce, he wants to annihilate human rights, honor, freedom and the existence of the Jews today. I repeat that I am no politician and I have to add: I am also no businessman. It may be that entrepreneurs and capitalists are right to hate Breitner. But I only see the end: Dr. Riehl and those connected to him strive backward into the darkest past; Breitner, however, seeks the future.



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7. Irene Harand Party or Fatherland? First published as “Partei oder Vaterland?,” Gerechtigkeit, November 17, 1933, 1. Translated by Nicole G. Burgoyne. Irene Harand (1900–1975) was an ardent Catholic critic of National Socialism and anti-Semitism. In reaction to Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and the rise to power of Austrofascists within her own political party, she launched the weekly newspaper Gerechtigkeit: Gegen Rassenhass und Menschennot (Righteousness: Against racial hatred and human poverty) on September 6, 1933. The periodical was forced to cease production on March 10, 1938, as Harand fled to the United States. A month into publication, Harand founded an accompanying movement called Weltverband gegen Rassenhass und Menschennot (World Movement Against Racial Hatred and Human Suffering), widely known as the Harand-Bewegung (Harand Movement). Harand’s newspaper and movement built upon the success of her pamphlet entitled “So oder So—die Wahrheit über den Antisemitismus” (One way or another: The truth about anti-Semitism) which was published earlier in 1933. She is perhaps best known for her 1936 monograph Sein Kampf: Antwort an Hitler (His struggle: Response to Hitler), which, like this article, sought to discredit claims that racist policies had a legitimate foundation in the teachings of Christianity. Recent reappraisals of her life’s work have examined Harand’s support for the Fatherland Front and Austrofascist dictator Engelbert Dollfuß as displayed in this excerpt. In the Reichspost of Thursday, November 16, under the title “Remarks on a Recent Piece” (referring to Dr. Emmerich Czermak’s brochure “Accord with Jewry”), clear and unmistakable calls were made for the organization of a modern ghetto.11 It reads verbatim: It is not necessary to consider the ghetto of the middle ages, which was common to the essence of the Jewish question, as the ideal solution. For the present, it has something symbolic and indicative about it. The ghetto shows the Jews’ diaspora is the will of God. At the same time the ghetto ensures an orderly separation and segregation of those of different essences.

Had I not read these words myself, I would not have believed that the newspaper of Austria’s leading party could disgrace our fatherland to this extent. The saddest thing about it is that the author of this article justifies this standpoint with the teachings of Christianity. So it is really true: the anti-Semitic waltz will be keyed up. Is it really desirable to win over the masses by rolling out the Jewish question and following Hitler’s example of creating second-class citizens? [. . .] The leading gentlemen of the Christian Social Party cannot deny that I have been making efforts to turn broad swathes of the people to thoughts of true Christianity for years. In this decisive moment I call upon the witness of His Eminence the Cardinal 11 See Emmerich Czermak, “Verständigung mit dem Judentum?,” and Oskar Karbach, “Wende der staatlichen Judenpolitik,” in Ordnung in der Judenfrage?, vol. 4, Sonderschrift der Berichte zur Kultur- und Zeitgeschichte, ed. by Nikolaus Hovorka (Leipzig, Vienna: Reinhold Verlag, 1933).

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Archbishop of Vienna, who can confirm that I have tirelessly and tenaciously recruited and worked for the Christian cause. Therefore, I am above every suspicion that I want to act against the interests of Christianity. Precisely because I make every effort to be a good Christian, I feel myself obligated to raise my voice in warning. This dangerous game must finally come to an end! [. . .] The only thing that I can see: the attempt to make a political fortune at great cost to the Jews. I see only that some leading gentlemen in the Christian Social Party have been struck with blindness and do not understand that the party interests must be completely set aside and replaced with a single upright endeavor: to fight for the fatherland and if necessary, even to die while fighting. This applies not only to individuals but also to parties. And when it is a question of the interests of the fatherland, party interests have to take a backseat. The interest of the fatherland commandingly demands that we not roll out the Jewish question but rather address the question of pests. We have only to set up a ghetto for characterless, morally inferior people. Lip service to Christianity is not enough to be excluded from such a ghetto. Unfortunately, there are enough people who call themselves Christians but in reality are beasts in human form. And if we Austrians have been waging tenacious battle against these pests for almost a year, then it can certainly be said that the Jews of Austria have played a large part in the success of this battle. Therefore, it is also an act of ingratitude to give them a kick as payment for their loyalty and sacrifice and make their fatherland, to whose renewal they have contributed in good faith, a living hell. There is no Jewish question in Austria, gentlemen! Ask the farmer who cannot sell his wheat, the mountain farmers, who cannot sell his cattle, ask the worker and official, ask the injured war veterans and the pensioners, ask all these tired and burdened people, the unemployed and all fellow citizens who suffer outrageous want, whether they care about a Jewish question. It is true: we are a free and independent people. No one has the right to interfere with our domestic issues, but we may not be so arrogant as to ignore well-meaning suggestions. Mussolini has clearly spoken out about anti-Semitism. The American emissary has unequivocally declared that Austria can rely on America’s sympathy and also on its help, but only if we do not allow our accursed anti-Semitism to expand. Let’s listen to others. To take the wind out of the sails of the National Socialists, in my opinion, economic and only economic measures will be effective. We have to wrestle with the secret agitation of the Hakenkreuzler in our country. And whoever has eyes to see recognizes the threats the Marxists pose to our government. Even the Rural League is not at all prepared to repress party interests for the benefit of the fatherland. Our chancellor has enough work to do and enough difficulties to overcome. [. . .] It is not at all necessary for the Christian Social Party to resort to such means to win the masses. It gave us Dollfuß, who saved not only Austria but also the civilization and culture of all of Europe. Dr. Dollfuß has done a patriotic deed in his creation of the Fatherland Front, in which every loyal, upright Austrian can find his place. If we shape the front into an invulnerable fortification, we need not resort to anti-Semitism within its walls. What is really necessary is an understanding of the economic needs of the people. We have to overcome the misery, the horrendous, stifling poverty, in order to complete the rescue work. What has occurred thus far allows us to hope for the best. If we work in the name of the fatherland and remind the people of their patriotic duties, we will develop an understanding of all of the difficulties that arise from our economic problems, even when our intentions were noble. But a wedge should not be driven between the groups of the Austrian people. The Austrian people are made up of different elements. There is hardly a family in Austria that cannot point to some foreign-born ancestor or other. That



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which divides us must be thrust aside and that which unites us brought to the fore. We are not in the clear yet, gentlemen. We still have much work to accomplish. [. . .] When we have saved our fatherland from danger, established and secured a free Austria, then the Jewish question will certainly be revisited, but even then, it should only be revisited without attempting to achieve political and economic advantages by means of confessional agitation.

“Austria is supposed to recuperate with the help of people like this?” Caricature showing the network of the paramilitary Heimwehr in a comprehensive sociogram of reactionary forces. Der Kuckuck, June 16, 1929. (Courtesy of VGA.)

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

BLACK VIENNA Wolfgang Fichna and Azadeh Yamini-Hamedani

T

he simplified color coding of Vienna’s political parties is far more complex than it appears at first glance. While it is clear how “red” came to be associated with the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP) and other parties on the left, the designation of the opposition as “black” is much more complex. Nevertheless, with the rise of modern political parties in the final decades of the monarchy, Black Vienna came to be associated with mayor Karl Lueger and the founders of the Christian Social Party (Christlichsoziale Partei, CS). The CS under Lueger—as well as his two successors Josef Neumayer and Richard Weiskirchner—was a successful mass movement of the city’s lower and middle classes. It positioned itself against the SDAP, as well as against the intellectual elites and the liberal upper class that had dominated the Imperial Council until that time. Catholic social teaching served as a foundation, as did programmatic anti-Semitism. The latter served to link the CS with the pan-German movement, though it was still distant from the movement due to its allegiance to the monarchy. With the introduction of universal male suffrage in the Imperial Council election of 1907 and 1911, the CS and the SDAP became the dominant factions in the Parliament of the monarchy. This made it necessary for the conservatives to expand their base to the lower clergy of the countryside and to the peasants, while the Social Democrats’ orientation toward the working class remained unchanged. The CS continued to expand its base into rural areas after World War I, particularly after the first municipal election in Vienna when universal suffrage was introduced, and when the mayoral office went to the Social Democrat Jakob Reumann. The subsequent strategy of the Christian Social chancellor (1922 to 1924, 1926 to 1929) and prelate Ignaz Seipel was to unite all anti-Marxist forces. In 1922, he formed a coalition at the federal level with the Pan-German People’s Party and the Rural League (Landbund), and in 1927 he was running in the national election with the so-called Unity List (Einheitsliste). Along with the CS, the “black” camp now included the Pan-Germans, the right-wing paramilitary organizations of the Heimwehr, and the bureaucratic elites of the monarchy. Seipel turned Red Vienna into a bogeyman and created a counterpart that was meant to unite all of the political shades to the right of the Social Democrats, even uniting those groups whose ideologies contradicted one another. Among the conservative intellectuals, for example, these included Catholic, anticlerical, legitimist, pan-German, and Austrofascist groups that were almost always anti-Semitic. Thus, this new Black Vienna defined itself not by its ideological unity, but rather by its opposition to Red Vienna. According to Janek Wasserman, this had a profound effect on the contemporary intellectual discourse.

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Learning to overlap with other interests became the rule of the day, especially in “black-leaning” university circles. In this way, the influential economist and sociologist Othmar Spann—with his authoritarian and anti-Enlightenment ideas—had a decisive impact on the CS’s move toward creating an Austrofascist Corporate State. His students gained power both in the universities and in the Heimwehr militias. Spann subsequently offered his services to the National Socialists. He was persecuted by the Nazis in 1938 not because he opposed them in any way, but because he was defeated in a power struggle with Alfred Rosenberg within the NSDAP. Joseph Eberle—a publicist and representative of a political Catholicism—surrounded himself with conservative intellectuals who shared a monarchist and pan-German bent. Together they worked on the popular journals Das Neue Reich (The new empire) and Schönere Zukunft (A brighter future). He himself increasingly embraced nationalist (völkische) ideas, and even though he criticized National Socialism as heathen and anticlerical in the 1930s, he also supported the Nazis’ struggles against liberalism, socialism, and Judaism. In contrast, Eberle’s editors—Alfred Missong, a student of Spann’s, and Ernst Karl Winter—embraced a legitimist-monarchist brand of conservatism that was also anti-Nazi. While Winter’s connection to Spann had inhibited his habilitation at the University of Vienna, such academic intrigues were usually reserved for Jewish and Marxist intellectuals and originated from clandestine groups such as the Bears’ Cave (Bärenhöhle) network. The latter was a secret group of anti-Semitic and panGerman professors—including the historians Oswald Menghin and Heinrich Srbik—who also acted as deans and university presidents. They are a typical example of the “opportunistic border crossers” (Klaus Taschwer) who moved between Black Vienna and the third facet of the contemporary political color palette, “brown” National Socialism.1 Thus, Menghin was sometimes simultaneously a member of the steering committee of the Fatherland Front, a member of the Catholic Cartellverband—an umbrella organization of Catholic, male student fraternities—and, along with Arthur Seyß-Inquart, he was also involved in the conspiratorial German Confraternity (Deutsche Gemeinschaft), as well as in the NSDAP. An academically institutionalized “brown” Nazi movement in Vienna first came into being after the violent events of 1927 and operated in a way that was inherently more political than intellectual, although the true power remained in the hands of the “black” faction members at the University of Vienna until long into the 1930s. Because of their small numbers, it was impossible for decidedly Social Democratic professors to eliminate the dominance of the “black” circles. The same was true for internationally recognized scholars such as Sigmund Freud, Moritz Schlick, Ernst Mach, and Charlotte and Karl Bühler. The Catholic, anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, anti-Semitic alliance of Black Vienna worked too well, and thus it was able to intellectually pave the way to the Austrofascist corporative state—and to a certain degree even to absorb the “brown” forces—until 1934. Further reading Lewis 1990 Taschwer 2016 Wasserman 2014

1 See

chapter 33.

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1. Karl Renner The Christian Social Party and How Its Character Has Changed First published as “Die christlichsoziale Partei und ihr veränderter Charakter,” Der Kampf 16, nos. 9–10 (1923): 303. Translated by Peter Woods. On the occasion of the national election of 1923, the Social Democratic journal Der Kampf published Karl Renner’s (1870–1950) history of the development of the Christian Social Party, of which “nothing remains but the name.” Beginning with its transformation into a middle-class party and the expansion into rural constituencies, he describes the shift of the Christian Social Party away from its former role as a party of the urban electorate. Renner feels that their reform ideas, rooted in Karl von Vogelsang’s Christian social teachings, were based more on sympathy for the working class than solidarity with it. However, Renner identifies Ignaz Seipel’s leadership of the party as the decisive change, for he oversaw the integration of some of the liberal upper middle class with the former aristocracy based upon their common anti-Marxist interests. At the same time, Seipel, who was a cleric himself, succeeded in bringing his party to the forefront of political Catholicism. In this polemic, Renner criticizes the anti-Semitism of Seipel and his party, while using anti-Semitic rhetoric in his own argument against finance capital and the bourgeois press. The collapse of the empire was, above all, the collapse of the [Christian Socials’] philistine flank. [. . .] At the end of the war, the peasant flank—by virtue of its unambiguous class position—was once again the only one that knew what to do. The farmer came home anti-revolution, anti-military, and anti-war. [. . .] The unprecedented perfidy of the whole Jewish and Christian press mob undermined the coalition of workers and farmers, and the peasant flank of the Christian Social Party possessed neither the intellectual nor the material means to confront it. Without the capacity to found its own press, it could not even fight the enemy in its own camp. Priests and chaplains fought against the politics of peasant leaders in every village. Thus, the leadership of the party gradually slipped away from them and passed to the urban hodgepodge [. . .]. This hodgepodge, however, had changed its composition drastically after the war, and it is this last class change that is decisive today. The old, democratic petty bourgeoisie had already been forced back, with little attention being paid to it for a long while. Now, though, the true middle class is no longer the deciding force; now the party has grown unexpectedly, and this has changed its very essence. [. . .] But these groups synthesized the quintessence of the ruling classes: the old court, the old military caste, the old bureaucracy, the church hierarchy, the reactionaries in the universities, the banking world—along with the finance capital behind it—the sharks of the stock exchange, the merchants and industrial barons with their Christian and Mosaic professions! Up until the revolution, this quintessence of political and economic domination had kept its distance from the anti-Semitic movement—that “nineteenth-century crime against civilization”—limiting itself to exploiting the working class. [. . .] The new body is creating a new spirit for itself: it is Seipel [. . .] who clearly expresses the new essence and gives the party its intellectual demeanor. It is he who solemnly buries

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the old ideas and lends the spiritual blessing and awful consecration of Catholic mysticism to the reactionary rulers of the deposed Habsburgs and the captains of big business. Suddenly, the old core of the Christian Socials—the upright landlords on the outskirts of the city, the honorable traders, the hulking farmers—find themselves overshadowed by the patronage of those at the top, and the leaders of yesterday have become a goggling retinue. And Seipel’s new doctrine has inverted the old doctrine of Christian socialism [sic] into its exact opposite. Vogelsang’s social state [Sozialstaat],2 which is supposed to guide and regulate the economy, has been brushed aside in order to make way for the oldest form of Manchester Liberalism. The state should not economize, nor should it provide care. Instead, the state must limit itself to providing authority that will protect the property owners from theft and dispossession. The fight against mobile capital has been called off; in fact, mobile capital trumps all, and the poison tree of the stock exchange thrives like the holy olive tree in tropical rain. What in the early days of the Christian Socials was called “evil gold” has become the absolute fetish of modern politics. [.  .  .] In the very beginning, Christian socialism saw “free enterprise” as the springboard of Judaism and as the poison fruit of the French Revolution, and they imagined that they had forever damned it as the greatest enemy of the Christian social structure. Yet Seipel singles out to bless all that which the older generation of the party had cursed! [. . .] How energetically Lueger protected his Vienna from foreign capital. How passionately he threw out the English gas company, which had subordinated Vienna, and socialized private enterprises for gas and light in favor of the city. How glad Kienböck and Seipel would have been to desocialize this single result of supposedly Christian socialism, which was in reality international municipal socialism.3 How glad they would have been to deliver municipalized enterprises to private and even foreign capital. All energy and all passion are now committed to the idea of relinquishing the largest possible parts of state and public holdings—yes, even of private enterprises—to foreign capital. Each new debt to foreigners is triumphantly celebrated as an act of salvation! But who are these foreigners, these saviors and miracle workers? They represent “international, mobile, Jewish big business,” the same interests the party’s childish predecessors felt it was their mission in life to fight against! It is a complete mental reversal! [. . .] Catholicism has ceased to be a true church and has become a political party. Catholic gatherings have become the promotional gatherings of a party. Catholic Days are now Christian Social Party days, and it is now big business and the media it controls that impart their truly profitable blessings to the faithful. That is the work and the spirit that Seipel has brought to this party! In the words of those who came before: the party is led by the “liberal Jew” in a cassock, Manchester liberalism trumps all, and the swamp blossom of “haggling and usury” thrives lavishly in the soil of a people stricken with horrible poverty. That is the great change that we have seen since Lueger! The entirety of the middle class and the peasantry has been placed under the class domination of those two upper layers—the bureaucratic and the plutocratic—that encompass Seipel’s innate conquest! Poor petty bourgeois! Poor farmer! If 2

Karl von Vogelsang (1818–1890), catholic social reformer and cocreator of the Christian social teachings (christliche Soziallehre). 3 Viktor Kienböck was the Christian Social finance minister from 1922 to 1924 and 1926 to 1929. He was also the president (1932–1938) and vice president (1952–1956) of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, Austria’s central bank. See chapter 2.

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your newest leaders succeed in their handiwork, then soon you will be carrying the train of those same lords that your forefathers rose up against. You are already slaves to the interests of mobile capital, your burden much worse than it ever was in the 1880s, and soon you will be standing at attention for the politicians, no different than in the days of the old militarism and bureaucratism. [.  .  .] The little that was good and encouraging of development in the history of the Christian Social Party is now transformed into an indictment against it, condemned according to the Seipel Law. Sooner or later, he will be judged!

2. Ignaz Seipel The Great Trajectory of Spiritual Development in Our Time Published as “Die große Linie der geistigen Entwicklung unserer Zeit,” in Seipels Reden in Österreich und anderwärts. Eine Auswahl zu seinem 50. Geburtstage, ed. Josef Geßl (Vienna: Herold 1926), 86–93. Translated by Peter Woods. Prelate Ignaz Seipel (1867–1932) was one of the key individuals responsible for the ideological breadth of Black Vienna, the self-identified anti-Marxist movement. Seipel accomplished this through the alliance he forged as two-time chancellor (1922–1924 and 1926–1929) with the Pan-German People’s Party, the National Socialist Riel-Group, and the paramilitary organizations of the Heimwehr. As chairman of the Christian Social Party, a cleric, and a moral theologian, however, he was also an important intellectual representative of political Catholicism. He was thus able to fall back on the large umbrella organizations associated with the Catholic Church, such as Catholic Action (Katholische Aktion) and the League of Catholics of Austria (Volksbund der Katholiken Österreichs). He also had academic societies to fall back on, such as the Austrian Leo Society. Seipel held the following speech on January 5, 1924, as part of a conference held by the League of Catholics of Austria. It reveals both his Christian and hierarchical view of politics. If we were living in normal times, then it probably would not even occur to us in the first place to search for the great trajectory of spiritual development of our time. We would only need to keep living in those normal times and guard ourselves against mistakes and wrong turns. We could take comfort in the fact that we were secure in the hands of divine providence, which would surely keep us on the right and normal path as long as we remained normal people ourselves. But these are not normal times. We are living at a rupture in time, if I may use this expression. There are many, of course, who do not want to believe this. They think that this is but an ebb and flow that will last only a short while. They see the entirety of our task as returning to the trajectory of development that we were on before the upheavals we experienced. But we did not experience mere upheavals. No, a genuine rupture has taken place. By allowing us to experience such a rupture in time, God has assigned us a special task. I believe that we will be in terrible danger if we fail to appreciate the fact that we are standing at a turning point in time, if we—out of comfort or out of exaggerated conservatism—simply take up what we had or return to what came before. [. . .] Still others have said that we cannot allow anything from before to remain. They take it on blind faith that a new time has already begun, and they have thrown themselves headlong into everything that appears to be new. This is the cause of the confusion that we have experienced in recent years. Flexible people—and some good ones among

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them—believed that we needed to renounce all of the old ways, in the loudest voice possible. They imagined that a truly new humanity could be born if only they could immediately push through to something new, or at least something that sounded new. This, too, is wrong. We must employ the usual remedies in order to recognize where the new trajectory is leading us. We must look back at the old trajectory, at the path it took through the upheaval, and try to recognize where it bent and where it broke along the way. What was it, then, that defined the trajectory of spiritual development in the time before the war? In short, we can say that it lay in the estimation—almost the worship—of technology, organization, and democracy. [. . .] Even in areas where monarchies persisted, it was not substantially different. We must continuously call attention to how little democracy depends on the form of government directly. Everywhere efforts were underway to acknowledge the will of the masses and the will of organizations as an all-determining force, including the natural, the mandatory and the voluntary organizations. We even saw these attempts infiltrate the church, or individual parts of the church. This has been the aim of certain spiritual battles that we have witnessed in recent decades. It was so difficult to find the true middle, the place that permitted the recognition of God-given authority, but also emphasized the modern ideas of freedom, self-determination, and personal experience. Modernism embodied the failed outcome of all such attempts at mediation from the realm of religion. [. . .] And how do things stand now? Have we noticed that the trajectory of spiritual development is turning in a new direction? Long story short: it is turning already, and we are already on a different path. Our inner attitude with regard to technology has, I believe, completely changed. We have been cured of our implicit worship of technology by the horror that we felt when we saw that the ultimate end of technology is to bring about destruction and death. And we have become resigned to the fact that we can no longer have all of the advantages of technology. How often have we, the conquered, in particular had to learn this sad truth? We are now so poor, and we have to do without many things. Fortunately, a person learns over time. In the end, placing emphasis on technology and technological advances leaves one cold; there is something missing. Therefore, although we the people of the new age do not want to do without the achievements of technology, neither can we continue to view technology alone as the pride of modern humanity. Nor can we see the comforts and commercial opportunities that technological development offers as the be-all and end-all. We also no longer imagine ourselves to be so tied to technology that we cannot live well without it. [. . .] Our attitude toward organizations has changed in a similar way. Whereas people used to feel very strongly about the value of the organization, we have already entered a time in which we feel the oppressiveness of the organization. We feel this way not because some organizations take too much and employ terrorist tactics, and because every rational person must realize for themselves that this could, after all, be the case with every organization. Beyond that, we have begun to look at them the way we look at technological inventions; we view the machinery of the organization itself with certain doubts and caution. Only the spirit of the organization can save it, and that is, I believe, an advantage. If one wants to organize for the Catholic cause, it is no longer the case that the Catholic aspects must remain in the background while the technological tools of the organization are placed in the foreground. On the contrary, I find that people do not want this at all anymore. They want a person to get to the point right away, and so we can and should say

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immediately what the purpose of the organization is. [. . .] If the spirit of the organization takes hold of its members and gets through to them, then they cannot go wrong. [. . .] Now it is likely that I will contradict myself when I say that a strong reversal has already come into effect, one that also relates to the third ideal of the time before the overthrow, namely democracy. However, only very few know about it, or they do not understand what the change consists of in this case. It is not a matter of turning around, as if the path were to lead back now, but rather a search for a new, truer, and better democracy. The political developments of recent years have left us with two approaches for extricating ourselves from democracy or moving past it. One of these is bolshevism, and the other is dictatorship. [. . .] Neither in bolshevism nor in dictatorship do we see the ideal of a better form of democracy that moves beyond a usual, majoritarian democracy, but we are learning from them where the trend is headed. To use a few slogans: a democracy that embraces interference from as many sides as possible must be replaced by a democracy that allows few people—who are, nevertheless, completely accountable to everyone—to operate the controls. A truly responsible democracy must take the place of democracy steered by the ballot alone. When this has fully taken shape, then we will see, even more so than we do now, how little it comes down to mere political forms. The three course corrections that I have pointed out as the consequence of the upheaval are not to be viewed as isolated phenomena; instead, they go together and interact with one another. The change in our attitude toward technology and our valuing the form and spirit of the organization—as well as the struggle for true democracy—these things do not only characterize the new trajectory of development. They also push us toward a common and unified solution to the problems that they themselves contain. One and the same truth exists in all of them: in the future, we cannot allow form alone to be decisive; it all comes down to the deepest, spiritual substance of all of the institutions that define our lives. It does not come down to technology and how we make it, but to what we make. In the face of all of this technology—be it the technology of the arts, of the sciences, of trade, industry, or enterprise, the technology of the organization or of political life—the new human that our development is targeting will have a sense of freedom in the face of it all. He will have an awareness that all of it is only a means to an end and that he should, therefore, be the master of these technologies, that he must not allow them to be his own master. There is a danger that would have threatened us had the old days continued without the upheaval. People could have become the servants of technology, servants of the organization, and slaves of democracy. Now, I hope, they have become aware of this danger and are thus on the way to becoming lords of technology, lords of the organization, and lords of democracy.

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3. Joseph Eberle De Profundis: The Paris Peace from the Perspective of Culture and History; An Appeal to the Christian Conscience Worldwide First published as De Profundis: Der Pariser Friede vom Standpunkte der Kultur und Geschichte; Ein Appell an das christliche Weltgewissen (Innsbruck, Vienna, Munich, Bozen: Verlagsanstalt Tyrolia, 1921), 165–207. Translated by Peter Woods. Joseph Eberle’s (1884–1947) journalistic influence during the 1920s covered the entire German-speaking region. His De Profundis—bemoaning the unjust peace treaty of Saint-Germain—was ostensibly directed toward the populations of the victorious powers of World War I. The book reveals the self-perception of Black Vienna’s Catholic core during the early years of the republic: Eberle shows himself to be the intellectual spearhead of a politicized approach to religion. Eberle’s language swallows up all of Christianity into Catholicism and uses examples from church history to legitimize his argument. Politicizing religion, as he demonstrates, involves positioning spiritual beliefs against modernity and Marxism. 10. We appeal to the Christian conscience worldwide. [. . .] Must not the entirety of Christendom take a stand against the global politics of these brutes? Has there ever been a greater mission for the hierarchs, Christian party leaders, and foreign journalists than the one that confronts Central Europe today? Christianity is not just a matter of cathedrals and parish quarters. Christianity concerns the whole of public life, of all relations of communities and states. Christianity is not one worldview among others; it is the credo of absolute primacy, the one that dominates all the rest. The commandments of Christianity are love for our neighbor and justice; the central tasks of Christians are to work for justice and love, to fight against injustice and hatred. How much fighting of this kind is needed today! Next to the sermon of God, the greatest message of the Old Testament is the fight against Caesarism and plutocracy on behalf of theocracy and its higher goals and ideals. Great figures of the history of the Christian church and culture owe their immortality to the same fight; among them are [church fathers, clerics, popes, theologians, and catholic philosophers such as] Ambrosius, Hilarius, Gregor the Great, Gregor VII, Pius VII, Pius IX, O’Connel, Thomas Morus, Fenelon, Görres, and Veuillot. Religion has first and foremost the celestial good of humanity in mind; but its laws are also meant to shape our lives on this earth and to provide spiritual leadership. It has always been the pride of great hierarchs and great Christian priests and laymen to defend the supremacy of spirit, truth, justice, and love in the world against the onslaughts of the material world, against the lust for power, the thirst for vengeance, avarice, barbarism, and despotism in all forms. According to the testimonies of even protestant and faithless historians, protecting the primacy of the spiritual and the moral from political power was at the core of the great struggles between the church and the state in the Middle Ages. Furthermore, protecting Europe from Caesarism and despotism is the great achievement of the papacy. “Catholicism,” writes Pückler-Muskau, “will forever retain the immortal glory of being the first to found an empire on Earth that is visible and yet purely spiritual in its tenets. Without

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it, we would still be living in raw, material violence.”4 Guizot writes, with regard to periods of the papacy’s great influence: “If the Christian church had never existed, the entire world would have fallen victim to material violence. The church alone exercised a moral and civilizing influence, and it did more than that. It developed everywhere the idea of legality, of a rule that stands above all human provisions. This is at times called ‘divine right,’ at others ‘reason,’ but it remains the same rule everywhere under different names.”5 Jakob Boehmer, a protestant, notes of the more recent period: “Military despotism could not arise as long as the papacy prevailed and intervened in worldly events; and it will rise here by the same degree to which the powers and regulations of the church lose their influence.”6 It was the pride of great hierarchs and Christians of the past to stand up to Caesars and plutocrats for the cause of right and love. Are there no equivalent disciples in our age for leadership? Can we not find a modern example of the courage and pride of former times? [. . .] The idols of Caesarism and plutocracy loom large in the midst of the modern world. Christians are obliged to take a stand. The great Christians of antiquity refused at the time to worship false gods. They preferred to be broken on the wheel, crucified, burned, or torn apart by wild animals. Are there no successors to Polycarp or Justin? To the members of the Legion of Thebes or the countless martyrs? Will we make sacrifices to idols in principle, even if it is done with “reservatio mentalis”? With regard to faddish zeal and errors of the times, “non licet, non possumus” [it is not permitted, it cannot be done] echoes the eternal truths. Popes have become beggars for the sake of “non licet,” have drifted off to some Salerno, Avignon, Fontainebleau, or Gaeta. They faced martyrdom with a smile and risked apostasy, like that of England under Henry VIII. Has the spirit of “non licet, non possumus,”—enshrined in Christian dogma—become so alien to our times? Is it possible for the fashionable Christians of modernity to “do whatever works”? Christianity knows not only sins of commission but also sins of omission. This refers to the so-called sins of others and involves, among other things, remaining silent in the face of another’s sin, defending or not punishing the sins of another, or appropriating the good of another for oneself. Does such a mirror on one’s sin not cause foreign Christians to reflect? Does it not present them with a moral dilemma? Will the Christians abroad remain unjustly silent about Versailles and Saint-Germain? Will they leave it to the Marxist International alone to make the voices of humanity heard? Are they actually going to allow the idea to circle the globe that—though Christendom is unbroken and eternally great—there are large areas of Christian representation in which the prophesy of “religio depopulata” [religion destroyed] applies to Christian practice among the people? Christian leaders, Christian hierarchs have a terrible responsibility. They must realize that it is not purple soutanes and gold crosses worn on the chest that make a prelate but heroism in service of the cross.

4

Original note: Cited from the volume 5 of Hettinger’s “Apologie des Christentums” (8th ed.) [Franz Hettinger, Apologie des Christentums: Eugen Müller (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder 1899–1900)]. 5 Original note: Ibid., 421–22. 6 Original note: Ibid., 421.

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4. Othmar Spann A Summary of Observations of the Inward Direction of Our Time and Its Political Ideology (from The True State) Published as “§ 23. Zusammenfassende Betrachtungen der inneren Richtung und des politischen Ideengehaltes unseres Zeitalters,” in Der wahre Staat: Vorlesungen über Abbruch und Neubau der Gesellschaft, gehalten im Sommersemester 1920 an der Universität Wien, 3rd ed. (Jena: Verlag Gustav Fischer, 1931), 145–48. Translated by Peter Woods. Shortly after his appointment as Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Vienna, Othmar Spann (1878–1950) became Max Adler and Hans Kelsen’s most influential conservative and antidemocratic opponent. His role as pioneer of the corporative ideology of Austrofascism began with the publication of The True State. Building on his conception of holistic ideas, Spann opposed individualism, democracy, liberalism, and socialism. In doing so, he also reached out to anticlerical and pan-German audiences. As a central figure of Black Vienna, Spann covered the whole spectrum from the conservative-Catholic to the nationally (völkisch) minded, though he remained defiantly anti-enlightenment. The same can be said for his listeners. We have observed the basic, intellectual components of our era in its individualistic, universalistic, and socialistic forms. We have tracked the crises of this era: as a political crisis or a crisis of democracy and as an economic crisis or a crisis of capitalism. We have also seen for ourselves the crisis of the greatest reform movements, the crisis of Marxism, we have seen the turmoil of our entire era and we have been forced to accept it. We recognized the deep, philosophical reversal as a hallmark of the spirit of our time. Positivism, empiricism, relativism—all of these inseparable companions of individualism—are gradually giving way to a more serious, increasingly powerful metaphysical pull, a desire for inwardness. [. . .] The French Revolution was the triumph of individualism. Our present revolution, though, is determined by other intellectual forces; a hybrid form lies within it: Marxism! However, in the present reversal, Marxism has initially led individualistic elements to victory. Its first act was the achievement of democracy: viewed from the outside, pacifism, cosmopolitanism, and anti-militarism have triumphed. And yet, the mask of Marxism has fallen as a result. After fighting primarily under the flag of universalism, how could this have made achieving democracy its greatest and most urgent act? The innermost cause of this is its defectiveness, the weakness of the universalistic elements within Marxism, because anarchism has proven to be lurking on Marxism’s most fundamental level! [. . .] At the same time, we may take great comfort in the present moment. It is emblematic of the change that our era has suffered throughout the whole course of events, namely that Marxism was only able to succeed under the mask of universalism. This event, “the achievement of democracy due to error,” illuminates the inner weaknesses of Marxism in a flash. It tells us that, of necessity, Marxism will ultimately fail. And this process of failure is already beginning today, right now, before our eyes. Something has happened that history has rarely seen: the victorious party split in the moment of victory because it was

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completely incapable of completing its task: achieving socialism. Marxism fails to succeed in practice and thus demonstrates that it can neither keep its promises nor provide what the spirit of the times demands. Thus, the meaning behind the split of Marxists into Bolsheviks or Communists and Majority Social Democrats becomes clear.7 The Bolsheviks were the first to throw the idea of democracy overboard. With their councils and dictatorship, they latched onto the sound notion of the rule of the good, rather than voting for the good as democracy would have it. They gave up on that fatalistic causal evolutionism, but in doing so they also threw historical materialism overboard. They reintroduced the idea and its inertia as proof of their own power in history, and they sought to overcome the commoditization of life that historical materialism demands. They have even broken through Marxism all the way from the other side, from the religious side. After all, there is a bit of Tolstoy in Bolshevism, an open expression of the metaphysical—albeit in Asian form—which is opposed to Westernness. [.  .  .] Generally speaking, one cannot fail to recognize that the Bolsheviks emphasize the idea of life, an inwardness in life. At the same time, the old Marxists remain caught up in their commodification and materialization of life, the very things that inspire historical materialism. What is satanic in this and any form of Bolshevism, past or present, is that they want to destroy all tradition, all learning; they really and truly wish to start over from the beginning. But again, that is—to call a spade a spade—an anarchistic and rather primitive cultural concept [. . .]. In contrast, the Majority Social Democrats do have the verbiage of Marxism and the will to implement it, but in practice they behave like a radical socialist party. They save present-day society from Bolshevist destruction by postponing the development of so much that is fundamental, and in practice something else comes of it. Here again, the deviation from practical communism is accompanied, strangely, by a clear move toward the corporative. One need only look at the Austrian Social Democratic Party’s socialization program developed by the very left-leaning Otto Bauer: in reality, it is no longer a communist socialization program, or one which is based on centralization and the collectivization of the means of production. Instead, there is clearly a move toward trade associations—thus, a corporative organization—and toward a guild economy. [. . .] Taking everything into account, we may judge the course of the revolution more hopefully. Despite the outward victory of individualism, this revolution is the first great struggle of humanity since the Renaissance that actually wishes to eliminate individualism. Our spirituality wants to return from the poverty and isolation of the independent individual. The life that dwells within the individual—which can only be a communal life— wants to be reawakened, wants to return to the forefront and reassume its place ahead of free enterprise, profit, and outwardness. Nevertheless, it is for precisely this reason that we cannot allow ourselves to be lulled into thinking that this revolution is at an end. The twitching and squirming that we now perceive are only the birth pangs of universalism, not yet the birth itself. The great fall of Marxism, of all the masses’ longing for socialism, is still to come. First, the working 7

The term “Majority Social Democrats” refers to the situation in Germany and the 1917 split of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) into the USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party), including the Spartacus League of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and the MSPD (Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany). Spann’s critique of the pan-European Left paints the Social Democrats of both Austria and Germany with the same brush.

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class must suffer through a terrible disappointment, most of all in the reversal of their economic and materialistic strides. The working class has been told daily that nothing is inherently true or good. They were told that these concepts were creations of the ruling class, of class privilege, of bourgeois ideology, of cunning exploitation. Suddenly, they are noticing that this is not true, that the hardships of existence are not always governed by robbery, deception, and wickedness. [. . .] Even if there is further backlash, the social, universal idea has triumphed and will always triumph. It will emerge from every fight and every fire in a purer, refined form, casting off the guises of individualism, exchanging the material for the spiritual, and carrying the banner of the super-individual before it. [. . .] In seeking a return to wholeness, we break the bonds that individualism placed on our spirits and stand on the verge of a derationalization, a decommercialization of life. Only in this way can the state, the economy, and society achieve the form that is necessary for the higher, spiritual substance of life. Only then will the spiritual master the material.

5. Max Adler In Critique of the Sociology of Othmar Spann First published as “Zur Kritik der Soziologie Othmar Spanns,” Der Kampf 20, no. 6 (1927): 265–70. Translated by Peter Woods. On the occasion of the Fifth Congress of the German Sociological Society, held in Vienna in 1926, Othmar Spann (at the time a full professor) tried to establish himself as one of the leading German-speaking social scientists. However, his formulation of a sociology of the spirit, as set out in his book Categories,8 was rejected by such prominent representatives of the discipline as Leopold von Wiese and Werner Sombart. Spann’s rejection of empiricism and his reference to Plato, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas received its most significant criticism from Max Adler (1873–1937), Spann’s Viennese Social Democratic opponent. Adler’s statement was published in the journal Der Kampf the following year. III. Now I come to the explanation of the metaphysical nature of Spann’s sociology. Professor Spann claims that sociology must emanate from the whole of society, and this sounds very good. Compared with the atomism of sociology today, which has proven to be almost innately wrong, this might even sound convincing. But what is this “whole”? And, in particular, where is it? Professor Spann says that we can consider elements to be posited in a meaningful way—and, of course, we can—but what guarantee do we have that they were truly posited in that way? Particularly as these elements are understood by Spann in two senses: first, as elements in the human spirit, and second, as the individual people who make up the elements of society. Now, the whole of the individual spirit—the “I”—is an empirical fact and an immediate experience. But what about the whole of society’s spirit, of which the people are supposed to be the elements? What about this all-encompassing whole that—like a body and his spirit—is supposed to have a meaningful unity? Is this also something we know from experience, or is it not 8 Othmar

Spann, Die Kategorienlehre (Jena: Verlag Gustav Fischer, 1924).

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perhaps an idea, a construction of the individual? It is immediately clear that there is no compelling evidence that can lead us from the meaningful unity of an individual to a meaningful unity of society as a whole. Instead, this is simply the old analogy already proclaimed by Plato. Thus, the “whole” is, in fact, as it was in the case of Plato, either a mere regulative idea or—if we wish to go beyond that and allege the reality of this unity—it takes on a metaphysical nature. The fact that the Fichtean “I” begins with self-positing is not a departure into the metaphysical, as this self-positing is simply a philosophical expression for the primordial givenness of the activity of consciousness. However, when sociology begins with the self-positing of meaningful unity that “separates” into its elements—this separation itself being synonymous with “spiritual community [Gezweiung] or social community [Gemeinschaft]”—then in spite of its brilliant form, it represents fundamentally naïve metaphysics. This is the case because it solves every problem by situating it as a primordial entity: another consciousness, the connection between the “I” and that other consciousness, and the division within a whole. In spite of what Professor Spann extolls in his teaching, wholeness and division do not supersede the mechanism alone. They also supersede an epistemological focus for which wholeness and divergence are not entities in and of themselves, but rather problems in their own right. However, if we are not meant to understand the wholeness as something metaphysical but rather as an analogy, then I feel compelled to say that I prefer the analogy of an organism. It is simply incomprehensible—on the face of it—how disembodiment is the same as embodiment and the same as spiritual community [Gezweiung] or social community [Gemeinschaft]. Because of this, I find a much more compelling example in the empirical conceptualization of the organism and of the functional interaction of its parts than I can find by looking at this kind of division. The latter obscures the connection of the “I” to the “you” and, in fact, this can only be understood by relying on the primal experience. By contrast, I believe that above all else it is Marxism that brings about a much more systematic realization of the epoch-making course of German Philosophy that has elaborated the essence of social consciousness. The catalyst of this change is the basic principle of the socialized human which has been developed by Marx. If sociology would remain an empirical science, then there is nowhere else that it can look for and find society than in the one place where all experience is possible, namely in the individual consciousness. Thus, sociological pursuits cannot base their assumptions on wholeness, but must instead base their assumptions on the individual. But this individual is the socialized human, a human in the sense of Marx, historically only existing within its relationships to other humans defined by labor and commerce. And I have shown that the historical socialization of this socialized human is only possible by virtue of the fact that his individual consciousness is transcendentally socialized. In other words, an “I” consciousness is only possible when intrinsically related to a defined plurality of subjects with which each “I” consciousness considers itself connected. Community, or what Professor Spann calls spiritual community, is a form of the “I” consciousness itself, and our experiences are connected not only to time, space, and categories but also to another consciousness. Social groupings are not universal entities, nor are they simple analogies, and they are quite certainly not mere universalistic conceptions. They are, in fact, the conditions of transcendental experience. Thus, social experience is just as valid an experience of being as the experience of nature can be, and all of this happens without it being necessary for us to become victims of naturalism. And so, the modern sociology of Marxism has emerged as a mature fruit of classical philosophy, as a teaching whose deeper rationale

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simultaneously incorporates the idea of Kant’s critique of cognition and continues to build upon it. IV. In closing I would like to point out that the basic metaphysical philosophy of Spann’s view comes from the high esteem that Professor Spann pays to the Aristotelian phrase of viewing “the whole is the cause of its parts.” Other than as a methodological assumption in scientific work, giving such precedence to the whole is only possible within the metaphysical. But this notion—even if used only as a method—lags behind the dialectic notion of Marxism. Marxism posits that the whole and the part are mere relational concepts, mutually dependent and continuously switching roles in sociological research. Only in a purely technical approach to logical thought can we put the whole before the part. In contrast, especially in terms of the classic German mind, which Spann is so fond of invoking, the whole is only manifest at the same time as the part, constituting an example of the dialectic movement of thought that transcends the formal-logical static finitude of concepts and leads to the kind of infinite thought attempted by Leibnitz [sic] and accomplished especially by Hegel. But Marxism has adopted precisely this dialectic and considers the German philosophical intellect to be one of its greatest origins. So it is that Spann will see—hopefully to his happy surprise—that Marxism has more points of contact with his own philosophical outlook than Spann had once assumed, based on his familiarity with it. And perhaps he will acknowledge that Marxism has something to contribute even to his point of view. One only needs to put forth the effort to understand Marxism in its own right and build off of its ideas. And let me say one more thing: Professor Span concludes with a kind of triumph that his system has been developed without contradiction. I have no desire to dispute this claim; I simply find nothing special about it. After all, when a brilliant man like Professor Spann postulates equally brilliant ideas, he is presumably capable of developing a system in which everything adds up according to its own internal logic. But enjoying a system, as great an aesthetic and affective value as it may represent, says nothing about the epistemological value of that system. After all, we have listened with great care and with great enjoyment to Professor Spann’s statements today, but the main question remains whether we would prefer a sociological science or a metaphysical science. The answer to that question includes the final evaluation of the worth of Professor Spann’s system.

6. Alfred Missong The World of the Proletariat: Psychological Reflections First published as “Die Welt des Proletariats: Psychologische Betrachtungen,” in Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Leo-Gesellschaft, ed. Oskar Katann (Vienna: Herder and Co., 1931): 3–44. Translated by Peter Woods. Alfred Missong (1902–1965) wrote his dissertation, The Sociological World of the Ideas of St. Augustine, in Vienna in 1924 and was an editor of Joseph Eberle’s journal Schönere Zukunft (A brighter future). During this time, he was also coeditor of the monarchist pamphlet Die Österreichische Aktion (The Austrian initiative), a commitment to an

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independent, Austrian identity as well as to Europe which held that “the world will be saved not by the ‘German character,’ but rather by the miracle of Catholicism.” 9 As a member of the Austrian Leo Society, named after Pope Leo XIII, he belonged to a prominently placed and influential association for the promotion of the sciences based on Catholicism. In the 1931 yearbook, at a time in which political fronts were already noticeably hardened, Missong delivers an assessment of working class access to science and education that is typical for Black Vienna. People who spend a lot of time around class-conscious workers and the “little man” will observe an almost magical belief in science among them. The average proletarian has the same respect for scientists, especially natural scientists, as the gullible primitive peoples have for their magicians and medicine men. It is not very difficult to explain this phenomenon. Every person has a primordial need for spiritual direction, spiritual authority. It is nothing more than a fundamental expression of the “anima naturaliter christiana” that longs for a focal point in life [Lebenszentrum]. A religious focal point in life is unavailable to the proletarian [. . .]; therefore, he needs a substitute. Such a substitute is found in “modern” science, with which all of the masters of the newer socialism tried to dress up—or to support—their socialist ideologies. It was not for nothing that Marxism always wanted to be “scientific” socialism. It defined “scientific” as that brand of natural science from the previous century that presumed to reveal all the secrets of life and the world, that presumed to give the answer to everything that the human intellect could wish to know. Thus, on the one hand, it is the need for a surrogate for religion that lures the proletarians to the cult of a science that they do not understand, and the fact that it possesses the mysterious aura of unfathomability makes it doubly venerable. On the other hand, it is the tradition of Marxist doctrine, professing its close allegiance to science, that provides this drive. The intrinsic, proletarian missionary zeal must also be considered, namely that the world is to be renewed by the elimination of class differences and the establishment of a social order that is entirely just. Only the struggling proletariat can bring about this renewal of the world. In order to achieve this, the proletariat must come into possession of the material and intellectual instruments of power, which the bourgeoisie uses both to administer its class rule and to retain it. For this reason, it is not enough to socialize the means of production; instead, it must be accompanied—or preceded—by conquering the sciences, which the “exploitative class” has used as a tool of oppression against the working class. In the various investigations that we see among the working class, the talk always centers on how knowledge is power and that it is the duty of the class-conscious proletarian to acquire knowledge and to become familiar with the supposedly “definitive results” of modern science. As we have already implied, the complete and comprehensive meaning of the word “science” is somewhat lost on the proletarian intellect. Whereas the true essence of science is a critical approach to illuminating the objective facts of being, not all fields of scholarly inquiry awaken the interest of the proletariat. Archeology, art history, and literary studies are unable to command their attention. They consider these things to be idle pastimes because they provide no “outlook” for either the foundation of their thinking or for the restructuring of society. Not even philosophy, with its primary focus on the critique of knowledge (Kant, Neo-Kantianism) or on metaphysics (Scholasticism, Hegel), catches the eye of the proletariat. And this is precisely because it is too speculative, too abstract, and unable to 9

Die österreichische Aktion: Programmische Studien, ed. August M. Knoll et al. (Vienna: Selfpublished, 1927), 6–7.

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offer any tangible formulas with practical applications. Moreover, good old Marxism has already done everything it could to brand philosophy as an archaic, “bourgeois ideology,” replacing it with positivistic natural philosophy. In this respect, the science-loving proletariat shares the lot of scientific socialism that even today clings to the positivistic philosophy of the preceding century with every fiber of its being. At the same time, the proletariat is trying to maintain the pretense of supremacy that science claimed to have over philosophy, and this in spite of the paradigm shift that has taken place in the meantime. “In the period of the 1860s to the 1880s, the proletariat truly did march in step with science and made the achievements of science their achievements as well [. . .]. Their attitude toward the philosophy of today, however, is one of almost total backwardness. [. . .] They are completely unaware of the critical realism in our philosophy today, completely unaware that a number of our leading philosophers consider it possible to treat metaphysics as science.”10 Natural philosophy is replacing actual philosophy in the forefront of the proletarian consciousness, and it is doing so as an appendix to so-called historical materialism. No other body of literature has as much appeal in proletarian circles as the “natural philosophy” of Darwin, Haeckel, Boelsche, Brehm, and Kraepelin, among others. This fits most closely with the proletarian call for clearer and simpler oversight as a replacement for religion as well as the demand for universality and usability. Above all, this justifies the proletariat’s belief in “eternal progress” which, they hope, will lead to the end of “bourgeois domination.” Darwin’s doctrine of the struggle for existence enjoys special preference and is uniquely suited to satisfy the proletarian attitude toward life. It amounts to quasi-philosophical window dressing for the proletarian belief in class struggle. To the proletarian ear, “natural law” truly is a magic word. Because if the absolute control of closed natural causality is valid, then the entire world is a machine constructed by the same principles as the one that the proletariat is forced to operate in the factory. If we consider all of these reasons, we find it easy to understand that the proletariat passionately embraces the scientific explanation of the world. After all, it is more understandable for them than any other because it means the sublimation and systematization of what has become a fundamental part of their lives: machine operation.

7. Heinrich Srbik The Historical Content of the Austrian Portrait Exhibition First published as Der historische Gehalt der Österreichischen Porträtausstellung: Vortrag, vol. 1 of Veröffentlichungen des Vereines der Museumsfreunde in Wien (Vienna: Neubauer, 1927). Translated by Peter Woods. In 1927 the Association of Museum Friends in Vienna (Verein der Museumsfreunde in Wien) hosted the Austrian Portrait Exhibition 1815–1914 at the Künstlerhaus. The keynote address was delivered by Heinrich Srbik (1878–1951), a historian and esteemed Metternich expert. He was also a member of the Bears’ Cave, a pan-German and anti-Semitic network that agitated against Jewish and Marxist university members. Srbik also served as minister of education in the Schober III cabinet from 1929–1930. In 1938 he became a member of the NSDAP, president of the Academy of Sciences, and an esteemed member of the academic 10

Original note: Gertrud Hermes, Die geistige Gestalt des marxistischen Arbeiters (Tübingen, 1926), 151.

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world of the German Reich. In his speech, Srbik disputes the notion of a separate Austrian identity from a pan-German perspective. He does acknowledge, however, that there are elements of Austrian history that render its identity unique among other Germans. The model also integrated dynastic thinking along with a culturally multilayered Central European landscape. The recent past has ushered in a reassessment of all values far and wide. We have all been thrown off course from our life’s path, and public institutions have been destroyed that we once imagined to be a mainstay of social achievement for current and future generations. Social shifts have occurred that would have been unthinkable for the prewar generation, and the state itself—as a Lebensraum and as a regulated community—has been subjected to a sudden and violent collapse. Is it not understandable that many people have lost their way, and now fumble around in search of a new paradigm, one that their fathers would find strange? The world as a totality, the state, and the present social phenomena have become a problem for the younger generation, as has the relationship between this present and the past. What came before seemed to many to have reached death’s door, its destruction justified. Ahistorical thinking only paid attention to the result of the great struggle among people and states. It saw success alone as the standard of value, and it drew the wrong conclusion from the destruction it witnessed: ahistorical thinking teaches that those who were destroyed had lacked vitality, had been unworthy of life. Ahistorical thinking forgot that fathers, sons, and grandchildren are united by blood, that the past is the foundation and lifespring of the present and the future, and that no great people may turn their backs on their past without being punished. Perhaps we have already arrived at the turning point in this spiritual crisis. Thinking people are once again becoming aware of the eternal, insoluble chain of historical events, of today and yesterday. Perhaps people are again reflecting on the fact that if the state and the people are to be healthy and develop, then they cannot maintain this artificial break with our earlier stages of existence. Instead, the highest goal must be a harmonious interlocking of old and new. If a terrible catastrophe makes this harmony truly impossible in a state, as it has in our case with Austria, then we should at least reestablish the spiritual connection with the former state, with the old structure of living that we have inherited from the GermanAustrian tribe. At the same time, we should also direct our attention to life’s new necessities. [. . .] The Vienna Congress is the starting point of the portrait collection, and this choice was made for good reason. After all, it marks a period during which Austria had achieved the geographical unity that it maintained until its collapse, with the exception of less organic appendages. That is when it became, outwardly, the unified, political manifestation of the state, and so it remained up until the World War, in spite of profound structural changes taking place within. We must never disregard the geopolitical moment that accompanied the development of this Austrian body politic. A state structure emerged whose outward unity and clear, internal geographic division had almost no equal in Europe. The countries of the Alps, the Bohemian-Moravian massif, and Carpathia provide the trinity and the unity: all of them closed to the outside and shielded by strong walls and bastions, and all of them open to the Vienna Basin on the inside. And the whole of it representing the southeastern slope of Central European commerce, with the ancient road of the Danube—that uniter of peoples—acting as its axis. Nevertheless, we cannot consider these geographic moments to have been causal factors in the history of Austrian statecraft but rather energizing and facilitating forces that provided support to the whole. The nature of this space gave rise to reinforced economic commonalities, a reciprocal

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extension of the spheres of production and consumption, as well as a mixing of blood among the various peoples—large and small—who lived between uniformly Germanic and uniformly Slavic settlement areas. The essential element of statecraft, however, was not the geopolitical element but rather the dynasty, German strength, and the German spirit. The dynasty was the first architect of the state, and until the end it remained the cupola arching over it all, so to speak. It was extracted from the motherland and from the primal, Alpine cells of the state—always expanding—by German thought, German combat, and German work in the hard soil. They brought uniformity and the highest culture—German culture—to a space that was permeated with a multitude of peoples. This is what we may call the historical mission of Austria: a title of honor for the German people that should never be forgotten. [. . .] Austria was already a unique cultural area even before it carried the title of an empire, and it grew into this title more and more over the course of the nineteenth century. Of course, Austrian German culture was primarily a branch of German culture in general. It sprouted from German culture and became an eastern-colonial German voice, always remaining clearly audible within the full symphony of the manifold cultural expressions of the German branches. Just the same, it did have its own particular ring to it. Austrian Germanness had a strong—at times perhaps too strong—receptivity for the intellectual and artistic assets of its neighbors, both those within the same national borders and those beyond them. It sucked up foreignness, processed it, incorporated it into itself, suffused it with its flush, and thereby became weaker than others, although in many respects also stronger. By doing so, however, it was able to win over foreign peoples in search of higher culture to its ways, which were always German in essence. In cultural gifts, it repaid with interest what it had received from them. It is with respect to this heritage that we speak of a “particular Austrianness,” of an “Austrian person,” or of an “Austrian flavor,” and above all we are referring to the German-Austrian. [. . .] Did Austria completely fulfill its cultural mission before it was destroyed? I would certainly deny that it did, but the answer is hardly a question for historians anymore. Life never stops moving forward and cannot content itself with resigned mourning for what was lost. New assumptions approach the people and the state from all directions. To a certain degree, even we must become new people in the new Austria. In one respect, however, we will persevere: the victorious powers were able to make this rump of Austria into the legal successor to the empire, which it by rights is not. Our duty, which we will perform gladly and of our own free will, is to be the cultural successors of the state of our fathers.

8. Anton Kuh Petty Heroism First published as “Pimperlheroismus,” Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung, December 4, 1922, 4. Translated by Peter Woods. With his commentary, Anton Kuh (1890–1941) delivered a sociogenesis of pan-German fraternity members and professors at the University of Vienna of the early republic. This was long before the National Socialists gained significance in Austria (a German National Socialist Workers’ Party, DNSAP, existed under the leadership of Walter Riehl and cooperated with

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the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, NSDAP, after 1920, but upon Hitler’s takeover as party chairman in 1924, Riehl was stripped of power and thrown out of the party).11 In his polemic, Kuh refers yet again to the pervasive anti-Semitism that united all of the powers of the intellectual landscape outside of the liberals and the leftists. It is necessary to give a formal apology, and thus to protect the better of the bad people from being used as guarantors by those who are worse. When considering that breed known as the “Austrian fraternity member [Farbstudent],” even those who most vehemently despise the demon of the fraternity—along with nationalistic childishness—can hardly fail to make a concession for their German-blooded cousins, namely that they are of competent and pure-blooded stock. From time immemorial, they have been bred according to the same ethos and are of a high class, right down to their bones. But, good heavens, what about that Austrian lad of a different complexion who has struggled his way out of the hatcheries of high school education? The one who has yet to shed his adolescent stubbornness and his fear of accountability and his father? One whose CzechHungarian-Slovene-German blood mixture and poverty-stricken features do not prevent him from calling himself a “representative of Germanness”? [. . .] In the years immediately following the war, it was possible to show more pity than scorn and contempt for the kind of person depicted here. Beaten and humiliated he returned from the turbulent realm of the field and the ranks, stricken to the depths of his being, and then to have to return home to the study rooms and those old schoolboy fears! To see what a paltry life his bespectacled father leads, dressed in the clothes of his class, and to await that same sad future for himself! And then not to be able even to live this pitiful life at the expense of his own government, his own people. Unable even to be a beggar student on his own two feet, but instead to know that foreign money and—pinnacle of shame!—even Jewish money is helping to finance him when he sleeps, works, and eats! Never to know for certain—with the delivery of his sponsored breakfast, while sitting at the lunch table, and when going to bed for the night—how many or few non-Aryans make all of the domestic and American aid work possible. The bite of food must have swelled in his mouth, his studies made doubly irritating since he owed his thanks for the food to a “preservation society.” No, if ever the satirical cudgel was bigger than its victim, then it was here. What the students of today are doing would have that youthful tinge of the innocuous to it. It would be training for a battle that was missing only the world and reality. It is the adults behind them, the professors who let “politics” be the name of the game, who make this visible and noteworthy. It has often been said—and in this very context—that since the great ones died, this latest batch of adults are really nothing more than schoolchildren with moustaches. They are the same truants from reality, inspired by the same goose-stepping idealism. They have simply been promoted from the rows of desks in the classroom to their professorships, protected from impartial and disrespectful glances by the myth of a kind of proficiency in their field. After they stopped being “luminaries,” they became “pillars.” Before we had luminaries of science, and now we have pillars of German national character. What distinguishes a luminary from a pillar, other than the fields themselves? The former illuminates, whereas the latter always seeks to “ignite.” The one is revered in his mortarboard, the other gives out honorary titles in bulk, as mandated by the anticipated history book. In this way it also shows the contrast between the shallow humanists and the real ones, between the one who lives for the book and the one who lives in the book, between the perpetual student and the perpetual learner. We deal much more often with the student today, with the grey-haired eighth-grader or, put 11 See

chapter 33.

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differently, with the civil servant of science. This is the new breed of professor, whose sentiments and party colors trump his scholarship and his character and who prefers the Aryan bully to the Jewish scientist. It is no wonder that in Prague and Vienna he allowed brawling to snowball into “political action,” which he would have stifled at the first sign of authority. His lack of character has to be balanced by the national attitude. Thus, he remains prejudiced. Let us imagine that he is currently taking the form of a Viennese university president, and he is intervening in an altercation between two students, one of whom called the other a “Jew” and that one responded with “rascal.” Thus, he intervenes and posts his public disapproval of the latter as an insult to the “entire German student body.” He accepts a parade of thanks from the toe-capped crowd from the fraternity, like Ludendorff, who only too gladly use these military theatrics and displays of tautness to indulge the old gymastics heroes, socalled petty heroism. And in order to enable this spectacle, the lie of the “hallowed academic ground” must hold. The lie that has exited from the very moment when it was not academic freedom holding back the Philistines, but rather current and future Philistines defending their special terror against the authority of the state. [. . .] Jewish control of the media? Clumsy oafs! If it existed in the way you mean, then none of these lines would be necessary. If that were true, the publishers—to speak nothing of else—would not have given your private brawling the stamp of politics by giving you, in accordance with old practice, the largest print space with the thickest type!

National Socialist newspaper seller in Austria, May 1, 1933. (Courtesy of Bildarchiv/Austrian National Library, ÖNB.)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

BROWN VIENNA Vrääth Öhner

E

Austrian National Socialism is older than its German corollary, its rise to a mass phenomenon in the early 1930s would be unthinkable without the successes of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) in Germany. Austrian National Socialism arose in 1904 in the German-speaking regions of Bohemia as a markedly proletarian offshoot of the panGerman camp (völkisches Lager) surrounding Georg von Schönerer. This group shared Schönerer’s political program from the 1880’s that combined German nationalism with anticlerical and antisocialist sentiment as well as a form of xenophobic anti-Semitism that emphasized the superiority of the German race. In the relatively stable economic and political conditions during the Habsburg monarchy, this program had little chance of success. In 1911, the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP) sent a total of three representatives to the Imperial Council (Reichsrat). After the collapse of the monarchy, the DAP split into an Austrian faction and a Czechoslovakian faction. Rudolf Jung, the chief ideologist of the party, remained in Bohemia, while the party’s chief propagandist, Walter Riehl, moved to Vienna. While there, Riehl founded the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei, DNSAP). For Jung, the defeat of the CentralEuropean powers in World War I was only the climax of a longer struggle in which the very survival of the German people (Volk) was at stake. He blamed Czechs, Jews, and other non-Aryan groups for the difficult condition of the German worker, and he blamed the Social Democrats for supporting non-German forces through their internationalism. Jung saw the incarnation of true German spirit in the castes of small independent farmers and employed tradesmen, led by a Führer whom fate would place at the head of the German ethnic state and protect the general welfare of the larger Volk from the individual interests of the single citizen.1 Jung’s demands, some of which appeared in the twenty-five points of the NSDAP program in Germany on February 24, 1920, failed to impress the well-organized Social Democratic working class. For these workers, the class struggle was not just a “Jewish invention,” it was reality. The National Socialist ideology too easily resonated with the legacy of the pan-German movement which, during the monarchy, had been strongly associated with the middle class. Moreover, the backward-looking vision of a German ven though

1

See Rudolf Jung, Der nationale Sozialismus: Seine Grundlagen, sein Werdegang, seine Ziele (Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, 1922 [1918]).

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Volk community offered few promises of real changes in societal power dynamics. The membership of the party remained correspondingly low: even during the inflation and economic crisis of 1923, it did not have more than a few thousand members. On top of everything else, the party was notoriously riven by infighting. Especially incendiary was a factional dispute about whether the DNSAP should maintain its independence or subordinate itself to its German sister party. This dispute led in 1924 to the expulsion of Walter Riehl and in 1926 to the founding of the Austrian NSDAP as a local branch of the Hitler Movement. From that point on, the Austrian National Socialists thus found themselves under the militant dictatorial leadership of Adolf Hitler, which at first did not improve the situation of the party. Quarrels continued within the party and the Hitler Movement was not able to chalk up any electoral successes except in the institutions of higher education. That did not change until Eduard Frauenfeld took over the Viennese party leadership in early 1930 and the NSDAP achieved 18.3 percent of the votes in the German elections of September 14, 1930, making it the second-strongest political power after the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Buoyed up by the wave of success in Germany, the Austrian National Socialists enjoyed a rapid rise in popularity: If they were nothing more than an obscure radical right-wing splinter group in 1930, they were able to make great gains in the Vienna state and municipal election of April 24, 1932, taking the third-most votes at the cost of the Christian Social Party and the pan-German camp (völkisches Lager), whose voters almost unanimously flipped over to the National Socialists. Right from the start, the Social Democrats observed the developments in Germany with growing concern. Reading their analyses today, it is easy to see their amazement about the appeal of a party whose political program did not distinguish itself from the other parties on the right end of the spectrum (Fritz Brügel). The Social Democrats were also astounded by the allure of a party that did not promise its members any more than a small part in the active use of power and by the “exhilaration felt by the disenfranchised as they form an identity based upon misplaced pride” (Dr. Otto). After Hitler seized power on January 30, 1933, and especially after the Enabling Act of March 24, 1933, it became clear once and for all that National Socialism represented more than just a passing threat that would disappear on its own with the end of the global economic crisis. By then it was already too late for Social Democracy and for the democratic Republic of Austria. The rise of National Socialism was a much bigger threat to the Christian Social Party and the Heimwehr militias than it was to the Social Democrats, because these groups were hemorrhaging urban votes to the upstart nationalists, whom they fought with fascist means. Just as in Germany, the Austrian bourgeoisie and the pan-German camp were less worried about National Socialist barbarities than they were about a democratically secured “socialist upheaval” (Otto Bauer). With the success that the NSDAP continued to expand their membership, even though the party had been declared illegal on June 19, 1933. After the July pact of 1936, confidants of the National Socialists held government positions, and in 1937 the Fatherland Front (Vaterländische Front) officially welcomed Nazis into their organization. Further reading Bauer 2005 Carsten 1978 Rabinbach and Gilman 2013 Schausberger 1995

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1. Walter Riehl National or International Socialism? Published as “Nationaler oder internationaler Sozialismus?,” in Unser Endziel: Eine Flugschrift für deutschen Nationalsozialismus, 5th ed. (Leipzig, Vienna: Deuticke, 1923), 5–14. Translated by Rob McFarland. Written shortly after the founding of the DNSAP in August 1918, Walter Riehl’s (1881–1955) Unser Endziel (Our final goal: A pamphlet for German National Socialism) was already in its fifth printing by 1923. Besides outlining basic ideologies, like rejecting international socialism as “non-German,” the pamphlet included the party tenets of the DNSAP. The party, according to the pamphlet, is a “class-based party of productive work” as well as a “libertarian [freiheitlich] and strictly national [völkische] party” that, above all else, “fights the spreading power of the Jewish-mercantilist spirit in all areas of public life.”2 As is fitting with its ethnic ideology, Riehl’s National Socialism sidelines opposing class interests and focuses on racism. I. These pages were written during the German people’s most trying time, during military, national [völkisch],3 and economic hardships. During the war, we National Socialists stood unflinchingly to defend the cause of the fatherland and the German people. Every new day justifies our stance! Victory or defeat—there was no third way. Now it is we who have been beaten, because our people followed the siren call of the enemy! Much of the war’s sorrow and misery was not only the fault of our outward enemies, we also suffered from the malice of those “hyenas of the hinterlands” that live among us, consisting mostly of foreign races. Difficult years of bitter misery and drudgery are upon us. The broad masses will have to fight hard to keep themselves from being weighed down with the harsh consequences of this war, loaded upon them by profit-hungry financial and business capitalists. We execrate this social revolution, this closing drama of the world war that has been conjured up by the Bolsheviks, those followers of the Social Democrats, our main political rivals. We decry this revolution not out of cowardly fear of bloody battles—we National Socialist leaders stood year after year in front of the enemy—but rather out of deepest abhorrence for that most terrible fate, a civil war that would pit Germans against their fellow Germans. We do not want these Braunsteins and Sobelsohns tromping triumphantly over the fresh mountains of corpses created by our own people, forging new and more horrible chains for our people than those they bear today.4 We warn our German brothers from all classes about the approaching danger, and we are arming our own hordes and strengthening our battle lines deep within the territory of our own people. These battle lines will demark the way to freedom out of the darkness of our pres2 “Parteigrundsätze

der Deutschen nationalsozialistischen Arbeiterpartei”, in Unser Endziel, 18. “Völkisch” refers to an ideological movement centered around the glorification of the German “Volk,” seen by right-wing thinkers as a single ethnic body that is tied to the national landscape as well as its extra-national enclaves. 4 Braunstein and Sobelsohn are corruptions of the names of Leon Trotsky (née Lew Dawidowitsch Bronstein, which became Braunstein) and Karl Radek (née Karol Sobelsohn). Both names are shorthand in National Socialist usage for “Jewish Bolshevism.” 3

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ent times, led by a love for everything German. Our wish: no class dictatorship, not even that of the proletariat over the other classes that want to complete an honest day’s work within the boundaries of social justice. The class-based state dominated by feudal lords and clerics, Jewish capitalists, Roman parliamentarians: all of these are just as iniquitous as the Bolshevik dictatorship of the urban proletariat which is controlled, as always, by the Lenins of the world. We call for the sovereignty of the German people, made up of every German, in a form that is distinctive to our way of life, nothing like those English or French models that do not speak to us at all. Just as in Russia, where the great experimenters failed to turn the present system into a utopia by means of violence, thus the Social Democratic theory of revolutionary socialism is false and dangerous, because it—and this is much more important than the abjection of war between brothers—depends upon and longs for the complete impoverishment of the masses. Marx and Lassalle clearly preached about this impoverishment of the masses, the “expropriation of the expropriators” (meaning the destruction of the petty bourgeoisie and the middle class), because only then will the great mass of the poor diminish their despair by seizing control and property from the hands of the rest of the people. This process seems to us to be destructive to the German people. Its success—as Russia has shown—means absolute misery, and its ultimate (unrealized) goal of unlimited common property seems completely undesirable. No, these paths will never lead us to our destination and they do not fit with the spirit of our people, even if it seems to be set up that way by the parties. The size of the social democratic movement is a sign of the German people’s lack of political talent, but it is in no way a sign of the future. Do not believe that the ultimate goal of our movement should be the petty work of the present: the union’s struggles for better wages, cooperatives, suffrage, etc. Those are all paths, but they are not the destinations, in most cases they are mere protective measures against attacks mounted by exploiters. Those that call themselves Social Democrats, those who truly want to reach their ideal of a Marxist state of the future—a state that kills off all human self-dependence, a state that makes everyone just the same, a police state in every sense of the word—these people will try to reach this unattainable goal by means of international revolution. Social revolution always leads to anarchy and will eventually lead right back to the same old regime. Social internationalism is a sterile beginning point, because everyone must always wait until the last nation reaches the same level of development as the first. This means that all nations will perpetually find themselves on different developmental levels. We stand solidly upon the ground of our own people, we will move forward according to the developmental needs of the German people, and we will build our own German socialism according to German ideals. We, too, hold our “future state” dear to our hearts. We want to see the German man of the future, rising out of desperate years of struggle, rising up in a unique German way (individuality) in opposition to monotonous internationalism (uniformity). Not by reducing all beings to an East London proletariat that mentally and spiritually vegetates in the same miserable way as the proletariat in Berlin O or Wien X,5 but by lifting as many Germans as possible out of the landless, nameless and homeless life of the proletariat. We want to lift them out of that state of enmity and dissatisfaction with God, the world, and themselves, that miserable state that has been so vehemently 5 “Berlin O” stands for the Berlin “Ost” [East] postal code, shorthand for the Friedrichshain District. Friedrichshain was a bastion for Social Democrats and Communists. Wien X stands for Vienna’s Tenth District, Favoriten, a traditional workers’ district.

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praised by the Singers and Adlers of the world. We want to lift them into an existence of tangible satisfaction, rootedness, into a true culture where hearts beat together as one! Instead of deliberately embittering people and forcing them into spiritual paucity until they rise up in a violent upheaval which—as has always been the case—leads to a very bad ending, instead of striving for an impossible and truly preposterous communist utopia by means of their famous Kladderadatsch (overthrow), we call for an upward evolution, allowing people to take an ever-greater share of the rewards of that German happiness that lies dormant in all of our souls: they want their own hearth and home, independent farmers and handworkers want real ownership of property, and agricultural and factory workers want a real, growing share of the prosperity that arises from huge modern factories and corporations. “It is not property that is harmful in and of itself, as long as it rises from labor and serves the laborer. The harm comes from property without labor, especially annuities and rental income” (party principles of the German National Socialist Party). No more unnatural, artificial overcrowding of people into tightly packed spaces that wear down the soul, the spirit, and the body, breaking down women and children in mass housing and mass slums. No, modern electric technology provides us with the possibility to build our settlements deep in the wide German countryside, returning the people to mother nature whom they have longed for, even if they have become darkminded big-city socialists. Mass rental slums have broken down the German man and turned him against founding a family, because it can only lead to misery. Giving him his own house, his own garden and his own fields will brighten his mind, his heart, and his soul. We do not want to create proletarians, instead we wish to take the dispossessed and turn them into proud owners of their own land and livelihood. We do not want God-hating, envious miscreants who curse their own existence. We want happy, satisfied people who strive to reach new heights, but not through rabble-rousing and appealing to the nastiest of instincts. We want people who will build upon what has been given them, bettering themselves from generation to generation through their own ambition and hard work.

2. Anonymous Remarque Forbidden Once and For All in Austria! A Victory for German Ideology! First published as “Remarque in ganz Oesterreich endgültig verboten! Sieg des völki­ schen Gedankens!,” Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung (DÖTZ), January 10, 1931, 1. Translated by Rob McFarland. The eventual success of the violent protests against the screening of Lewis Milestone’s film adaptation of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (USA, 1930) constituted the first attention-grabbing breakthrough for Austria’s National Socialists. In the national election on November 9, 1930, they had only been able to secure 2.9 percent of the votes. After the banning of the film, the number of their members expanded by 25 percent, reaching 4,200.6 With the exception of Vienna, the screening of the film had been banned in all Austrian 6 See

Kurt Bauer: “‘. . . jüdisch aussehende Passanten.’ Nationalsozialistische Gewalt und sozialdemokratische Gegengewalt in Wien 1932/33,” Das Jüdische Echo: Europäisches Forum für Kultur und Politik 54 (October 2005): 125–39.

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states after the NSDAP fixed their sights on the film as a part of a massive campaign in Germany. Because the screening ban fell under the jurisdiction of the states, and because Vienna’s mayor, Karl Seitz, refused to ban an anti-war film solely in response to violent demonstrations, the Ministry of the Interior decided to follow the German example after days of stormy protests. The ministry banned the film in order to avoid the “endangerment to public safety” brought about by the National Socialists. The “one hundred percent pacifistic” interior minister had to go along with it!— Heimatblock member Dr. Hueber reckons with Minister Winkler’s dithering.—A success for the National Socialists, Heimwehr militias, Gymnasts, veterans, and the “DÖTZ.” [. . .] We did it! Everyone who still had a sense of national dignity stood in a united front against this film made by an American Jew, joining together weeks before the premiere of the film to unequivocally express their will by any means necessary: to thwart the showing of this slander to all veterans, this defiling of the memory of two million fallen soldiers of the world war. The fact that the situation got so out of hand as it did in Vienna is due to the—to stay on the safe side, let’s call it “stubbornness”—of an interior minister caught up in back-room political party wrangling. Herr Winkler could have avoided the costs of the huge triple-staffed police presence and the damages that go along with street riots,7 as well as the provocations from Vienna’s mayor if he would have seen himself as a representative of the German people [Volk] in Austria, as it is stated in the constitution, and not just a leader made powerful by the grace of a few party hacks. Thus, the humiliation could not be spared for this “one hundred percent pacifist” and interior minister, a humiliation for which he can thank the united front of all German [völkisch] organizations, the National Socialists, the Heimwehr militias, the gymnasts, the Starhemberg fighters,8 German [völkische] unionists and ex-soldiers from the front. And, last but not least, he has our very own newspaper to thank for braving the dangerous cliffs of the press laws and contributing to the storm of German outrage against this outrageous vilification and defilement of our German heroes. This storm of public opinion would have swept away the interior minister with his pacifist tendencies that are so incomprehensible to broad swaths of the population. The victory that was won against the pacifist proclivities of this interior minister, who was flushed into power by some passing democratic wave, is doubly potent in its significance: this victory is not only a sign that the German people in Austria have regained a sense of their national dignity and are ready to turn their backs on those people who led them into twelve years of deeper and deeper economic and spiritual adversity. It also signifies that—even in Red Vienna—the streets no longer belong to Marxist looters and arsonists, but that the German people of Vienna have once again found their will to assert themselves against the democratic dithering of those who are currently at the rudder of the ship. All German people owe a debt of gratitude not only to the widows and orphans of our fallen world war heroes, to the faded, grey throngs of our million-strong army, but 7 Franz Winkler (1890–1945) was a member of the conservative, farmer-oriented Rural League who served as interior minister from 1930 to 1933. 8 Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg (1899–1956) was the national leader of the Austrofascist wing of the Heimwehr.

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also to every single person who, ready to make any personal sacrifice, took part in the demonstrations or the preparations that brought about the banning of the disgraceful film “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

3. Fritz Brügel National Socialist Ideology First published as “Nationalsozialistische Ideologie,” Der Kampf 24, no. 3 (1931): 105– 17. Translated by Rob McFarland. Fritz Brügel’s (1897–1955) detailed analysis of National Socialist ideology came about as a result of the enormous growth in the number of votes for the NSDAP in the Reichstag election of September 14, 1930, in Germany. Brügel’s thesis: the National Socialist electoral victory must have resulted from some other factors than the twenty-five political demands that the party laid out in its program on February 24, 1920. Brügel, an author who was also the head of the social sciences research library at the Chamber of Labor, was especially mystified by the allure that the National Socialists exerted upon young and middle-class voters. The spectrum of explanations offered by Brügel is correspondingly broad, extending from the economic crisis and the increasing sense of national unease to the new forms of agitation, from the Führercult to anti-Semitism, from the “stab-in-the-back” myth (Dolchstoßlegende) to the romanticizing of wartime camaraderie.9 Because people and parties love to pull out their wide-reaching pedigrees and wave them in front of their fellow citizens, the “National Socialist Workers Party,” formed in Munich in 1919, traces its origins far back into similar movements that were launched in Austria in days of yore. It is pointless to discuss the accuracy of this pedigree, anyway the old Austrian National Socialist movement can really only be understood in the context of the living conditions in the former Austrian Empire. That movement sank with the empire, and only remains as a fragment that can be found in modern-day Czechoslovakia.10 That entity known today in Germany and Austria as the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” was thus founded in Munich in the year 1919. The current Führer of the party, Adolf Hitler [. . .], joined the party in May of that same year, becoming the seventh member of the party. From that point on, the rise and fall of the party has been tied to the state of the general German economy. The number of voters who support the party could be used as a barometer for the latest status of the crisis. [. . .] There are two obvious reasons for the party’s success. First: the economic crisis that doubtlessly induced countless people—including nonvoters—to try their luck with a new party. Second: the national agitation that doubtlessly exists in Germany, an agitation that has become increasingly visible. This agitation has as its goal the dismantling of the peace treaties and the reacquisition of the lost territories and colonies. The German National 9 The Dolchstoßlegende refers to the unfounded belief—propagated by militant right-wing politicians and populists—that Germany’s defeat in World War I could be blamed on the traitorous behind-the-scenes machinations of Jews and Social Democrats. 10 Original note: Rudolf Jung, Der nationale Sozialismus, 3rd ed. (Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, 1922).

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People’s Party, especially in their position vis-à-vis the Dawes Plan,11 have not done enough to quell this agitation. Both of these causes are closely related. Beyond these phenomena, the National Socialist program resonates with many different sentiments and impulses of the “German soul.” These become clearer if you consider the other by-products of the Hakenkreuzler that exist beyond the party program. Only by looking at these by-products can you see the real ideology of the National Socialists, which is inseparably connected with the kinds of agitation that they use. [. . .] The party has created a catechism for their events,12 for their gatherings, and for their other publicity work that provides instructions for an agitator, depending on the needed skills; for example, the following instructions are given for the crafting of paper flyers: “the text can be composed in a coarse, crude way for distribution in the workingclass districts, and for the middle-class districts they can be composed in the delicate, unnoticeable, drop-by-drop style preferred by Berlin’s idiosyncratic democratic publications.” Gatherings should be organized under the motto “sensational events, scandals of the Jewish or Marxist variety.” Political questions should be formulated in such a way that people attend these gatherings out of curiosity or rage, or because they want to see something sensational, or because people want to attend in order to “hear flattering things that appeal to the interests of their class or their social group.” The party has its own gathering ritual that requires every meeting to include a decisive “Heil” to the party and to the Führer. The Deutschland Anthem should only be sung on occasions where the audience is a known quantity,13 and in all other matters caution is recommended so that the party does not appear to be reactionary or—worse—like Marxists in disguise. Following the latest advertisement techniques, the best opportunities for the dissemination of posters, flyers, hand-outs and pasted-up notes are to be considered, no means of department-store advertising will be disdained. [. . .] The position of the Führer plays the most important role in the ideology of the party. There is no party in Germany that grants a more important position to their leader than the National Socialists give to Hitler. He is called a genius, he is likened to Jesus Christ, he has succeeded in “inspiring the German people of all classes and vocations,” upon him rests the blessing, he is the prince who leads his people at the decisive moment, he is the judge who will mete out wrath upon Germany’s enemies, whom he shall destroy. The first among these enemies are Jesuitism and Judaism, the second among these enemies is France.14 [. . .] Needless to say, the German university professors have illuminated the German ideal of the Führer with the romantic splendor of their sciences. They consider the political parties to be the embodiment of evil, and above them stands the grand, honorable Führer as judge. “If,” says a German scholar,15 “right from the beginning, a government is dependent upon the will of a parliament and remains thus dependent during the 11 The Dawes Plan of August 16, 1924, regulated Germany’s reparations payments to the victors of World War I. 12 Original note: Georg Stark, Moderne politische Propaganda (Munich: Eher, 1930). 13 The Deutschlandlied refers to the song that has served as the German national anthem since 1922. The song was composed by Joseph Haydn in 1797 with lyrics written in 1841 by August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, with the infamous first line “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.” 14 Original note: Georg Schott, Das Volksbuch vom Hitler (Munich: Wiechmann, 1924). 15 Original note: Friedrich Lent, Parlamentarismus und Führertum (Langensalza: Beyer, 1929).

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time of its mandate, it becomes a mere organ of enforcement for a foreign will. Such a government no longer leads but only implements. The will of such a government does not wield power over others but is subject to the power wielded by a foreign will.” That is the new formulation of the glorious era that [Kaiser] Wilhelm has brought to the German people, along with the smashing of all enemies of the state, the oppositional will must be subdued. This has had the effect that still today in Germany, governing has come to mean the rape of the will and the brutal wrestling down of the opposition. This ideal of a Führer most represents an absolutist monarchy; Werner Hegemann showed the role of this logic in the agitation of the National Socialists and other reactionary German parties when he pointed out that the idealized image of the historical Prussian King Frederick the Great is nearly identical to the image of Adolf Hitler.16 [. . .] In spite of this sharply antiparliamentary position of the party, the Hakenkreuzler deliberately leave us in the dark about what their ideal form of government might be. “The form of the state takes care of itself,” the Führer said, when he still did not have control over 107 delegates. The party has also never publicly explained which way it plans to go in the future. During the trial of the Reichswehr officers, a statement of the witness Hitler reported that “out of the 107 mandates we will make 250, and we will have the absolute majority. My opponents only have one interest: to denigrate the movement as an enemy of the state, because they recognize that we will take over the state by fully legal means.” Goebbels speaks much more like Orpheus: “Every form of government, whether it seems democratic or aristocratic on the outside, is a kind of coercion. The only basic difference exists in the direction, whether the coercion leads to the blessing or the cursing of the populace. What we are demanding is new, incisive, and radical, and therefore revolutionary in the deepest sense. At its core, that has nothing to do with turmoil and barricades. It is possible that it will come to those things at some point.” It is evident that Fridericus Rex,17 the most successful legend of German historiography, comes closest to enlightened absolutism, the ideal of the National Socialists. It makes sense that they have used the Fridericus films for their agitation.18 [. . .] It is now time to concern ourselves with the question of race. It is doubtlessly a mistake when the left parties dismiss the race question with laughter and avoid a discussion about it. People do not like to speak about this matter that the German poet Wilhelm Schäfer has identified as “the most shameful of all of the dangers of our time.”19 The program, ideology, and agitation of the German nationalist parties, however, need this central theme, the Jewish question, with binding logic. The Jesuitism and Judaism are, as stated above, the primary enemy, France is the secondary enemy. The National Socialists claim, unencumbered by the findings of scientific inquiries, memoirs, and eyewitnesses, that Germany had not lost the war militarily. Therefore someone must be found who is to blame for the defeat, and the fewer the people that believe in the “stab-in-the16

Original note: Werner Hegemann, Das Jugendbuch vom großen König oder Kronprinz Friedrichs Kampf um die Freiheit (Hellerau: Hegner, 1931). 17 “Fridericus Rex” is Latin for Frederick the Great. 18 “Fridericus films” refers to a number of films made about Frederick II of Prussia over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, most of which starred the actor Otto Gebühr in the role of the king. In terms of Brügel’s article, the most recent Fridericus film was The Flute Concert of Sanssouci produced by the German film company UFA in 1930. 19 Original note: Wilhelm Schäfer, Der deutsche Gott (Munich: Müller, 1923).

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back” myth, the more zealously and frequently they believe that the Jews orchestrated the wartime defeat and the peace treaties, the reparation payments and the economic misery, much in the same way that the National Socialists orchestrated a violent demonstration from Munich to Coburg. The struggle is against the individual Jew as well as the total Jewish population. It is carried out so vehemently that it cannot help but make a great impression on the younger generation who never knew the economic bankruptcy caused by the anti-Semitism of the Stöcker variety.20 Goebbels depicts the uncompromising nature of this struggle in a downright classical form: “A Jew is, actually, also a human. Certainly, and it has never been questioned by any of us. We only question the assertion that a Jew is a decent human. He does not fit in with us. He lives according to different inner and outer laws than we do. The fact that he is a human is not reason enough for us to let him dominate and subjugate us in the most inhumane way. He is a human, however—but what kind of human? If someone strikes your mother with a whip right in the middle of her face, you don’t say ‘Thank you, he is also a human.’ That is not a human, that is a monster. How many more terrible things has the Jew committed against our mother Germany, and he is still getting away with it today?” The whole construction of the National Socialist Jewish question is thus logical, for they must find a scapegoat for the defeat, someone who sits as a foreign enemy in the middle of the people. Because one out of every one hundred Germans is a Jew, this one percent of the German population must be poetically ascribed with such a huge measure of demonic abilities that the ninety-nine percent could conceivably be conquered by one percent. This is the only way to explain away the war’s losers by targeting the war’s winners. The National Socialists reach their goal by having Rosenberg, the chief editor of their Völkischer Beobachter [National observer], publish the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the true centerpiece of the National Socialist program. [. . .] The National Socialists are not only aiming their arguments against the supposed economic hegemony of the Jews but are also targeting above all else the contamination from the Jewish-materialist spirit. Someone must find the courage to say in the face of this agitation that if ninety-nine percent of Germans cannot bring up enough of their own spirit to resist the Jewish-material spirit of the one percent, then the Jewish question is not a Jewish question at all but a German question. [. . .] On top of all of this is the fact that National Socialism has scooped up all of those followers that have lived lives of adventure in the voluntary militias of the Zeitfreiwilligenkorps, in the paramilitary groups of the Baltikumformationen, in the shadow army of the Schwarze Reichswehr, and in the other coup organizations. A large number of participants in these adventures have written their memoirs, and these books are most instructive as a gauge of the spiritual health of some segments of the German people. All of these books share a certain literary device in which the hero—stuck in the middle of some situation—contemplates what the situation will look like in print. These literary experiences must naturally leave an impression upon other writers and intellectuals and awake the propensity in young readers to follow them into a life of adventure. No matter if the reader is in Riga or in Berlin, in both cities there is plenty of adventure that is beckoning: money, fame, women. [. . .]

20

Adolf Stöcker (1835–1909) was one of the founders of the Christian Social Party of Germany and the first politician to make anti-Semitism a central credo of a modern political party.

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Here a phenomenon is made manifest that normally only can be seen as an unpleasant gaffe in the daily publications of the National Socialists. The war and the revolution have completely altered the legal and practical position of the German woman, in her vocation and in her sexuality the woman stands as the equally entitled partner to the man. In politics, women’s votes represent a power that none of the old parties dared to offend. Every German party program contains special concessions to women, but not the National Socialists. The National Socialists are a masculine party. While the man fights for the Third Reich with his swastika on his steel helmet, his mild-mannered wife preserves the honor and sanctity of his home and waits while her husband sees to the ordering of the German race, proving the power of his manhood even in Baltic villages that sometimes are not that far off from Berlin. [. . .] The National Socialist ideology only stands to grow in significance and success during periods like the one we have been enduring since 1918. If you want to understand their clout, you have to keep in mind the unemployment and loss of income, the reparations question, the example of Italian fascism, the loss of German national territory, all of those things that make our national defeat into a continuously festering wound, as well as the lack of a sizeable standing army, which feeds the formation of illegal militias through its repression of long-standing military instincts. [. . .] The National Socialist ideology will not be able to force their way through if we succeed to reanimate all the lingering ghosts of rationality, and if we remain conscious of the battle that we are waging, a battle where everything is on the line: the political and material situation of the working class, the maintaining of our hard-fought gains on the way to socialism, our humanity, and our humanism. Then we will see the National Socialist ideology as it is, clear and naked: the armor of the barbarians.

4. Alfred Eduard Frauenfeld The People Want It! First published as “Das Volk will es!,” Der Kampfruf, May 7, 1932, 1–2. Translated by Rob McFarland. Part of the agitation strategy of the NSDAP/Hitler Movement was a well-publicized struggle for power that continued on after every election. Party leaders followed this pattern after the Vienna state and municipal election of April 24, 1932, where they had just received their best outcomes yet. They called for a massive demonstration that took place on the evening before the May Day holiday and thus created an open provocation toward the Social Democrats. According to their own statements, two hundred thousand people marched along the Ringstraße and demanded the immediate disbanding of Austrian Parliament and a new national election. This feature article by the Viennese Gauleiter Alfred Eduard Frauenfeld (1898–1977) enlists street violence as an essential component of National Socialist propaganda, coupled with a corresponding trope of National Socialist rhetoric which conjures a glorified mythological past. Overnight, Vienna has changed its appearance! For more than a dozen years it has seemed as if the swamp of our times had smothered all that was good in this city, as if the

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city’s German-ness was buried under the slime of corruption, buried under mountains of Jewish newspapers. Her features were more and more deformed by the vacant stare of Marxist functional buildings, with endless rows of windows in their vapid facades as a symbol of the banality of this doctrine! Red Vienna, Eldorado of the Jews and other subhumans, the last bastion of Marxism, the platform from which the scum of the East approached the German people . . . that was Vienna until yesterday! And then, suddenly, people were aware that in the city of the German gothic, in the city where the blossoming of the baroque unfolded in resplendent fullness, there lived and suffered hundreds of thousands of German people. And suddenly these people were no longer as they had been for a decade: a timid, browbeaten people who hid fearfully in the houses of their forefathers. Suddenly, they were no longer docile domestic animals that let themselves be exploited and defrauded in such an outrageous manner! These people came together, and the spirit of their fathers was once again alive within them, the spirit that once stood on the walls of this city and protected it from the attacks of the Asian hordes, saving Europe and the German culture in the process. The blood of millennia flowed again through their veins, a gift given to them by their mothers and fathers along the way. German Vienna has once again awakened from its slumber. It has recuperated from a terrible illness. Crowds are gathering around the red swastika flags. Boundless enthusiasm is glowing in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of people, and a cleansing fire welds them together to a new unit of battle-ready people, eager to serve and filled with a holy wrath that hurls them toward the battle with their oppressors. The atmosphere of the crusades has filled our German Vienna today, that same Vienna that cowardly, politicizing, weak pseudo-Christians handed over to Jewish Marxism. Vienna once forced its faltering, impressionable monarch to accept a mayor that Adolf Hitler has called the greatest mayor of all times.21 Since that time, decades have passed and Vienna turned into a dying city. It seemed that time had run out for German Vienna. Only memories survived in poetry and song, and one hundred thousand people felt like German Vienna was only a beautiful dream from a long-forgotten time. Then came National Socialism, and performed a miracle: Vienna regained its health, it awoke to new life. Anybody who witnessed those one hundred thousand people a few days ago, joining together into ranks of boundless enthusiasm, anybody who saw this knows: We are standing at the beginning of a grand, powerful movement of the people, a movement that has stirred up Vienna like hardly any movement before! Already today, the Vienna Municipal Council with its mere fifteen National Socialists does not represent the mind of the people anymore, for the National Socialist avalanche grows day by day, even hour by hour, ready to wipe out any parliament that ignores the signs of the times and wishes to close its ears to the roaring tide of the German [völkisch] storm surge. The National Socialists do not want the disbanding of Parliament, the people want it! And because the people are no longer a defenseless tool wielded by the proponents of a dying system but people that have shaken themselves awake from their drowsiness, finding a safe home and defense in the National Socialist movement, the people will know how to assert their will against anyone who tries to confront them! The people who heeded our call on April 17 and showed up in the ten thousands at Karlsplatz, these people showed up again with double that number on April 20. They 21

Frauenfeld is referring to Karl Lueger, founder and leader of the Austrian Christian Social Party and an outspoken supporter of anti-Semitic causes. See chapter 31.

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will follow our call again tomorrow and there will be even more of them. One day, our patience will be at its end and we will no longer ask for things, we will simply seize things and take back what is ours, as the sovereign people from whom emanates all of the power of state. The article of our constitution clearly states that the people are the masters of the state. Very well, we are the people, and anybody who stands against us is committing high treason and will be held accountable! We demand nothing more than our good right, and the whole world should know that we will go ahead and take this right if it is not given to us. Who will stop us? The big shots of the old political parties? . . . Marxists or Christian Socials who can barely hide their trembling fear? They are only trying to use their numbers to hide the hemorrhaging of all of their revolutionary elements and activists into the National Socialist camp, leaving only a quivering mush of weaklings and miscreants, devoid of vim and fighting vigor, not even capable of wielding a political battle sword. Some people rely on the hope that if they can delay their decision, this “passing phenomenon” of successful National Socialism will run its course. These people learned their lesson on April 30, for it turns out that the throngs of people had doubled in size within two weeks and show no signs of stopping their growth. The longer that the old parties wait before standing for a new election in the National Council, the more devastating their defeat will be. An entire people has stood up against their tormentors and exploiters and National Socialism is the manifestation of the people’s will to live, to fight, to be free! This will has now finally broken through in Vienna, against mountains of filth that had been dumped upon this German city, against the mountains of paper printed by Jews, against the walls and abutments of lies and slander that were built against the National Socialist movement and against the German people! [. . .] One thousand years of grand history do not lie, two million dead in the world war did not live and suffer so that Jews could line their pockets while German people go to rack and ruin, so that subhumans could fatten up and conquer the noble blood of superior people. The German people did not climb to such great heights to perish in party politics, democracy, and parliamentarianism. They rose up so that they could be led out of this swamp by the bearers of a sacred legacy and the protectors of a sublime past, into a lovelier era, into an era when their sacrifice will be appreciated. Persist in your subterfuge, think up the stupidest excuses, nothing shall save you now . . . The people want it!—We are the people and you must vanish! The twilight of the big shots!. . . The dawning of a new day! The people are rising and carving out their destiny with their own strong hands, according to the laws of their own blood under the sign of the swastika!

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5. Otto Bauer April 24 First published as “Der 24. April,” Der Kampf 25, no. 5 (1932): 189–93. Translated by Rob McFarland. Written only three days after the “electoral slaughter” of April 24, 1932, Otto Bauer’s (1881– 1938) analysis is still influenced by the impression of the “disruption of the middle-class party arrangement” that favored Austrian National Socialists in the state elections in Vienna, Lower Austria, Salzburg, and Steiermark. Practically overnight the National Socialists had transformed from a hardly noticed right-fringe splinter group into the main focus of the Social Democratic forces, who met the National Socialist street terror with markedly increasing aggressiveness over the course of the year. Evidently the Social Democrats had succeeded in awakening the sense of “youthful fighting spirit,” as Bauer refers to it, especially in the ranks of the Republican Protection League.22 Bauer also alludes to another motif that dominated discussions among party members up to the prohibition of the SDAP on February 12, 1934: in order to harness the rebellious mood of the masses, it would not be enough to defend the party’s accomplishments. If we are to properly dignify the results of the electoral slaughter on April 24, then we must remain conscious of the very different conditions in which we fought during this electoral slaughter, different than in other recent elections. [. . .] Although we held our ground, there has been a major disruption in the middle-class political camp. The Pan-German People’s Party does not exist anymore, the Landbund has been substantially weakened, the Heimatblock is dissolving. The Christian Socials were only able to hold up in rural areas; in the cities, especially in Vienna, they suffered a harsh defeat. The Hakenkreuzler enjoyed the kind of success that has the suggestive power to promise even more success. This is the greatest upheaval in the bourgeois political order since the time that the Christian Socials and the Pan-Germans separated themselves from old liberalism [Altliberalismus] and old clericalism [Altklerikalismus].23 Since 1897, all of our elections have dominated by the contrast between us and the Christian Socials. From now on, all elections will be dominated by the contrast between us and the National Socialists. [. . .] In many respects the Hitler Movement resembles the beginnings of the Christian Socials and the Pan-Germans (more in Austria, less in the German Reich). Their antiMarxism, their nationalism, their social demagoguery are most reminiscent of the longforgotten Franko Stein and Eduard Seidl that we had to deal with in the German areas of the Sudetenland in the years before the war. Do not underestimate the differences between the German [Reichsdeutschen] and the Austrian Hakenkreuzler. In Germany, fierce nationalism is a reaction to the deep humiliation and injury to the national 22 The

league (Republikanischer Schutzbund) was the paramilitary organization of the social democratic movement in Austria from 1923 to 1934. 23 Altliberalismus refers to the old Austrian liberal order that promoted the moderate constitutional liberalism of the 1848 revolution. Altklerikalismus refers to the power that the church wielded on Austrian politics up into the early twentieth century.

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pride that came with their defeat in the Great War. In Austria, the National Socialists [Hakenkreuzlerbewegung] gain much less energy from nationalism. The Christian Social dupe of last week may have voted for the Nazis yesterday, but he is far from becoming a Pan-German. He just got fed up with his party that had become so boringly statesmanlike, never daring to let slip an anti-Semitic word anymore, blithely taking money from Jewish industrialists and giving the Austrian people’s money to Jewish banks. Just as in the long crises in the eighties and nineties, petty bourgeois rebellion and petty bourgeois anti-capitalism first shows up in the form of anti-Semitism. [. . .] The most important thing is to know this new enemy! Our old orators are familiar with our old opponents, but they still do not know enough about our new enemies. We must catch up! We have plenty of worthwhile socialist literature about Swastika fascism. All of our speakers, all of our trusted comrades must study this literature in order to be ready for the next struggle. Our methods of propaganda must be fundamentally altered. Let us not forget that more than a quarter of our voters now belong to the postwar generation who have no memory of the time before the war. Our methods must adjust to the mentality of this new generation. Everything that the old generation fought for, all of the things that we can rightfully be proud of—our building program in Vienna as well as the eight-hour workday, workers’ vacations, unemployment insurance—all of these things are taken for granted by this young group, they are things they have known their whole lives. We cannot depend on the joy that comes from achievements we have already struggled to win. They can only be motivated by the alluring projects that we still have to fight to realize. For the old generation that bore the yoke of the monarchy, the republic is seen as a victory. For the youth, who never knew the monarchy, it is just the bourgeois republic that still must become the republic of the working people! A party that is carried by young people, like the Nazis, can only be conquered by young people, by the fighting strength of youth. Our existential tasks include creating more space for young people in our party, preventing the party from ossifying in tired old methods, in mere routines. We must channel their youthful boisterousness and create a counterbalance to the conservatism, the specialization, and the prosaic sobriety that all too often come with dedicated years of careful administrative work. [. . .] The most important thing is to stay abreast of the evolving situation in the midst of all of the political considerations and decisions that we have to make. The broad petty bourgeois and proletarian masses that were previously served by the old middle-class parties are now in flux, unmoored by the crisis. They could be lured to fascism. They could also be guided back and won over to our side. If the masses perceive us as partners and coconspirators of the bourgeois system, then we will only drive them into the arms of the fascists, and we would thus increase the fascist danger. The more that we can find a way to capture the rebellious mood that has seized the masses, the more that we can separate ourselves from the capitalist world, the more resolutely we fight against capital, fight against its institutions and its parties, fight against its entire economic, political, ideational system, the more boldly we strive for our hard-fought goal—the complete socialist reordering of the populace—the bigger the number we can draw to our cause out of those restless, moving masses. It may seem a little early at this point to make tactical decisions. We will certainly face new problems as we face the trade negotiations that are going on in Geneva, the serious crisis of the central bank and thus our currency, and all of the events going on around the world. But whatever tactical decisions these happenings might force upon us, one thing

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must be considered in every single tactical maneuver we may make: In a time, in which an unprecedented worldwide economic shock has stirred up the souls of the masses, even the smartest, most successful statesmen, compromises, or pacts will not be able to move the masses forward. Only masculine decisiveness and bold action will conquer the new enemy. April 27.

6. Dr. Otto The Psychopathology of National Socialism First published as “Psychopathologie des Nationalsozialismus,” Der Kampf 26, no. 10 (1933), 402–6. Translated by Rob McFarland. Freudo-Marxism, rediscovered by the New Left at the end of the 1960s, experienced its first heyday in the 1920s as authors close to Sigmund Freud sought to connect psychoanalysis with Marxist societal theory. These authors included Siegfried Bernfeld, Helene Deutsch, Paul Federn, Otto Fenichel, Josef Karl Friedjung, and Wilhelm Reich. The person who hid herself or himself behind the pseudonym “Dr. Otto” presumably came out of this Freudo-Marxist sphere. Whoever it was, this writer’s analysis of National Socialism emphasizes a crucial but neglected aspect of the movement’s dynamics: National Socialism encourages its supporters to seek instant gratification of their primal urges. Because they cannot be reached by rational arguments, this “band of charlatans and robbers” is, from a psychological standpoint, capable of the worst possible outcome: the unleashing of the “barbaric ur-nature of the human.” The psychological side of the National Socialist phenomenon has not yet been sufficiently investigated. The dynamics of this movement are best understood from the standpoint of psychology. The tools of consciousness psychology [Bewußtseinspsychologie] will unfortunately not take us very far. That point is proven by the impotence of the tactics of the “normal” political opposition employed by newly defeated parties. Instead, it is useful to deploy the arsenal of instinct psychology [Triebpsychologie]. The Nazis know full well why they threw the writings of Sigmund Freud onto the bonfires. [. . .] The psychological forces that are at work here could only have come about in the context of the German governmental and economic crisis: no class, no milieu, no avocation has escaped the deep tremors that threaten the very foundations of their existence. The result: extreme social tension, escalation of class differences, heated political passions; the deep disappointment of the working class, a crisis of their current class consciousness and little hope of victory, no will to power demonstrated by the leadership; the embitterment of a middle class that has been dispossessed and made déclassé, especially the intelligentsia; the tenacious resistance by industrial leaders and agricultural barons buoyed up by the army and by right-wing militias; the impotence of a parliamentary system that was born too late and flaccid from the start. In this situation, the leadership of the nation falls onto the middle class instead of the working class. In this situation, the leadership of the nation falls onto the middle class instead of the working class. Threatened by high capitalism and by the proletarian onslaught, completely blind to the lack of objective, historic opportunities, this middle class is stoking itself up for a will to power. The wild nature of this will is merely a sign of the effort it will cost them to suppress reason, rational calculation, and economic and sociological foresightedness.

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[. . .] Under the leadership of its most agitated and scrappiest elements, the petty bourgeoisie can, at best, re-arrange itself in the existing economic system: “Ôte-toi, que je m’y mette!” [“Get up and move, so that I can take your place!”] That is the political wisdom of the social climbers of the Third Reich. The class struggle mutates into a competitive struggle between every rung on the career ladder. In this environment, every group has a few members who feel like they drew the short straw, and these people are all too ready to fall for even the most audaciously deceptive ideology. This is the point where National Socialism is “rooted” in the masses: Solidarity? Collegiality? To hell with that! Down with the nearest colleague who is sitting right in front of your nose. That hits home with everyone. The result is a mere reshuffling of those who suffer most from the social order. Out with the Marxists, out with the Jews! Then there will be some space freed up across all professions. Then other people can have a turn. Seldom will they naively admit to it, and officially it is draped in heroism. [. . .] Thus, a typical psychological mechanism becomes visible: An insane person suffers paranoia. His “voices” berate him. These are the voices of his conscience, speaking out against his—truly!—evil instincts. This process is known as projection. From this angle, consider Hitler’s choice of words before he seized power: “Feeding-trough” [Futterkrippe], “big shots” [Bonzentum], “corruption” [Korruption], “party politics” [Parteiwesen]—those were the easiest to sell. As soon as they had gained power, the Hitler Movement did the very same things that they had accused the enemy of doing, in a scope and magnitude that defies all imagination. How is it possible that they got away with all of these tangible deceptions? Here we can observe a complicated social-psychological mechanism at work: the creation of a certain type of social conscience. The conscience plays a regulatory role for an individual’s social behavior. Modern instinct psychology does not see the conscience as a mystical power, not as an anonymous representative of absolute values, but as the historical expression of the concrete life experiences, the foundations of which were laid in early childhood. A child’s identification with the authority figures in his or her early environment ground this figure’s views and commandments in a “superego.” This superego serves to protect the “ego” throughout its life from the assaults of the “id,” the anonymous realm of instincts. The superego guarantees a society’s traditions. In a broader sense one can speak of a collective superego. It is impossible to imagine a civilized society without this instinct-controlling collective conscience. The social superego has its proxies in the external entities of societal organizations. The more developed and universally valid this collective conscious becomes, the more a society can forgo the personal representation of this principle and rely on the unwritten laws of society. Democracy is, in the life of a state, the most rational form of this evolutionary process. If democracy is threatened, society falls back on more primitive external configurations. The social ideas that once led the society can no longer be expressed as clear, rational concepts but only as blurry symbols. Society then falls back to relying on personal representatives who cause the masses to submit themselves to the collective measures of authority, asking them to revert to an infantile lack of criticism and to forgo the formation of their own will. The “Führer” becomes the catch-all stand-in for the father figure who alone holds responsibility. Faith, reverence, and blind obedience emerge as the dominant societal values. Critical thinking, self-determinations, and resistance to the suggestive voice of authority are all drowned by emotion. Society becomes infantilized. [. . .]

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This is the point where Führer figures emerge, with the courage to proclaim the most banal coffee house wisdom. Incitement to hatred, rapacity, cruelty—all those things that the collective superego once rejected—are affirmed, glorified, and thus unleashed. “The Führer” unloads the conscience of the dissatisfied, adapts through demagoguery to the resentments of all levels of society. Political wisdom consists of blind utopian rage against the nearest social symptom, allowing every nonpolitical malcontent to identify with the “Führer,” and to feed the leader’s megalomania with his own. In this process of identity formation, heightened by suggestive mass experience, the authority of the collective and individual superego breaks down. The new commandments and interdictions from the mouth of the “Führer” and his representative staff release the individual from personal responsibility. New reactionary values are psychologically consummated. [. . .] Yes, all revolutions have led to a breakthrough of a new social conscience. The only new thing about this “revolution” is the deep collapse of collective moral conscience. If culture means resisting the immediate satisfaction of instincts, if civilization’s collective superego plays the role of censor against the fulfillment of base instinctual desires, then the Hitler government is doing nothing but inciting people to satisfy their primal urges, sanctioning antisocial and even evil behavior. All of this serves as a textbook example of the fluid, fragile, and psychologically tenuous nature of the societal conditions that are supposed to guarantee us a stable culture. The crude traditions of prehistoric, precultural life over millions of years of human evolution have left each one of us a psychological genetic legacy in the form of our instincts and urges. It is all too easy to awaken these forces and to thus expose the barbaric ur-nature of the human. [. . .] We now understand the complete uselessness of rational or ethical arguments when it comes to this movement. National Socialism leads toward the immediate satisfaction of primal urges. It appeals to a prelogical, emotional mode of thought that is not oriented around rational facts, preferring to escape from the difficulties of the real world, pathologically drawn to utopias and fantasies. In order to help the dissatisfied masses to negotiate social demands, the Hitler Movement offers them a substitute form of gratification. Serving as a kind of hypocritical social church, it offers the intoxication of “honor,” a false pride that gives identity to socially precarious groups and allows them to act out their resentments through their cruel treatment of innocent scapegoats. The domestication of the ur-human, this oh-so-late accomplishment of the genus homo, is flat out liquidated by an authoritarian, unscrupulous band of charlatans and robbers who cover their maneuvers with appeals to a loving God. This Führer clique asserts its power, necessarily regulated by the promotion and encouragement of sadism. [. . .] Can and should the civilized world wait until this Germany has rotted from the inside out? Is the world not afraid that this wave will spill over the borders? There is no extreme act of violence that should not be expected from this regime. At its core, it supports itself by allowing vicious, inhumane acts that discharge instinctual energy. It leads to a sociological process of reverse selection. The dissatisfied, parasitic, bellicose, kleptomaniacal, antisocial, denunciatory, anti-intellectual elements of all classes gain control of every last cell of the co-opted societal organism. The psychology of the band of robbers becomes the moral of the state. They defraud us of everything that generations of our forbearers have sacrificed to give to us, everything they built and accumulated. They defraud us of press institutions, trade unions, consumer associations, Jewish

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family fortunes. Then they distribute the loot to their greedy comrades. That is their national interest. Hugenberg wanted to turn the world into an accomplice of his upcoming international heist.24 It was too early, too obvious. He had to go. The polite world is still immune to Hitler’s foreign propaganda. But is it immune to Göring’s bomber squadrons?

24 “Dr. Otto” is playfully referring to a speech given by Alfred Hugenberg on August 12, 1933, to the London Economic Conference, in which Hugenberg demanded the return of Germany’s former colonies.

Part XII Power

“Heave-Ho to the Left! Vote Social Democratic!.” SDAP poster for the Vienna state and municipal election of 1932. (Courtesy of Wienbibliothek im Rathaus.)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CAMPAIGNS AND ELECTIONS Werner Michael Schwarz

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t is only a small exaggeration to say that from the outset in 1919, Red Vienna was in a state of permanent election campaigning. The social and political claims and achievements were widely communicated with great material input, professional expertise, and ambitious experimentation. The young generation of internationally renowned graphic artists in Red Vienna worked intensively and applied the latest advertising psychology. Otto Neurath’s Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, as well as exhibitions at the Social and Economic Museum (Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum), blurred the boundaries between education and propaganda. From the mid-1920s, new media such as film, radio, or photomontage were used increasingly in election campaigns. In addition, the politician Robert Danneberg (1885–1942) regularly published sophisticated election analyses in the Social Democratic theoretical journal Der Kampf. The extensive and highly visible social housing construction program can also be regarded as an effective propaganda tool. It was for that reason that Siegfried Mattl spoke of Red Vienna as a project “in the spirit of advertising.” The 1919, 1920, and 1923 election campaigns in Vienna were notable for the unprecedented use of posters. Compared with other countries, this form of mass communication was relatively late in arriving in Austria. In contrast to the United States, Great Britain, and France, the political and legal basis was absent for a long time. Austrian election legislation became gradually democratized after 1867. The basis for a modern election campaign was not established until the new election legislation in 1896, which gave an unevenly weighted vote to all male citizens over the age of twenty‑four. On the state level, unweighted male suffrage for the Austrian Imperial Council (Reichsrat) was introduced in 1907; on the local level, however, for the municipal council, it was not introduced until 1918. Added to this was a restrictive censorship policy by the police. For a long time, therefore, the election campaigns in Austria remained “premodern,” as Pippa Norris described it in her political campaign model, in which direct communication at meetings was still the dominant mode. The posters used in the first unrestrictedly democratic elections in 1919, after the introduction of women’s suffrage, were pointed and confrontational. They were also seen as a reaction to the years of war rhetoric, from which the Christian Socials, for example, borrowed poignant motifs, such as the dragon demonizing the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. For the national election in 1920, the Social Democrats called on the illustrator and graphic artist Mihály Biró (1886–1948), who created the figure of the Red Giant as a superhero, which was to become firmly anchored in the

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leftists’ election rhetoric. The Nazis were later to rely above all on pseudo-objective text posters, establishing the swastika as a “brand” and symbolically occupying the urban space in this way. The answer from the Social Democrats from 1932 was the three downward-pointing arrows. Ernestine Bennersdorfer describes the election campaigns of the First Republic as a “war of symbols.” They featured clear stereotypes, with simplified and generalized classifications of individuals and groups, and strong emotional and defamatory content. One of the effects for the Social Democrats of these mobilization strategies was an increasing discrepancy between the party’s actual political (and increasingly restrictive) scope for action and the high voter expectations created by the power rhetoric. The great significance of posters in election campaigns is also demonstrated by the attempts of the city government and the SDAP to control this medium. Gewista,1 a publicity company, was founded in 1921 for the purpose of developing advertising space in public transport. The Wiener Plakatier-AG (WIPAG) was founded in 1924 to place private poster spaces under the control of the municipal authorities. The Social Democratic campaigns from 1920 onward were managed by Julius Braunthal (1891–1972), who also prompted the establishment of numerous party newspapers (Das kleine Blatt [The small paper] in 1927, and the illustrated magazine Der Kuckuck [The cuckoo] in 1929). The run-up to the 1927 national, state, and municipal elections, which saw great gains for the Social Democrats, was marked by a significant increase in the publicity methods and media used. For the first time, illuminated advertising was employed on a large scale, along with propaganda films. Inspired by Soviet film production, the municipal Cinema Operations Company (Kinobetriebsgesellschaft, Kiba) was founded to appropriate cinemas and encourage socialist film production. Feature-length films were shown for the 1930 national election and 1932 state and municipal election (Das Notizbuch des Mr. Pim and Die vom 17er Haus, respectively). The 1927 Social Democratic election strategies, for the first time, also focused more strongly on middle-class voters, highlighting the party’s own achievements rather than seeking confrontation. The last election campaigns in Red Vienna in 1930 and 1932 took place at a time of a dramatic economic crisis and major confrontations with the Christian Socials and the emergent Nazis. Against this backdrop, and with the infusion of new energy in form of young party members, new, theatrical forms of agitation emerged, exemplified by the Red Players (Rote Spieler), who used political cabaret as a form of direct communication (see chapter 26). Further reading Bennersdorfer 2002 Krammer 2019 Maryška 2019 Mattl 2009 Norris 2000 Schwarz (Werner Michael) 2019

1 Gemeinde

Wien–Städtische Ankündigungsunternehmung.



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1. Anonymous The Picture Gallery on the Street First published as “Die Bildergalerie auf der Straße,” Neue Freie Presse, February 15, 1919, 13. Translated by Nick Somers. This report discusses the first, extensive use of posters in the 1919 election campaign. Before World War I, election law for a long time provided for votes to be differently weighted. Moreover, women could not vote, and the restrictive censorship by the police severely limited the use of this medium. The streets of Vienna have been transformed into a large poster exhibition. There is not an empty space or small corner that has escaped the bill poster’s brush and glue pot. Whether the inhabitants have been politicized is a matter of opinion, but the politicization of advertising pillars, walls, fences, and railings is a fait accompli. There is no need to attend election meetings, and any talk of the elections while at the hairdresser can be politely but firmly declined. Election posters, by contrast, are everywhere—as soon as you step outside, after reading in the hallway where you should perform your civic duty on Sunday. The election posters in the first election in the new state are fundamentally different from their prewar counterparts. Back then, they resembled a businessman from a preindustrial age. If you want to do business with me, they said, all well and good. If you don’t want to, that’s fine with me too. Their modern-day successors speak a different language. They force themselves on you, overwhelm and silence you, sweep aside your objections and shout down your protests. The illustrated election poster is the overriding feature of this election week. The text is a mere supplement to the pictures, which dominate and seek to convey their message independently and on their own. They play on the psychological fact that cinema is now more popular than the theater—hence the competition by poster illustrators to keep their texts to a bare minimum. The horse with the red and black fetlocks; the Bolshevist with red cap and hand grenade; the crown with the representatives of the old regime sitting on it; the red and black millstone, which threatens to crush the citizenry; the dance of death of the victims of war; the returnee greeting his children; the mothers mourning their lost sons—all of these posters are effectively election songs without words. The candidates of all parties appear to be aware of the impact they need to have. Perhaps the old and antiquated view that women are influenced by appearances also plays a role. This could be the reason as well why some candidates emphasize their masculine appearance and have the idealized image of themselves carried round the streets by sandwich‑board men, who appear to have incredibly multiplied. And why should candidates be denied the possibility of retouching their own likenesses for election purposes, when they present such flattering pictures of their distinguished voters. The canvassed Viennese citizens are depicted on the election posters of all parties with an expression of good-natured joviality and a well-rounded, healthy corpulence—wishful thinking, unfortunately, after five years of war and its after-effects. The farmer behind the plow is drawn with a well-meaning amiability, as if he had never refused to sell us potatoes or milk. He is the idealized farmer from Berthold Auerbach’s novel.2 It is a sympathetic act of equalizing fairness that the returning front soldier is portrayed with all his war medals that so many people sneer at today with uncalled-for disdain. In the last 2

Berthold Auerbach (1812–1882) was a German Jewish writer and revolutionary, known for his Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Black Forest village tales) published in 1843.

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few days the walls have not been enough for the party managers, and election slogans can be read, American style, on the sidewalks as well. The way the streets are cleaned these days, these slogans could cause some confusion when voters go to the ballot boxes again in 1921.

2. Rallying Cry of Vienna’s Intellectuals First published as “Eine Kundgebung des geistigen Wien,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, April 20, 1927, 1. Translated by Franz Hofer. This election appeal for the Social Democratic Party, was published in the Arbeiter-Zeitung a few days before the 1927 Austrian national and Vienna state and municipal election. The background to this was the formation of the Unity List (Einheitsliste), an electoral alliance under the leadership of the Christian Social Party and Chancellor Ignaz Seipel. Their election campaign focused on a critique of Red Vienna, especially the “Breitner taxes.” A source of indignation was the inclusion in the alliance of National Socialist and radical anti-Semitic groups. At the national level, the Unity List was slightly ahead of the Social Democrats. Strong gains, however, led to the Social Democrats’ hitherto strongest election result in Vienna, in which they won just over 60 percent of the votes. A testimony to the great social and cultural achievements of the municipality of Vienna. In light of the political struggle in this city, we feel obligated to offer the following explanation: A person who is involved in intellectual activity is beyond and between the classes. He cannot bow to any political dogma, as it is the intellect alone that will create the new realities that politics grasps only at a later point. Yet a moment such as the present one forces upon us decisions that must be made intellectually. It is not our intention to intervene in the battle between different economic concepts or offer our views on taxation matters. In our opinion, the state and society have the responsibility to make life easier for individuals rather than more difficult. We therefore condemn all unjust hardships imposed by authoritarian demands. But it would be true neglect in the battle against taxation burdens to overlook the great social and cultural achievements of the Viennese authorities. It is this great and prolific achievement that cares for the needy, educates and develops young people on the basis of the best possible principles, and guides the current of culture into the deepest channels, these deeds are what we want to recognize; we want to know that this achievement transcending political considerations will be maintained and promoted. Intellect and humanity are one and the same. They are capable of alleviating the loud and greedy oppositions of material life. Let the economic movements and political slogans shout their claims of priority, we will not allow ourselves to be silenced. We cannot sacrifice the inspired intellect. Therefore, we must counter the attempt to deceive the public through an economic campaign slogan, which in reality aims only at a standstill, even at regression. The essence of the intellect is first and foremost freedom, which is endangered at present, and which we consider our responsibility to protect. The struggle to elevate humanity and the battle against lethargy and barrenness will always find us at the ready. And at this very moment, too, we are ready.



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Dr. Alfred Adler Wilhelm Börner, writer Art[h]ur Brusenbauch, academic painter Professor Karl Bühler, director of the Psychology Institute of the University of Vienna Franz Cizek, professor at the School of Arts and Crafts Leo Delitz, academic painter Josef Dobrovsky, academic painter Karl Forest, actor and director at the Deutsches Volkstheater Dr. Siegmund [sic] Freud, professor at the University of Vienna Dr. Max Graf, writer, professor at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts Fritz Grünbaum, writer, director of the Stadttheater Dr. Fanina Halle, writer Anton Hanak, academic sculptor, professor at the School of Arts and Crafts Albert Heine, privy councillor, Director of the Burgtheater a. D., director and actor, professor at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts Josef Jarno, director of the Renaissancebühne Dr. Hans Kelsen, professor at the University of Vienna Dr. Wilhelm Kienzl, composer Theodor Klotz-Dür[r]enbach, academic painter Dr. Rudolf Kraus, professor at the University of Vienna Professor Ernst Lichtblau, architect Primarius Dr. Robert Lichtenstern Alma Maria Mahler Maria Mayer, Burgtheater actress Georg Merkel, academic painter Margaret[h]e Minor Dr. Robert Musil, writer Dr. Wilhelm Neubauer, professor at the College of Agriculture Ferdinand Onno, actor at the Deutsches Volkstheater Alfred Polgar, writer Professor Otto Prutscher, architect Professor Helene Rauchberg Franz Salmhofer, composer Karl Schneller, writer Dr. Oskar Strnad, architect, professor at the School of Arts and Crafts Dr. Anton Webern, musician Dr. Egon Wellesz, Docent at the University of Vienna Franz Werfel, writer Professor Karl Witzmann, architect Franz Zülow, academic painter

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3. Anonymous To All Working Jews! Jewish Voters! First published as “An alle arbeitenden Juden! Jüdische Wähler und Wählerinnen!,” Der Jüdische Arbeiter, Organ der jüdischen sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterorganisation Poale Zion, Wien, April 20, 1927, 1. Translated by Nick Somers. The fight against the Unity List, the election coalition formed under the leadership of the Christian Social Party in 1927 and including Nazi groups, was the main reason for Poale Zion’s support of the Social Democrats. Poale Zion was a Zionist socialist movement active in Vienna since 1904. At its World Congress in 1920, it split into left-wing and right-wing factions. The latter supported the Social Democrats in Vienna. The elections to the Austrian National Council and Vienna Municipal Council take place on April 24. More than ever before, these elections will represent a contest between the united reactionary parties on the one hand and the Social Democratic Party on the other. Where should Jewish voters stand? Jewish blue- and white-collar workers can give a rapid reply. Together with the entire proletariat of Austria, they campaign not only during elections but over the course of their entire life for better wages and working conditions, for social and protective legislation, for a new society on a socialist basis. Jewish white-collar workers in particular, among whom the loss of jobs and earnings have been enormous because of the crisis and failure of so many banks, will suppress all feelings of despair and faintheartedness and will fight passionately for the rights of the deprived and impoverished and for the victory of socialism. But where do Jewish tradesmen, small shop owners, peddlers, and sales representatives, the broad Jewish masses, belong? For them, the most important battle is for rent control. Jewish shopkeepers and tradesmen, Jewish doctors and attorneys have the same interests as workers in protecting rents and ensuring the victory of Social Democracy. The masses of self-employed tradesmen and shopkeepers also share the interests of the workers when it comes to customs and trade policy. In particular, they need to support the battle by the Social Democrats against the new customs levy on basic foodstuffs, which benefits only large farm owners at the expense of the population as a whole. In general, the many small shopkeepers and tradesmen need workers with purchasing power. It is therefore in their interest at least to reduce if not to eliminate unemployment, since a higher living standard among the workers also means higher earnings and better prospects for the large mass of self-employed tradesmen and shopkeepers. You should therefore support the Social Democrats not only in their struggle to protect rents but also in their tax and finance policy and their social policy! All those who say that they support rent control but oppose public housing and the Breitner taxes are thus in reality enemies of the broad masses.3 If we are going to protect the home of every family, and the office, workshop, or premises of every shopkeeper and tradesman, we must give the municipality the means and taxes to construct attractive, solid buildings. 3

The new taxes in Red Vienna—the highly progressive housing construction tax, the welfare tax, and the luxury taxes—were named after Hugo Breitner, the city councillor of finance. See chapter 2.



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But apart from the buildings, is it not obvious that our socialist municipality uses money for productive and social purposes while the federal government wastes it on failed banks? You must support the Social Democrats on economic issues. If you do not, you will work toward their defeat and toward the success of the Christian Social unified front. This is also the first—albeit not the only—sin that has been committed by the candidates on the “Jewish list.” For fear that Jewish voters will automatically reject them, they support rent control, but in the same breath attack public housing, the Breitner taxes, and social democracy in general. For that reason alone, they do not deserve our trust. But rent control is not the only battle. The fight is also about whether the reactionaries will succeed at all, whether, as prelate Seipel says,4 it is time for a shift to the right. To that end, the Christian Socials have allied not only with the Pan-German People’s Party but also with the Hakenkreuzler. The anti-Semitism of the Christian Socials is already a slap in the face for the Jewish population and a constant source of harassment. Their barbs are aimed not at the Jewish bankers, who are on their side, but at the poor Jewish masses. But this anti-Semitism is relatively harmless compared with the vicious, bestial anti-Semitism of the Nazis. These are the people Seipel has sided with. For the reactionaries, all means are justified in the fight against Social Democracy. But we, the broad Jewish masses, know that reactionaries who mix with the Hakenkreuzler represent a great danger for us. Reactionism is the greatest enemy of the Jewish masses. That is why the reactionaries and the Unity List must be fought with all our might, and all our votes must go to the Social Democrats. That is also why we are against the “Jewish list,” which can only weaken Social Democracy and strengthen the reactionaries. This time the candidates on the “Jewish list” demonstrate with particular clarity that they are working against the broad Jewish masses. First, because they consider it to be a good idea to work with the declared reactionaries and anti-Semites, the Jewish bankers, the already baptized and not-yet baptized bank directors in fighting against the Breitner tax and the Vienna city administration. Second, the candidates on the “Jewish list,” the bourgeois Zionists, are pursuing the wrong policy by seeking to create an intellectual schism between the Jewish masses and the Social Democrats. It should not be forgotten that this is not a question of national demands. The representatives of the “Jewish list” seek to obscure this issue by using national phrases, but even they are not serious about it. It is sufficient to point out that they allied in 1923 with the people from the “Israelite Union” and explicitly undertook not to make any national demands.5 Between 1923 and 1927, nothing has changed in this regard. The marriage contract between the bourgeois Zionists and the Israelite Union has been annulled, but not because the bourgeois Zionists have changed their minds and are suddenly making national demands of the Austrian government, but because the “Israelite Union” is fed up with providing them with money for the agitation and votes for Dr. Plaschkes.6 The representatives on the Jewish list should not be allowed to numb their listeners with empty words about “national interests.” 4 Ignaz Seipel (1876–1932) was a Catholic priest and head of the Christian Social Party from 1921 to 1930. He was chancellor from 1922 to 1924 and 1926 to 1929. See chapter 32. 5 Until 1928, the liberal Union of German-Austrian Jews (Union deutsch-österreichischer Juden) dominated the board of the Jewish Community Vienna. For the board elections in 1924, they formed a joint list with the Zionists. 6 Leopold Plaschkes (1884–1942) was a Zionist and member of the board of the IKG. From 1919 to 1927 he represented the Jewish National Party in the Vienna Municipal Council.

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This approach would only cut off the Jewish popular masses, where Jewish popular interests actually exist, from the natural assistance that international socialism provides them. We Jewish socialists constantly strive to ensure that this does not happen, and Jewish voters should see that this is so in the elections. The Jewish bankers and journalists who spit in the face of the Jewish people and campaign for the anti-Semites in the Christian Social and Hakenkreuzler Unity List should be branded as traitors. You should also fight against candidates of the so-called democratic and “Jewish list,” because deliberately or not, they strengthen the anti-Semitic reactionaries, the greatest enemy of the Jewish popular masses. Vote for those people who will fight for a better and freer life, for a society without social and ethnic suppression, for a popular and liberating social democracy. The working Jewish population can and must demand that Austrian Social Democracy takes account of their vital wishes and rights. We demand that the Social Democrats vigorously attack the anti-Semitic contamination of the masses, that they enable us to counter the alienation of the young generation from the Jewish nation, that they promote the great project of building up a working Palestine. These demands are in line with the basic principles of genuine democracy and popular liberating socialism, values shared by international socialism. We join the Austrian workers in fighting for these claims and raising awareness of them. Sign the statements issued by our organization. The regeneration of our people is an act of progress, and national and social liberation, calling on us to march arm in arm with the most resolute fighters for freedom. Working Jews! Support our demands! Vote together and canvas for Social Democracy! Poale Zion Jewish Social Democratic Workers’ Organization.

4. Robert Danneberg The Party First published as “Die Partei,” in 10 Jahre Republik, ed. Josef Luitpold Stern (Vienna: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1928), 18–19. Translated by Nick Somers. To mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of the First Republic, Robert Danneberg (1885–1942) reported on the extreme growth in membership in the Social Democratic Party. Although 1927 was a critical year for the party (the police massacre on the occasion of the Palace of Justice fire, a bourgeois backlash, and growing fascist tendencies in Austria), it marked the party’s zenith in terms of organization and votes. As a youth and education functionary, president of the Vienna State Assembly, and jurist, Robert Danneberg was an important negotiator within the party. Along with Hugo Breitner he is regarded as the architect of the tax system in Red Vienna. The Social Democratic workers’ movement has gradually also attracted large numbers of white-collar workers and civil servants along with farm and forest workers. It



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is the task of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party to unite and organize the entire working class—workers in trade and industry and commerce and transport with farm and forest workers, manual workers with white-collar workers and civil servants—to make them mentally and physically fit for action and ensure they remain so, to educate them to take up their struggles together and to subordinate all special interests of particular professions and businesses to the general interests of the entire working class. In this way we will raise the effectiveness of the working class to the highest level and make them realize the incompatibility of their lives and development interests with the capitalist social order. The Social Democratic Workers’ Party has destroyed the election privileges of the owner classes, toppled the monarchy and founded a democratic republic, achievements that our party program proudly proclaims. On Republic Day, many people celebrate because they have to, and others celebrate because they have come to terms with it. We Social Democrats celebrate the republic as an important achievement on the way to our goals. We have a goal of transforming the capital-serving republic into a social republic, a community, a united country. We, the party! Forty years ago, a group of valiant men, persecuted and disdained; just a generation later they have become the visible tool of history, builders of a state, refuge for the desperate and perplexed, hope for the discouraged, pioneers of a great future. Before the war began fifteen years ago, there were 78,877 men and 10,751 women in the territory of present-day Austria who admitted to being members of the Social Democratic Party. At the end of 1927, we are 468,523 men and 201,063 women. These figures are indicative of a splendid rise, all the more impressive for being accompanied by a massive growth in all other areas of the workers’ movement. There are many achievements that we can be rightfully proud of: an army of trade unions, the imposing ranks of cooperative members, the vast regiments of working-class sports clubs and Protection League [Schutzbund] members, the plethora of cultural organizations, the throngs of juvenile workers, the tens of thousands of parents who unite to wrest their children from the spell of an antiquated education system. There are six times as many men and twenty times as many women in our party as there were before the war. Looking back, this development is unparalleled. But looking forward, we still have lots to do and will only be able to deal with the tasks if many more people come to us. The generation growing up today no longer has to overcome outdated attitudes, for they have had the benefit of a republican education. We are seeing a young generation at work that is developing vigorously and carrying on the fight, as the old campaigners gradually hand over the reins of leadership. Their legacy is the party, the structure that thousands have energetically worked to create over the past four decades. Success is its own incentive. The day is coming when the red flag will be hoisted victoriously. Then, thanks to the efforts of the party, the celebration of the republic will become a celebration of socialism.

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5. Joh. H. Who Should We Vote For? The Social Democratic Campaign Has Begun First published as “Wen sollen wir wählen? Der Werbefeldzug der Sozialdemokratie hat begonnen,” in Das kleine Blatt, October 24, 1930, 6–7. Translated by Nick Somers. This is a report on the upcoming national election in Vienna and the diverse publicity methods and media, from posters and promotional films to the new forms of agitation by young party members. Das Kleine Blatt, in which the report was published, was founded in 1927 as a low-threshold, small-format newspaper by Julius Braunthal (1891–1972), who had lead the Social Democratic election campaigns since 1920. What goes on in the city is played out in the streets. There is now a new addition to daily city life, work, society, entertainment: the elections. And the approach of election day is reflected in the appearance of the streets. Walls talk. What do the posters normally talk about? About the latest film, the best there has ever been, the best coffee, the best toothpaste, infallible cleaning products. They still do so today, but in the last few days more important things have been usurping them, things of decis­ive significance for our nation and our country. Advertising posters have become wall newspapers, and people who otherwise simply ignore them as they passed by now stop and stand, avidly study the words and the signed opinion pieces, and think about and discuss them. The strength and vitality of the Social Democratic Party is also evident in its huge superiority in the poster war. Before the others even realized how they should present themselves to—or hide themselves from—the electorate, the Social Democrats had already put up one poster after the other. Their flaming textual and illustrated slogans illuminate the city: “Vote for those who build houses, not the housing profiteers!”— “Down with the civil war provocation—vote for the Social Democrats!” The red flame burns brightly over the rooftops . . . But even the modest “Vote for the Social Democrats” scribbled in small shaky letters on a board somewhere speaks a powerful language, the language of the stirring love of a people for its party. The new meeting. It’s evening, the cinemas are closed for the day, but there are more people streaming from meetings than from cinemas and theaters. Every day, the Social Democratic Party organizes seventy-five to one hundred events in Vienna alone! This is mass education in grand style. Still a struggle, but this time with minds, a struggle to win over people through argumentation. The others are not so comfortable in this battlefield. They have no intellectual weapons, just rifles and machine guns and at best obscure slogans and venomous untruths. That is why they do not try very hard with meetings. They bank on the stupidity of people and, failing that, brute force. Why try to win minds when they are quite happy to break heads?



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The Social Democrats appeal above all to the voters’ reason, but they also appeal to their emotions. Social Democratic meetings have largely taken on a new form. We no longer simply listen as the speaker calmly, objectively, and concisely outlines the Social Democratic platform. First, a speaking choir puts the audience in a congenial mood, then a film or slide show illustrates the speaker’s words, satirical songs entertain the crowd, and a choir solemnly rounds off the event. The content and liveliness of these Social Democratic election meetings can turn them into a memorable event in their own right. Five dreams and a notebook. There is a slide show about the “five terrible dreams” of a young girl, dreams that show us a world as gray and bleak as it would be if the prelate [Seipel] and the rooster’s tail [Heimwehr] and Strafella and his corrupt gang were to be in power and to shape it to their own designs:7 the pious fashions, corporal punishment, paradise for house-owners . . . We have a vivid picture of what awaits us if the anti-Marxist demon, the anti‑Marxist enemies of the people, prevail. Carefully selected pictures of the old days that would return, and clever and humorous caricatures back up the heart-rending words. Seriousness and humor go together, everyone understands that. And everyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear knows how they should vote . . . There is a film in which a notebook plays the main role, a notebook belonging to an American journalist, who comes to Vienna to write sensationalist reports about the “dying city.”8 He obtains his information from a professional maligner of Vienna, the editor-in-chief of the Neues Freies Journal, and writes it down credulously in his notebook. But when he sees for himself what Vienna is really like and learns about the socalled “good old days,” he tears up his carefully recorded jottings. This story provides an opportunity to show the great achievements of the Social Democrats with an eloquence that is only possible in films, while still leaving room for a romance that keeps everyone happy. A fine cinema performance, and free of charge into the bargain . . . How the young present themselves. Do you know the huge semi-circular arena inside the Matteotti-Hof [municipal housing complex]? On Saturday evening it was converted into an open-air cinema. The films showing the massive housing projects of the Vienna municipality and the children splashing about in the paddling pools were projected to a delighted audience of several thousand spectators. Beforehand there was a stirring speaking choir, in between a speaker spoke inspiring words, and there was musical entertainment with fighting and hiking songs. It was a completely new and completely different kind of event. Individuals could be heard shouting from the windows of the huge housing complex: “Who should we vote for?” Thousands of voices shouted out the answer! There were loud bursts of applause each time the words “Vote for the Social Democrats!” appeared on the screen, and the great achievements and great demands of Social Democracy were met with endless cheering.

7

Franz Georg Strafella (1891–1968) was an Austrian businessman and Christian Social politician who by a majority decision in Parliament was replaced in 1931 as director general of the federal railways following accusations of corruption. 8 Das Notizbuch des Mr. Pim (Austria 1930, dir. Frank Ward Rossak).

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The stone arena in Matteotti-Hof testified to what the Reds have achieved; and the loud cheering of the crowds filling it provided assurance of what it can do in the future . . . Blue shirts—everywhere and nowhere! This brightly lit celebration under the dark starry sky was organized by young people— Red Falcons, Blue Shirts.9 It has been repeated elsewhere since then, always with the same enjoyment, enthusiasm, and optimism. The “Blue Shirts” appeared then for the first time. On the same evening they were seen handing out flyers and publicity materials to passengers at railway stations. On Sunday, they could be found all over the city, laughing and singing as they marched down the streets, turning into the courtyard of one of the municipal housing projects, gathering in a square—and in no time a crowd had assembled around this new type of traveling journeyman. Mocking rhymes are bandied around about Strafella, Starhemberg, and Vaugoin.10 But there are also serious chants full of rage that hit the mark, fiery fighting songs, dramatic scenes. With a closing chant of “Friendship! Friendship!” they move on resoundingly to their next stopping point. These five thousand or more are “making Vienna unsafe.” They appeared in at least 170 locations in Vienna on Sunday! You run into them everywhere: in the afternoon they perform for female servants, in the evening at the election film projection; they enliven every election meeting; they have visited just about every municipal housing complex. Where have they not been? Veritable all-rounders, these young boys and girls in their blue shirts and red neckties, their bright voices and fresh faces, everywhere and nowhere! And they bring the energy and enthusiasm of the young to the vast Social Democratic election campaign, conducted with illustrations and texts, with speeches and breezy songs, with films and photos, with pathos and intelligence, and, above all, with tens of thousands of ardently enthusiastic people sure of their victory in the tough battle that will be decided on November 9.

6. Anonymous An Election Appeal in Stone! First published as “Der steinerne Wahlaufruf!,” in Das Kleine Blatt, October 12, 1930, 2. Translated by Nick Somers. Karl-Marx-Hof, one of the largest municipal housing complexes, known in particular for its contemporary design, its name, and its location on the edge of the wealthy district of Döbling, was opened in a flurry of publicity just before the 1930 national election. The major building program of Red Vienna was used extensively for propaganda purposes. This Sunday morning the Viennese should travel to Heiligenstadt, where the mayor will be opening a municipal housing project whose grandness exceeds anything ever seen in our city since the war. It is a construction that will make our Vienna famous, 9 As

a response to the Nazi brown shirts, the Socialist Workers’ Youth wore blue shirts. Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg (1899–1956) was a leader of the Heimwehr militias and leading candidate for the right-wing Heimatblock for the Austrian national election in 1930. Carl Vaugoin (1873–1949) was a Christian Social politician, minister of defense, and, briefly, chancellor before the 1930 election. 10



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a construction massive in dimensions, sublime in its artistic design, unparalleled in its hygienic facilities. Five thousand people, including twelve hundred children, who previously wasted away in stifling tenements owned by slum landlords now have a sunny, healthy home centered around beautiful green courtyards. The two large kindergartens, a youth club, library, two pools, and a school dental clinic in this huge estate will ensure that its occupants are content and well. Five thousand people will be delivered from the torment of crowded tenements and homelessness to lead a healthier and happier life. Karl-Marx-Hof is the name of the proud building. People of Vienna, go to Heiligenstadt today and take a look for yourself at this example of Marxism! Just think of all the untruths you have been told about Marxism! Think of all the anger and hate, lies and slander that have accompanied this structure, which now stands in the midst of our city, proudly bearing the name of Karl Marx! Remember the special issue of Seipel’s rag and its attempt to disconcert the inhabitants by predicting the collapse of the building in Heiligenstadt!11 People of Vienna, go to Heiligenstadt today and take a look for yourself at this “collapsed building”! Go and see for yourself how the antiMarxists have lied, and then make your own judgment about Marxism and anti-Marxism! Stand in front of the huge construction, stroll through its greened courtyards, take a look at the apartments with their sunny balconies, kindergartens, and libraries, and find out what Marxism really is about. Marxism, you see, liberates housing, the sun, the air, and the light from speculation and exploitation. Don’t you remember how it was before Marxism came along? Housing, light, and air were commodities like any other, subject to speculation, usury, and exploitation by work-shy capitalists. That has all changed. Housing, light, and sun should not be commodities; the human demand for healthy living should not be traded on. Housing should be built and managed by the municipality and made available to those in need of it. The Karl-Marx-Hof is an example of Marxism in action! And the kindergartens, libraries, pools, the noncommercial provision of electric light, gas, and public transport— that is what Marxism is about. A small beginning—but Vienna has now built public housing for forty-five thousand families! This beginning shows what the Marxists want. They want the good of the community to be provided by the community. What do the anti-Marxists have to offer? What services do they provide? Unprecedented hardship, unemployment, and Strafella—that’s what! Anti-Marxism is the party of the house speculators; Marxism is the party of the house builders. Do you want the party that builds or the party that exploits? That is the question that voters will have to decide on.

11 “Seipel’s

rag” refers to the Reichspost, which supported the Christian Social Party, and in particular to the October 21, 1927, issue.

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7. Alois Jalkotzy Women Matter! First published as “Auf die Frauen kommt es an!,” in Die Unzufriedene, April 23, 1932, 2. Translated by Nick Somers. In his attempt to attract women voters of the Social Democratic women’s magazine Die Unzufriedene (The dissatisfied woman), the youth and education functionary Alois Jalkotzy (1892–1987) placed particular emphasis on welfare and schooling. During the Red Vienna era, the Social Democrats were able to steadily increase the number of female supporters to compensate for the loss of male voters, particularly since the start of the economic crisis. First of all, there are more women than men voters, and they therefore have a decisive influence on the outcome of the election. And then, people very often underestimate the significance of women when they are determined to have their way. It is true that in politics women are sadly accustomed to keeping their opinions to themselves; but surely not the “dissatisfied” ones? In this election campaign, and on this April 14, where in most cases there are municipal elections, the issues involved are those that our women take very seriously. First of all, the incredibly important issue of schooling, and then welfare. This election campaign is about nothing less than the welfare of our children. From the smallest community to a huge municipality such as Vienna, it is the responsibility of the council to manage schools and welfare services. The way this is done is decided by most parties in the assembly rooms, by the mayor and the heads of the various committees in each local council. An election like this can have a happy or unhappy outcome, which will generally affect the life of the community for several years. Let us ensure that the outcome of this election is a happy one! From welfare benefits for pregnant women and infants to kindergartens, school meals, and after-school facilities for adolescents—all this is the responsibility of the municipalities. Which party successfully provides this welfare, which parties are seriously interested in it? Certainly not the nationalist parties. Whether they style themselves as National Socialists, Pan-Germans, Hakenkreuzler, or pro-business, they are all in favor of free competition and capitalism. Their credo is the survival of the fittest; those who have lost their jobs are probably not hardworking, and their children and wives are therefore doomed to failure. It is true that the Christian Socials are in favor of welfare, but they want it to be the responsibility not of the municipalities but of monasteries and the church! In their eyes, humility is the first requirement for welfare and gratitude the next. The Social Democrats demand that welfare should be a public and municipal responsibility. The Christian Socials in the Vienna Municipal Council repeatedly complain about the high cost of public welfare. Their charity is much cheaper. We cannot deny it, public welfare costs more than what the church, its monasteries, and parishes offer. But what they offer is not welfare but charity and compassion. “Ask and you will be given!” But then we ask our working-class wives and mothers in all seriousness: “Wouldn’t you rather do without all this? Wouldn’t you rather boldly demand back from society what it owes you



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as women, particularly as mothers, and what it owes your children?” First of all, this rotten capitalist economic system impoverishes people, then it imposes the most terrible hardship on the workers, and then the clerical shepherds and nuns of all confessions come bringing “gifts to the poor.” But we seek a completely different type of redemption—and only the Social Democratic Party can help us to find it. We demand our right to welfare! Upstanding and progressive women and mothers who know what welfare means in this time of terrible economic hardship have no choice but to vote for the Social Democrats! We do not beg; we vote for the Social Democrats. We love our children, we know how hard things are today, but we know how we can help ourselves, and that’s why we vote for the Social Democrats.

8. Anonymous Wear Three Arrows! The New Fighting Symbol First published as “Tragt die Drei Pfeile! Das neue Kampfzeichen,” in Arbeiter Zeitung, August 14, 1932, 3. Translated by Nick Somers. The three-arrow symbol, borrowed from the anti-Nazi Iron Front organization in Germany, was a reaction by the Austrian Social Democrats to the strategy by the Nazis of placing swastikas prominently on all of their propaganda posters, establishing this symbol as a recognizable brand. A new symbol has emerged in the fight that the German workers are waging for freedom. The three arrows, the insignia of the Iron Front in Germany, are an expression of the fighting spirit in the combat with barons and Nazis, reactionary Junkers,12 and bloody fascism. Austrian workers, bound to the German proletariat in brotherly solidarity and by the same fighting spirit, have enthusiastically adopted this symbol. The leaders of German-Austrian Social Democracy have decided to recommend to all party comrades to wear the new insignia alongside our party symbol, as an additional sign of active disciplined resistance. The three arrows are aimed at our opponents! The first arrow is for capitalism, the second for fascism, and the third for reactionaries in all their forms. May the new fighting symbol express the will to overcome these opponents of freedom and of the working class! The three arrows will conquer the swastika! At this historic moment in Germany today, the Iron Front must fight against the bloody barbarity of fascism. In Austria no swastika should be allowed to oppose the iron front of the working class! Defy the enemy and wear the three arrows in the street! Show it on every poster, every flyer, at every event! We are continuing the old fight with a new symbol! Long live the struggle! Long live freedom!

12 In

the Weimar Republic, the Prussian Junker, large landowners from east of the Elbe river, were often perceived as epitomizing reactionary, militaristic, and antidemocratic views.

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9. Anonymous Wear the Blue Shirt of the Socialist Youth Front! First published as Tragt das Blaue Hemd der Sozialistischen Jungfront! Sozialistische Jungfront in der Sozialdemokratischen Partei, flyer, ca. 1932. Translated by Nick Somers. In the light of the economic crisis and as a reaction to the Nazi brown shirts, the blue shirt was adopted as the symbol of the Socialist Youth Front (Sozialistische Jungfront). The blue referred to the traditional color of workers’ clothing. The blue shirts were also part of the new theatrical agitation form developed by the young members of the party. The functionaries of the Socialist Youth Front have decided to ask all of its members to acquire the movement’s blue shirt and to wear it and the red necktie at all demonstrations. The blue shirt and red necktie are our symbols. The blue shirt recalls the blue worker’s overalls. The Socialist Youth Front demands work! The red is the old symbol for freedom. The Socialist Youth Front fights for freedom!

Work and freedom are the slogans of the Socialist Youth Front. And we want to demonstrate our resolve to fight for work and freedom by wearing blue shirts! But by wearing blue shirts we also want to demonstrate the open and courageous commitment of the Socialist Youth Front to the Social Democratic Party. We want to ensure that the bright blue of the Socialist Youth Front everywhere supplants the dirty brown of the swastika! We therefore call on all comrades in the Socialist Youth Front to wear and show the blue shirt of the Socialist Youth Front wherever you go! Only buy blue shirts with our SDAP logo, available in the outlets listed below. The central committee of the Socialist Youth Front in the Social Democratic Party.

10. Stal Three Out of a Thousand Pioneers: A Report from the World of Wall Newspapers First published as “Von 1000 Pionieren 3: Reportage aus dem Bereich der Wandzeitungen,” in Der Kuckuck, December 11, 1932, 12. Translated by Nick Somers. Wall newspapers were an important medium for information and propaganda, particularly in rural areas. They were compiled ad hoc by local functionaries from party material and newspapers, such as the illustrated magazine Der Kuckuck. A good 90 percent of the militants in the social democratic movement remain anonymous. No lead articles mention their names, no one tells them in person that they are strong, powerful, trustworthy, courageous, and selfless. Only occasionally does a police report show their name, in small print, when an insignificant man with his insignificant



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life stands up to fight for his rights. With a perpetually empty stomach, never able to enjoy life or its material benefits, pants neatly sewn perhaps, but shoes and coat ripped, looking for a cigarette but with nothing to eat. Who exactly is this person? You need only look through the register. I bet ninety to one that he is driven in his work for the party by idealism running up and down stairs until he collapses in exhaustion on his straw mattress, hoping that things will be better tomorrow. His life and actions are anonymous, he is known only as part of a group, as a storm trooper on the innumerable party and trade union fronts. From one thousand pioneers, I would like to single out three, or a dozen, a hundred, and all those who are causing a commotion in towns or villages. They work with their brain, scissors, and gluepot; they make wall newspapers that cannot be ignored because they are public. Their letterpress tray is the reservoir of pictures from the Kuckuck, the accusations cut out from party newspapers. They squat somewhere, perhaps in a wellheated room, but more often in an empty delivery room or an unheated store, with a blackboard in front of them, on which someone sketches what the next issue will look. A school of wall newspaper editors, a school of fellows who view our time quite differently, who in every picture and every word see a usable accusation of capitalism and reactionism. They work all day, twenty-five times a year, construct, try out, create new ideas, sometimes a little angry at the many photographers who take pictures merely of chimneys and clouds, birch trees and clouds, children’s buggies and clouds, still life and light, girl’s heads and light, reflections in glass, completely forgetting that a camera in the hands of a worker is a weapon with which to hunt political elephants. They are annoyed with these photographers because with their idyllic and romantic photos they forget to focus on our worldview and quickly salve their consciences when Der Kuckuck publishes good and large-scale agitation material. An assistant works in an anonymous corner, a baker, tailor, painter, lathe turner—a family of unemployment benefit collectors, magnificent fellows, who will not be cowed by the future. They speak all languages, those of the intellectual and those of the primitive. This era, in which the infamy of the ruling system becomes more evident every day, has sought new advocates and found them in the wall newspaper people, the poster sticker teams, and the lookout teams. The shouting in Parliament, the outcry in the newspapers, have found their pendants and strong confirmation in wall newspapers. It is hardly surprising that the Hakenkreuzler, whose lies are exposed a hundred times a week all over the city, organize raids and tear down from the walls the fruits of this great work. But it is hardly surprising either that if the poster stickers catch a stupid boy red-handed, he is likely to receive a public punishment for his vandalism and have a pot of glue poured over his head! They are magnificent specimens, these three out of a thousand, or a thousand out of ten thousand, these hunters for pictures and headlines, who energetically and uninhibitedly seek to passionately express their ideas, who find pictures and words to expose the injustices of our time, and who look eagerly for helpers and new opportunities. Perhaps we will better understand these times one day, reconstructed from old wall newspapers. Making a wall newspaper is a new concept, taking the fight to the front line, holding the line because its loss would create an unfillable gap in the front, fighting with humor, seriousness, tenacity, and stamina.

“Developments in Vienna’s Proletariat Press.” Pictorial statistics in the style of the Social and Economic Museum. Arbeiter-Zeitung, May 12, 1928. (Courtesy of VGA.)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

COMMUNICATION AND PROPAGANDA Alicia Roy

T

of the term propaganda is heavily laden with negative connotations, as it is associated with the manipulative spread of falsehoods and harmful ideologies. However, in the 1920s and 1930s, propaganda was a positive term, and of great theoretical importance to the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP). Willi Münzenberg, speaking from the rival German communist perspective, explained that “in contrast to the contemptuous judgment of bourgeois groups, the word propaganda in the socialist terminology means something great, valuable, spiritual, scientific.” Propaganda, agitation (also a positive term in this context), education, and enlightenment are all related, and integral to an understanding of the party workings during the period of Red Vienna. There are two primary threads concerning propaganda and communication: the efforts of the SDAP within the city to educate the masses and run campaigns and the international “city marketing” efforts of Red Vienna (or, as the Social Democratic city representatives often preferred, New Vienna) to present itself as an example of a social democratic metropolis to the world. Internationally published books, such as Robert Danneberg’s Zehn Jahre Neues Wien (The New Vienna, 1929) or Hermann Kosel’s famous tourism posters, cultivated a distinct identity for the city, an image with political meaning and cultural capital. Vienna’s architecture also played a significant role, combining ideological importance with marketing potential. The ambitious building program and architectural style provided much-needed public housing and were also visually distinctive and recognizable, ideal for use in advertising the city’s progress and successes. The goal of this chapter is to shed light on the communication and propaganda efforts of the SDAP, which were multimedial in a truly modern sense. This was innovative but also necessary to match the organizational scope and ambition of a party looking to shape the culture and worldview of the Viennese. Heinrich Faludi, a Viennese PR-expert for the city’s publicity company Gewista and later on involved with the Austrian Research Center for Economic Psychology (Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle), wrote that propaganda should “take possession of the cityscape,” from leaflets, posters, and wall newspapers (newspaper clippings posted for the benefit of those too poor to buy a newspaper) to choirs, films, and cabaret performances.1 Finally, live events such as he modern usage

1 The

Austrian Research Center for Economic Psychology was famous for its study Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal (The unemployed of Marienthal), a classic of empirical social research. See chapters 3, 4, and 17.

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parades (especially the annual May 1 parades and demonstrations), marches, and sports were also a central part of Red Vienna propaganda and attracted huge numbers of people. As Wolfgang Maderthaner describes it, the SDAP propaganda was a “total work of art in which personal emancipation and political activity were to be connected,” creating the New Human of the twentieth century. Especially in the late 1920s and into the early 1930s, Red Vienna was on the defensive against the growing fascist and National Socialist propaganda machine. An ongoing debate on how to react suggested responding in kind to fascist propaganda—blue shirts to counter brown ones, a raised fist to counter the Nazi salute, “Freiheit” or “Freundschaft” salutations to counter “Heil Hitler,” the three arrows symbol to counter the swastika (see chapter 34). Despite the attention to new media such as film, the party’s strongest branch of propaganda by sheer output was that of print media. Supposedly, every member of a Social Democratic organization could receive forty books published by the party every year. The Vienna Workers’ Libraries and Social Democratic publications such as the ArbeiterZeitung were vital in establishing an alternative source of information to the capitalist press, demanding that the “workers’ press” provide both politically educational information and the news and entertainment that the growing readership sought. The illustrated journal Der Kuckuck—which was introduced in 1929 and included serialized fiction and articles written in a more informal, easy-to-read voice—was a breakthrough that attracted younger readers. The focus on the integration of word and image in Der Kuckuck¸ exemplified by its use of distinctive image collages, reflects a larger thematization of perception in the early twentieth century. Urban life coupled with new forms of media, such as photojournalism and film montage, led to a theorization of changes in the human experience of reality, with an emphasis on visual perception. Images were no longer just illustrations or accompaniments to a text—“the images themselves tell the story.” The new view of the world needed to be trained and developed as a part of an aesthetic education. Propaganda and communication in Red Vienna needed to appeal to the eye, but it was also part of the educational program of the party to train visual perception in order to better emancipate the masses. The attention to educational work and visual media in Red Vienna famously found expression in the Social and Economic Museum, which existed from 1925 to 1934 under the direction of Otto Neurath. Friedrich Stadler describes the museum as a place where “social reform and educational work [came] together in theory and practice.” In order to better illuminate for a mass audience the topics of health, family, social politics, living, school, art, insurance, and architecture (in short, everything Red Vienna aimed to revolutionize), Neurath and his colleagues sought to present facts and connections in their historical context using easily understandable figures and symbols. The most important information should be clear at first glance, and all details should take no more than three glances to be understood and absorbed. This method of representing social facts visually became known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics—later refered to as Isotype, short for international system of typographic picture education (see the opening image of this chapter for an example)—which has had a far-reaching influence worldwide in the pictorial presentation of the physical world from museums to textbooks to today’s infographics. With a view to educating the masses, finding innovative ways to secure votes, and advertising its successes to the world as an exemplary social democratic city government, Red Vienna was the site of propaganda and communication efforts on an unprecedented scale. Internally, the entire cityscape became a surface on which to work, and externally, Red Vienna advertised itself to the world, spreading the message of what could be achieved by social democracy for the betterment of all humankind.



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Further reading Gruber 1991 Krammer 2008 Mattl 2009 Maderthaner 1993 Riesenfellner and Seiter 1995 Stadler 2002

1. Anonymous Ten Years of the New Vienna First published as “Zehn Jahre neues Wien,” Der Kuckuck, May 19, 1929, 8–9. Translated by Nick Somers. In the ongoing struggle to spread their message, to campaign during elections, to gain new membership, and to represent Red Vienna to itself and the world, the SDAP relied heavily on printed publications to do the work of propaganda. In response to loss of interest (particularly among the younger voters) in the mid-1920s, the party created several new publications designed to appeal to the popular tastes of younger Austrians. The publications were illustrated with lots of photographs and featured serialized fiction in order to increase outreach. The illustrated newspaper played to the visual nature of the Austro-Marxist idea of counterculture (a culture for workers, separate from bourgeois culture). Most notable among them was Der Kuckuck, which was characterized by an emphasis on visual engagement and experimentation, with photomontage as a communication strategy (see chapter 28). Zehn Jahre Neues Wien is a classic piece of “city marketing” advertising the successes of the SDAP and presenting Red Vienna as a model to the world, with lists of statistics originally accompanied by a signature Kuckuck-style photo collage. “If we could still kneel, we would kneel down; if we could still pray, we would pray for Vienna.” These words by the great poet Ferdinand Freiligrath have taken on new meaning and significance.2 Millions of people are turning their eyes to Vienna. Tens of thousands come every year from all over the world to study and to visit the innovations by the city of Vienna. For the first time in history, a socialist majority has the opportunity in Vienna to show how a large city should be run. It is now precisely ten years since the Social Democrats took over the municipal council at a time of hunger and ruin following the terrible world war. The city coffers were empty and the Christian Socials were about to sell the most important communal utilities to private capital. Ten years have elapsed since this takeover—a short period in the history of a great city—but a period that has completely changed the appearance of Vienna. The innovations are too numerous to list here. Of all the major cities in Europe, Vienna had the most terrible housing situation. The red council has built forty-two thousand housing units to date, and every week work starts on new major constructions. The vast inner courtyards in these housing complexes 2 Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810–1876) was a poet and translator associated with the Young Germany movement. This quote comes from his poem “Wien [Vienna],” written in 1848 and published the following year.

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with their playgrounds, communal laundries, kindergartens, and libraries are now well known. In these ten years, not one area of the municipal administration has failed to see new and major accomplishments. Public transport has been extended through the electrified urban railway and new bus routes. The streetcar network, which was completely run down because of the war, has been largely renewed, and is now three times as efficient as it was before the war. The school reform in Vienna has been acknowledged and admired by education reformers throughout the world. The once notoriously dirty streets of Vienna are disappearing. Every year around sixteen million schillings are invested in new streets, and around two million square meters of road surface have been covered with oil to keep down the dust. The once-dreaded street sweeper who with his long broom threw up clouds of dust has disappeared in these ten years, and the city’s workshops are endeavoring to manufacture new and better streetsweeping vehicles. The street lighting was very poor. Today, the streets are lit by some 20,000 powerful electric lamps, with several hundred new lamps being installed every week. It would take volumes to record all of the achievements, which can only be listed here in dry and very incomplete form: 25 new public baths, 20 open-air children’s pools, 160 new parks, and dust-free refuse disposal with the Colonia system. And all of these creations are supplemented by a huge welfare system. Vienna’s youth welfare program has been revamped from the ground up and is practically unparalleled in any other city in the world in terms of structure and performance. Child welfare starts in the womb. Pregnant mothers can register in one of the thirty-six Counseling Centers for Mothers and receive maternity benefits. The infant is welcomed in the world with a present from the council in the form of a complete layette. All births are registered so as to enable city female welfare workers to offer assistance if necessary. All mothers can come to the District Youth Offices for help and advice. Hundreds of kindergarten units have been built. Working women can leave their children there without worries from 7 am to 6 pm. Schools now also are provided with a doctor and a nurse [Fürsorgerin]. The children in particular are examined for their lung conditions. At the end of 1927, thirty-seven thousand children were being permanently looked after by the city authorities. In addition, thirty-five public after‑school and daycare centers have been established; there are school meals with ninety distribution points serving around fifteen thousand children; vacation centers can accommodate two thousand children every year; and twenty-five thousand children are offered a summer vacation by the Vienna Youth Relief Organization [Jugendhilfswerk]. The council has established seven large day-recreation centers in the Vienna Woods for two thousand children, thirtyone children’s playgrounds, and thirteen ice-skating rinks. But all this is just a small part of the city’s youth welfare, with its Intake Center for Children, its children’s homes, and its wonderful home in Schloss Wilhelminenberg, probably the most pleasant children’s home in Central Europe. The school dental services and clinics, the training schools and community homes for neglected children, and many similar establishments give us an idea of the gigantic scope of Vienna’s social welfare projects. It is a magnificent work that has been accomplished in these ten years, unique in its solid quality, unique in the spirit that pervades it. As a result, this work has become renowned beyond the borders of the city and of Austria; as a result, millions of people all over the world regard it as the creation of a new spirit that is getting ready to conquer earth; as a result, millions of people identify with this work, kneel down and pray for it. We can thank fate that we have been given the opportunity to experience, to help shape, and to consolidate this grandiose structure. Future generations will celebrate the day in which the working people took the fate of our city into their hands as the start of a major revolution in which something new and great took possession of the earth.



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2. Leopold Thaller Educational Resources and Propaganda in Campaigns First published as “Bildungsmittel und Propaganda im Wahlkampf,” Bildungsarbeit: Blätter für sozialistisches Bildungswesen 17, no. 10 (1930): 109–10. Translated by Nick Somers. Leopold Thaller (1888–1971), head of the Central Office for Workers’ Education (Arbeiter­ bildungszentrale) from 1922 to 1932, was engaged with the topics of education and youth from early on in his career with the SDAP. In 1919 he became a member of the Vienna Municipal Council and chairman of the International Working Group of Socialist Youth Organizations. This text highlights Thaller’s opinions about the significance of elections as opportunities for mass education, and it provides a detailed look at the media in use by the party at the time. In describing the needs for media use during elections, Thaller reproduces the discourse of the modern era as one of speed and constant desire for excitement, but in contrast to Otto Neurath, he sees visual media as an aid to text as opposed to a method of communication on its own. Thaller illustrates his vision of a multimedia party presence within the city, so that every level of life and experience is infused with the sights and sounds of the party’s propaganda efforts. Even just a few years ago, no one would have thought of using educational material in an election campaign. They are opposites, like fire and water. Election campaigning took precedence over education. Of course, normal education work is still impossible today and has to be put aside during a fierce campaign. But an election campaign is actually enlightening, in other words a form of mass education on the largest scale. This is now generally accepted, and it is therefore no longer paradoxical to speak of using our new educational material in the election campaign. Earlier election campaigns were run above all by means of meetings and flyers, and even posters played a small role. The more intense the election campaigns became, the greater the number of people to be mobilized and addressed and hence the more numerous the campaign aids used. In the national elections three and six years ago, our party was already using film and cinema in the election campaign. During the last elections we also added projections and illuminated advertising. In fact, modern advertising seemed to have been used strongly by all the parties in the campaign. Our party can say proudly that it paved the way in this respect, with the bourgeois parties lagging far behind. In our fast-moving time, however, posters and illuminated advertising are likely to lose their impact very quickly. Technological developments over the past few years have suddenly opened up new possibilities. Small-gauge film and records can now also be used as educational materials in election campaigns. There is no need any more for dry election meetings with one, two, or more speakers. With the simplest means, a livelier version of the spoken word can be used in meetings. Small-gauge film, records, projections are useful to the campaigner. Even if there is no cinema to screen a 35mm film, there is still electricity to power a small-gauge film projector. And even if there is no electricity, a projector with acetylene or spirit lamps can be set up. Almost every tavern has a gramophone, and if it is already too old, a small portable device can be used. Everyone will be glad to hear a socialist battle song or a rousing speech by one of the prominent leaders of the movement, even if it is a recording. What do we have?

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The party has [commissioned] a great feature film, “Das Notizbuch des Mr. Pim” [Mr. Pim’s notebook] (a refutation of the lies about the municipality), and a cartoon, “Die Abenteuer des Herrn Antimarx” [The adventures of Mr. Antimarx] (a satire of an anti-Marxist petty bourgeois, the Heimwehr and Strafella3), produced on 35mm film. The feature film has also been copied onto small-gauge film. Two other short films, “Frohe Jugend in Wien” [Happy youth in Vienna] (showing life and activities in municipal kindergartens and day-care centers) and “Schach der Wohnungsnot” [Checkmate for housing shortage] (a film about the council’s housing policy), are available. Three new slide shows—“Die fünf schrecklichen Träume der Gretl Wiesner” [Gretl Wiesner’s five terrible dreams] (particularly suited for women), “Diese verfluchten Marxisten” [Those damn Marxists] (showing the work of many small red municipalities), and “Die Brüder” [The brothers] (about Heimwehr fascism)—are also available. The slide show “Das neue Wien” [The new Vienna] has been updated and can also be used. Five records with speeches by Otto Bauer, Robert Danneberg, Julius Deutsch, Otto Glöckel, Adelheid Popp, Karl Renner, Paul Richter, Pius Schneeberger, Karl Seitz, and Anton Weber have been recorded. The old-style voters’ meeting is no more, the modern voters’ meeting looks quite different, perhaps like this: Opening: record, choir “Empor zum Licht” [To the light]4 Speech Small-gauge film (can be accompanied by records) Recorded speech by two candidates Closing choir: record, “Lied der Arbeit” [Song of work]5

Many of us today have no inner peace; we are surrounded everywhere by restless and bustling activity. We want to see much more clearly and hear much more loudly than people in earlier times. If something is to arouse our interest, we have to be made especially aware of it. Illustrated posters and illustrated newspapers are much more interesting than text-based posters, flyers, and brochures. Just as the new voters’ meeting is completely different, completely different methods must be used for the invitations to attend it and the publicity about it. Invitations and posters are no longer sufficient. A loudspeaker truck with a set of records with socialist marches, songs, and speeches is required not only to announce the relevant voters’ meeting but also to set the mood for it. It must be used to penetrate those areas that even today are inaccessible to our speakers. More neon advertisements are required in large cities; this is possible if cheaper and simpler methods, which are often even more effective, are used. Illuminated panels on roofs, canvas banners spanned over streets and squares, effectively bring home our slogans. Poster trucks traveling the streets, walking or cycling sandwich men can go where there are no poster walls. The Blue Shirt agitprop troupes will provide a captive audience for a street orator.6 Political couplets, sometimes a full evening of political cabaret or revue, will bring a lighter note into the seriousness of the campaign. 3

Franz Georg Strafella (1891–1968) was a Christian Social Austrian politician accused of corruption by the Social Democrats. 4 Written in 1901 by Gustav Adolf Uthmann. 5 Written in 1867 by Josef Zapf. 6 Inspired by political cabaret, the Blue Shirts were agitprop groups, who performed during elections.



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In election campaigns, as in education, it is not just about bringing the slogans to the masses but also making them stick. The great mass of people understand the quality of the theories only if they are made readily comprehensible to them. Our educational material can and will be of assistance here. From the wealth of new ideas used in this election campaign, voters will certainly be persuaded that the Social Democrats are the party with new ideas.

3. Otto Neurath Youth Front Agitation and the Task of Education First published as “Jungfrontagitation und Bildungsarbeit,” in Bildungsarbeit: Blätter für sozialistisches Bildungswesen 19, no. 9 (September 1932): 165–66. Translated by Nick Somers. The Social Democrats thematized political education as a means to inspire the working class to independent thinking and political engagement. At a time defined by transformations in the way people experienced and consumed reality, focusing on visuals took center stage. Otto Neurath (1882–1945) famously developed the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics (or Isotype) as a new form of visual expression, in order to prepare and communicate knowledge for broad public consumption and understanding. In this piece, Neurath speaks to the necessity of approaching images not as a secondary accompaniment to text, but as conveyors of meaning and knowledge in their own right, with even more power than that of the word to influence and educate the masses. Images are not simply objects of emotional impact or excitement. Far from being simplistic, images are ideal for political education because they are easily accessible to most people without the need for a high level of schooling. Within the party organization, the Youth Front [Jungfront] unites particularly energetic comrades for offensive and defensive work. The more the working class is aware of its own situation and historical development, the stronger it becomes. The progress the working class makes is therefore dependent on enlightenment and education. Our agitation is effective not only because it is a counter to our opponents’ agitation but also because it is markedly different from theirs. And because it is also educational, it is clearly distinct from the agitation of the National Socialists and other class enemies. Agitation is designed to persuade prospective comrades-in-arms but also, no less important, to reaffirm the convictions of those who have already been persuaded. We counter the ardor of attack with our own ardor and enthusiasm. “But enthusiasm is not some kind of herring that can be pickled for years” (Goethe). We must establish a lasting basis from which the fighting spirit can emerge whenever it is required. This calls for constant activity within the everyday work of the party and comprehensive education work in the widest sense. Agitation comes through actions, words, and images. These are the tools of enlightenment: Agitation with words It is stimulating, as it produces a direct feeling of resentment, rancor, indignation. It describes fascist domination, enslavement of the proletariat, the devastating effects of the

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capitalist economy. The next step is discussion of the opponents’ programs. But however important it is to be aware of the opponents’ programs and to drive the opponents into a corner with their own words, overemphasis on this aspect of the struggle distracts from the Marxist education that is so vital to our struggle. The content of the opponents’ programs is less important than what they do. Agitation must consistently show how the opposing parties have behaved in the past and how their composition forces them to behave. We must show the class structure of our society and of the state, reveal the balance of power, and point out the revolutionary path of the working class from a capitalist to a socialist order. In this way we can expose the opponent groups, the interests they represent, the approaches they take, the extent to which this harms the working class, the forces that are available to counter it, the successes they have achieved to date, and the hopes and dangers that exist. An agitator can do this only if he has adequate training. However straightforward things may be presented during a campaign, whatever examples one may use to explain things, this simplification presupposes that the campaigner understands how things are connected. In a way, every Youth Front functionary is also an education functionary. Only by tirelessly picking at the opponents’ arguments, which are easier to find in the press and in everyday speech than in the programs, only by clearly explaining the real social and political situation, only by presenting everything the working class has suffered and achieved, is it possible to give the young people who come to us the Marxist tools that will enable them not only to act based on their own understanding but also to encourage others to join the struggle. Agitation with words is to a large extent education, systematic education, opportunistic education. It must be taught and developed in this way. Agitation with images We live in a visual century: advertisements, films, illustrated newspapers, demonstrations, banners: in short, we live among a growing number of objects and processes that capture our sights. And yet our agitation comes mainly from a century of words, a century of great parliamentary debate and great speakers. The theory of pictorial agitation is not yet well developed. We know that agitation requires a visual impact. Whereas agitation with words is not limited to exciting passion or enthusiasm, pictorial agitation is. Our agitation with images is based almost exclusively on arousal. We use pictures without considering their impact to the same extent as we do with our writing and speeches. We observe again and again, however, that the pure excitement aroused by pictures quickly subsides. We can illustrate the downfall of the capitalist order and the rise of the working class in pictures showing a defeated capitalist and a triumphant worker, but how many variations on this theme are possible? We can show over and over the worker, his flag flying, marching into the sun. But the effect of these images subsides and can often be misleading. Many of them do not give even an inkling of the bitterness of the struggle. Many of them seek merely to show the straight line of triumphant progress, a victorious battle cry: forward! A completely different effect is achieved with images showing the shocking aspects of the current order, the distribution of land ownership, child mortality within the proletariat and the ruling class, the collapse of the capitalist production apparatus, the achievements of the working class, as well as their revolutionary failures. Posters designed for a narrower target group can show the counterrevolution of 1849, which soon came to an end, and the welcome conclusions that can be drawn for the present counterrevolution can be effective as well. How much discussion is provoked by instructive pictures of the taxes raised and



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put to use by Vienna’s Social Democratic municipality compared with the taxes raised by the national government. What an impact it will make to illustrate the effects of the collapse of the capitalist order by showing the number of blast furnaces that have been shut down, whereas in the Soviet Union, whatever your opinion of it, one blast furnace after another is fired up. A pictorial chart can be used in which tiny blast furnace symbols representing the newly created installations show how much progress is being made. A pictorial chart in which tiny figures represent the progress of our Youth Front movement can be studied again and again. After all, people also keep track of the latest soccer scores. An explanatory quantitative picture is such an important means for agitation because it is also informative. Every agitation: education Marches, assemblies, and street agitation are all based on the same principle: “Education!” Every large-scale agitation plan must also aim specifically at enlightenment. Serious self-education is required if our Youth Front functionaries and every Youth Front comrade is to agitate successfully.

4. Paula Nowotny Mail Correspondence between City and Country First published as “Briefwechsel zwischen Stadt und Land: Eine neue Aktion der ‘Unzufriedenen’,” Die Unzufriedene, September 12, 1931, 2. Translated by Nick Somers. Many discussions of media use and modern propaganda were almost by nature bound up with city life—particularly the discourse regarding visual stimulation and pervasive speed. However, the propaganda work of the party also looked beyond the borders of Vienna to increase their outreach and test the possibilities of periodicals, the preferred Social Demoratic communication medium. To this effect, Paula Nowotny ran a campaign through Die Unzufriedene (The dissatisfied woman) that tried to connect urban working-class women activists with women in the rural regions. The campaign illustrates the necessity of cultivating urban-rural connections and communication for establishing solidarity and for spreading the party’s successes outside the city of Vienna. Dear Comrades! One of the most important organizational issues today is propaganda among workers and small-scale farmers in the country, in remote villages and localities, and way up into the mountains. If the party manages to win the hearts of the working people in rural areas, the gains are sure to be reflected in the elections. This publicity is difficult to establish on a large scale in rural areas, and it requires a lot of money. The Austrian party has grown larger, however, through the tireless piecemeal endeavors of thousands of people. Let us therefore apply these piecemeal endeavors to publicity in rural areas as well! The Unzufriedene is collecting the addresses of everyone in the city and in the country who is interested in an exchange of letters and newspapers.

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Our “Looking for connections” contest, announced last May, has brought us a large number of such addresses. Every newspaper, every small brochure, every letter, every postcard of municipal housing complexes provides the workers and farmers in rural areas with information about the progress of the workers in the cities. This information is important, since our opponents in the villages (priests, teachers, foresters, businesspeople and, not least, the opposing press) endeavor repeatedly to spread lies and slander about the things that the “Reds” are doing in the cities. If the farmers and workers in the villages know the “Reds” from the city in person or through correspondence, the barrier of unfamiliarity is overcome and they will soon extend a hand to one another, because they understand each other, because they have learned more about each other as people. Is this publicity work from person to person, from family to family, not an agreeable task for every committed and zealous party comrade? We ask all of our readers to tell friends and acquaintances that the editorial board of the Unzufriedene, Vienna 5, Rechte Wienzeile 95, has lists of addresses of comrades in the towns and villages of Austria who wish to correspond by letter for propaganda purposes. If they would like a list, they should notify the editors of their address and inform them whether they want a town or a village address list. If they enclose a twenty groschen stamp, the list will be mailed to them straightaway. For years now, the “Unzufriedene” has been calling for diverse and energetic rural propaganda, and it would be pleased if men and women were to take part in large numbers in its new “town-country correspondence” campaign. Those who have suggestions themselves regarding rural propaganda are invited to notify the Unzufriedene. The greater the participation in this important issue of rural agitation, the more rapid and diversified will be the response, on which the further progress of the party depends.

5. Anton Kuh The Mass Mobilization of Work First published as Anton, “Der Aufmarsch der Arbeit,” Die Stunde, May 3, 1923, 3. Translated by Nick Somers. Although for sheer amount, journals, and newspapers were the largest branch of Social Democratic propaganda and communication, mass festivals attracted larger numbers of Viennese workers, “mainly because they offered an easy form of association with mass experience [. . .] and provided symbolic assurances of collective strength.”7 Live and public events were also closely tied to sports, another significant propaganda and organization effort of the party. In this article, Anton Kuh (1890–1941), famous for his varied literary output, writes for Die Stunde (The hour), Vienna’s first tabloid newspaper. His vivid description of the May Day march (an annual event which at the time took place along the Ringstrasse and ended at the Vienna City Hall) illustrates the effect this type of mass event had on the spectators. Party issues aside, the fact remains that of all the marches and demonstrations, the most uplifting and enticing is a march by real working men and women. There is no sign in 7 Gruber

(1991, 102).



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their behavior of embarrassed theatricals, demonstrative and yet avoiding direct eye contact, nothing of the old‑fashioned, embittered self-consciousness in the idealistic costume processions of a class that is unsure of itself and remote from reality. Here we encounter frank and earnest faces, none of the stiff-lipped defiance in front of an invisible amateur photographer, but with eyes as curious as they were when they first saw the light of day, reflecting an abiding capacity for enjoyment—in short, faces that have not yet been dehumanized by a corrosive internal lack of freedom. A workers’ march is much more appealing than a regimented march-past, just as a neatly brushed costume is much more appealing than a uniform or Carnival fancy dress costume. Yesterday’s workers’ march was an impressive refutation of the recent popular talk of the “twilight of socialism,” or “the decline of socialist thinking,” etc. Never before was the participation so great, never before did passers-by have to wait so long to cross the street, never before was the participation of entire families with their children so remarkable. Some tightlipped bystanders might have been afraid. How they would have liked to say something malicious, had they not been so surprised themselves by the spectacle . . . [. . .] But the march took place shamefully without an echo, without cheering or hankie-waving. People associate workers above all with the Social Democrats; and when the workers of the nation, celebrating themselves and their commitment and strength, go into the streets, the rest (however much they are moved by the marchers) stand apart, hamstrung by their own convictions, because the color of the flags does not suit them. It is the color of the banner that counts, not the human impulse. And yet for that very reason, the sound of the marchers, left to their own devices, not driven or moved by acclamation, kept ringing in people’s ears. The march lasted two and a half hours. The message to spectators was even more forceful than in previous years: this colossus is not to be trifled with. The reality of Viennese life is deceptive in that respect. In no other city in the world is May Day celebrated in such a civilized, peaceful, and innocuous atmosphere as it is in Vienna, often mocked for its good nature by political rowdies from elsewhere, a city that gives priority to a style of living over vulgar politics: political activity in the morning, off to the park in the afternoon.

6. Otto Felix Kanitz and Stephanie Endres Educational Tasks of the Workers Federations of Sports First published as “Bildungs- und Erziehungsaufgaben der Arbeitersportverbände,” in Protokoll des V. ordentlichen Bundestages des ASKÖ abgehalten am 11. und 12. Juni 1932 in Wien (Vienna: ASKÖ, 1932), 20–28. Translated by Nick Somers. Otto Felix Kanitz (1894–1940) spoke at the annual federal conference of the Austrian Workers’ Association for Sports and Physical Culture (Arbeiterbund für Sport und Körperkultur in Österreich, ASKÖ) shortly after the 1932 Vienna state and municipal election, in which the Nazis greatly increased their percentage of votes. With this new threat made clear, political groups throughout the city tried to understand the draw of the fascists, especially among young voters. Kanitz, a youth and education official, concludes it has to do with their propaganda techniques and argues for a restructuring of the SDAP’s own propaganda efforts modeled on those of the National Socialists. This includes the use of uniforms,

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logos, party gestures and greetings, and a stricter hierarchical order with strong leaders. The feminist educator and sports official Stephanie (Steffi) Endres (1891–1974) disagrees, suggesting that more girls should be welcomed to party sports activities and warning against the imitation of fascist strategies. Dr. Kanitz: Comrades! This is not the time or the place to discuss the principle that sport in Social Democratic workers’ sports organizations is not an end in itself but a means to an end. It goes without saying that the real task of Social Democratic sport is also to teach the spirit of socialism to the many young people who join our sports movement because they are sports enthusiasts. [. . .] If you look at the election results, particularly in Vienna—a city in which the Social Democrats have been given undisputed responsibility for the past thirteen years and have managed successfully in spite of the terrible hardship of our times and the fierce attacks by opponents—you will see that the party has succeeded in retaining the large majority of young voters. That our older voters continue to vote for the Social Democrats is no surprise, considering that they identify emotionally with the movement after the decades of struggle. As far as the younger ones are concerned, it has been possible, thanks to the many years of educational work, including that carried out by sports organizations, to create an emotional link to the movement and to make them impervious to the temptations and demagogical methods of others. We have already come this far, comrades, but it is clearly not enough. We must now consolidate these emotional ties through planned educational activities. [. . .] This is something that the bourgeois sports federations, particularly the pan-German ones, have also long recognized. Most of you will be familiar with the function of the Dietwart.8 He is not someone who just says a few words at gymnastic club functions, he is responsible for the stimulation and political motivation of the sporting activities. Unlike us speakers, he does not have a subordinate role in club life but is a very important person. [.  .  .] Hence the function of the speakers. I should like to say something about their duties. Their task, as you know, is to take every opportunity of saying something about the political events and our position with regard to them. They must ensure that our songs are sung. Our old comrades sing very little, while our opponents have a completely different attitude to group singing. The task of the speakers is to ensure that young members of the sports organizations are integrated in the party and that they are incorporated in the party organization. [. . .] There are a number of politicians and serious academics in Germany who have studied Nazism and its incredible dynamism and they have come to the conclusion that it results not from the political depression and Germany’s special situation, particularly its foreign policy, but from the brilliant and psychologically persuasive National Socialist propaganda. The truth of this conclusion can also be seen in Vienna. The National Socialists have lured many supporters away from the bourgeois parties; tens of thousands supporters of the Christian Social and Pan-German People’s parties have become disillusioned with their old parties. If they have turned their backs on them, however, that does not mean that those who abandon the Christian Socials automatically go to the National Socialists. Could we not attract these dissatisfied voters ourselves? The fact that they preferred the National Socialists bears witness to the excellent Nazi propaganda. 8

An individual responsible for giving speeches and political education in pan-German gymnastics organizations, a term later adopted by the Nazis.



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That three-fifths of young voters with bourgeois, pan-German and other sympathies have gone over to the National Socialists is proof that this party understands very well how to appeal to young people. [. . .] We older ones who experienced the war, right on the battlefields, and who also saw the consequences on the home front, we still have the horrors of the war in our bones and all agree with the principle: no more war! We know what it means. The same cannot be said for the younger generation. [. . .] Do not forget, comrades, that in these eighteen-, twenty-one-, and twenty-five-year-olds, who are far removed from war, the inherent youthful instinct for adventure and aggression is very much alive. [. . .] In the middle of our democratic era, another attraction has arisen that has a great draw for our young people, harking back to the past, to strict discipline, to the military, the Führer problem. They have a certain inclination to follow that path as it is new and revolutionary. [. . .] As we can see, despite our best efforts, young people will fail to truly understand democracy. We must draw conclusions from this, from the dissatisfaction of the young. At every opportunity we must condemn this capitalist world, at every opportunity we must point out that we do not agree with it; again and again we must condemn it and say that this is not our world, not the world that we believe in. If we do this, we will be in tune with the revolutionary mood of the young. We must provide a form of expression for the revolutionary will of the young. We must indicate our ultimate goal. The National Socialists make it quite easy: the Third Reich. Everyone is at liberty to make of this what they will. That concept has the advantage of being completely new. We speak of socialism. This concept is already old. The speaker must say to the young: look, the world is falling apart, you are the victims, the ones to suffer from this collapsing system, and it is time to start building a new world. [. . .] Look, comrades—and you in the sports organizations will be particularly aware of this—young people have a distaste, as I have explained, for excessive democratic clichés and platitudes. Instead, they have a certain need for strict leadership, and we must naturally also take that into account. You will always find that these young people enjoy uniforms and marching in step. A word as well about the uniform or clothing: In Austria it is a blue shirt. The SAJ [Sozialistische Arbeiterjugend, or Socialist Workers’ Youth] were the first, inspired by the International Youth Meeting, then the young unionists adopted it, and now the Socialist Youth Front [Sozialistische Jungfront] has opted for it. The Red Falcons [Rote Falken] have also swapped their green shirts for blue ones. Sports organizations might now also consider wearing blue shirts with the insignia of their sport, as is the case with some groups. The idea is that blue shirts should be as visible as possible so as to simply wash away the dirty brown of the Nazis. [. . .] Without a decision being adopted, the greeting “Freundschaft!” [Friendship!] has become customary in the workers’ movement, not only in Austria but also elsewhere. This is important, but this greeting is heard much too little in private life. There is a whole series of other greetings: “Frei Heil!,” “Kraft frei!,” “Frei nass!,” etc. These are certainly worth thinking about as a valuable addition to club life. If we are to present a stronger unified front against the National Socialist movement as a whole, this proliferation of greetings is unnecessary. I am not so radical as to demand that we immediately implement these suggestions, but I do propose that we seriously consider introducing these blue shirts everywhere with the appropriate insignia. In this way the identification

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with a particular club will be retained, and all young persons will wear these blue shirts, connecting them and organizing them as members of the working class. Speakers can also exert an influence here. While anchored within their clubs, they must try to channel their thoughts and feelings into the tasks of the movement as a whole, which is now more extensive and difficult than ever before. There is another important task. The party organization—and this is something of particular importance for sports functionaries—has come to realize that we are very much behind in our propaganda work. In the past, we were very active in the run-up to elections, with one meeting after another, brochures and flyers aplenty. After the elections, we fell into a gentle slumber, only waking up again a few weeks before the next elections, with the result that the honest voters said to themselves, “They are not for me; they only come to us at elections.” We have finally come to realize that we must be much more agile and lively in our propaganda activities. We propose to organize a series of meetings in the near future. We must turn these meetings into lively affairs. The time has passed when meetings could be opened with a few words, followed by lengthy and often long-winded speeches, a possibly even more long-winded closing speech by the chairman, and then everyone goes home. We need meetings pulsating with youth and new life! Propaganda marches before or afterward with the participation of sports club members! The involvement of the sports organizations and their members has often proved to be remarkably effective during elections. Speakers also have the task here of coordinating activities of the individual organizations with the needs of the party. As you can see, comrades, we are asking quite a lot of the speakers. [. . .] We must recognize that in these politically agitated times, when we are faced by important political decisions, when the struggle between socialism and fascism is flaring up not only in Europe, sports organizations must be filled and imbued with political life. They have an ideal basis to start from, because they attract young people thanks to their entire organization structure. They must systematically set about carrying out their political education work. They must seek to embrace every aspect of a person and involve each person in the party’s overall political and propaganda activities. The speaker function was introduced recently in Austria. Now, the speakers have also been sanctioned, as it were, by our annual federal conference [Bundestag]. Speakers must set about their work everywhere. If you devote all of your energies to this task, you will be justified in feeling that you are contributing to the last major task of the international working class, that you will have worked with all of your energies to the building of a better and more noble world. [. . .] Dr. Steffi Endres: Comrade Kanitz [.  .  .] mentioned that the National Socialists understand very well how to attract young people. I should like to advise against using the Nazi-style propaganda ourselves. Their method does not apply for everyone, and all of the fancy packaging used by Nazism for its propaganda is quite in keeping with the hollowness of the entire movement. If it reproduces the romanticism of youth that our comrades repeatedly talk about, we must realize the following: throughout the entire youth movement, the problem of “boys and girls” is tackled wrongly. Comrade Kanitz concluded his presentation by saying that young persons must be able to mobilize to defend themselves. How does he see this with relation to girls? Does he not realize that youth work is now organized differently? That boys and girls each have a quite distinct path in life, and a start must therefore be made with the young? In recent times, since the war, we have seen an incredible increase in female members, and when we set up gymnastics for girls and women, the interest was enormous. This needs to be developed in other sports as well.



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Not everything can be adapted for the female sex, but we have seen with gymnastics that it is possible. [. . .] It is clear that we women are opposed to uniforms. They are imitations of the National Socialist movement, but we will not achieve any victory over the National Socialists merely by having our young members wear blue shirts. There is something else missing: we should not only give our young members a political education but also familiarize them with the new, modern Weltanschauung. Young people are extremely interested in technology, something that has been completely ignored to date. Instead of having to listen to speeches, they should be busy with technical problems. This is something that is bound to attract young people to us. We need to produce young people with a sense of responsibility, a realization that fighting Nazism is not a question of wearing blue shirts but of instilling an awareness, a new Weltanschauung and attitude to the new social order.

7. M. N. Cinema for the Tens of Thousands First published as “Das Kino der Zehntausend,” Die Rote Fahne, October 9, 1923, 3. Translated by Nick Somers. Die Rote Fahne, like the Berlin newspaper of the same name, was the central organ of the Communist Party of Austria until it was banned in 1933. The following review of an SDAP film program from 1923 shows some of the tension between the Communists and the Social Democrats, as the review criticizes the use of a popular Charlie Chaplin film to make the election propaganda more “digestible,” echoing the attitude of the Left that the SDAP was not revolutionary enough. However, the report describes the ideal process of propaganda through film, admitting both the commonality in ideology and the effectiveness of the political film to awaken class consciousness and ignite agitation. “Cinema for the ten thousand” is the name given by the Arbeiter-Zeitung to the venue where it will play its election film. It is a good example of mass psychology to draw in an audience with a Charlie Chaplin comedy, making it easier in this way to digest the message “Vote Social Democrat.” In fact, the film merely reproduces the familiar slogans on the election posters. It does, however, have one unintentional innovation: It shows lumberjacks carrying out their dangerous and laborious work, and the enormous effort required to bring the timber from the forest to Vienna. It shows how the lumberjacks are exposed to constant danger when they fell the trees, how they slide the trunks down to the valley on the icy snow and then tie them together to form rafts floated downstream, all tasks in which they constantly risk their lives and health. It also shows how the timber is sawn by machines, and we cannot escape the feeling that a worker could easily have his hand hacked to bits. I didn’t breathe easily again until the film was over. I said to my neighbor, an old worker: “Does a rich idler deserve even one piece of this wood?” The worker replied: “The worst of it is that the work we perform is not valued as much as it should be.” Those around us who had heard the conversation agreed with him, and a young steward said: “When the workers themselves finally become clearly aware of the value of their work, they will become class-conscious.” This statement by the young comrade was an incitement. If the film helps workers to recognize that they are the ones who do everything, it will not be long before they realize that everyone needs to work so

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that the individual burden is not so great. This will put an an end to the current situation, in which the masses work and starve while a few do nothing and live it up. If that were the case, I would be happy for the film to be shown every evening to hundreds of thousands.

8. Anonymous Social-Fascist Deception Films First published as “Sozialfaschistische Verschleierungsfilme,” Die Rote Fahne, November 6, 1930, 8. Translated by Nick Somers. While the previous review of an SDAP propaganda film in Die Rote Fahne had been mostly supportive, this review from less than a decade later shows the stark difference in between Social Democrats and Communists. It also speaks to the larger difficulties the Social Democratic faced starting in the late 1920s. In 1927, Austrians experienced both the largest Social Democratic electoral victory and the July revolt, also known as the Vienna Palace of Justice fire (Justizpalastbrand). Internal strife and the threat of fascism were ongoing, and yet this review describes an unnamed propaganda film (likely Das Notizbuch des Mr. Pim) presenting a glowing image of Red Vienna and its successes. The “victories” illustrated in the film ring hollow by 1930 with the lack of progress (especially the perpetual problem of the housing shortage) and the Communists see no commonality with the SDAP. The workers will no longer let themselves be deceived. The S[DA]P election films, which are designed to fog the workers’ brains and, instead of the terrible hardship of the working population, to present demagogical “jokes” and building façades that are inaccessible to the unemployed, can barely have the desired effect on workers who experience hardship. The idea of a film like this is as follows: The editor of a major American newspaper comes to Vienna to visit the foundering city. His daughter lives here and both she and her husband are good Social Democratic party members. The American makes a beeline for the offices of the Freies Journal (standing for bourgeois newspapers in general). Lippowitz tells him about the good old days, the golden Viennese heart, and how nice it used to be. In contrast, the film shows a series of pictures of the perils of working-class life: eleven-hour workdays without vacation, no health insurance, no protection for apprentices and—here comes the best—no legal protection for tenants! The film shows how all of that was remedied by the Social Democratic Party and how it was responsible for introducing the eight-hour workday and other benefits for workers. It is true that the workers were off badly enough before the war, but the gentlemen completely forget that these laws were implemented not by the Social Democratic Party but thanks to pressure from workers outside the party. The film wisely omitted to show how few of these achievements remain after twelve years of Social Democratic rule, that the fascists have infiltrated factories in Upper Styria, that there are eighty-four thousand unemployed in Vienna alone to whom the “socialist” municipality does not even grant discounts for gas and electricity. The film does not show that the unemployed have lost their severance pay. It does not show that homeworkers and domestics still have no protection whatsoever. And it does not show the homeless who commit suicide, or what is left of rent control. The workers do not ignore these facts, however. They reject the methods of the pseudo-socialist party. On November 9, they will vote for the only socialist party, namely the Communists.

“July 15: A day of terror in Vienna’s history.” Title page of Das interessante Blatt (July 21, 1927), representing a traumatic highpoint of the acts of political violence in the time of Red Vienna. (Courtesy of VGA.)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

POLITICAL VIOLENCE Ingo Zechner

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here is broad consensus that the First Republic—and with it Red Vienna—failed because of the violent conflicts between political camps, above all between the Christian Socials and the Social Democrats. Historian Gerhard Botz compiled a “Timeline of Acts of Political Violence,” which is by no means comprehensive, although it lists 242 incidents occurring between November 12, 1918, and February 11, 1934. These incidents—motivated, with few exceptions, by domestic political objectives—led to deaths, serious injuries, and a substantial number of minor injuries, and included coup attempts, riots, clashes, assassination attempts, and attacks. Alongside political motives, it was the political actors—either directly or indirectly involved—who gave the individual acts of violence their political dimension. There were paramilitary groups, in particular the Heimwehr, which united Christian Socials as well as Pan-Germans, and the Republican Protection League (Republikanischer Schutzbund), controlled by the Social Democrats. Later came the SA and the SS. Individual actors also contributed to political violence. Walter Riehl,1 for example, was a Viennese lawyer whose allegiance vacillated between the National Socialist and Christian Social parties. Riehl represented in court not only the Schattendorf shooters but also the murderers of the writer Hugo Bettauer and the man responsible for a failed assassination attempt on Vienna Mayor Karl Seitz.2 What all of these groups and individuals had in common was that they fundamentally challenged the state’s monopoly on the use of force. Latent violence represents just as much of a provocation as overt violence when it comes to the state’s monopoly on the use of force. Many a political activist has wished death on a political opponent. “We will not truly have won until the head of this Asian rolls onto the sand.” This is what Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg,3 newly appointed federal leader of the Heimwehr, had to say about Hugo Breitner, Red Vienna’s city councillor

1 Walter Riehl (1881–1955), chairman of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party in Austria, DNSAP, (1919–1923), and NSDAP member of the Vienna Municipal Council (1932). See chapter 33. 2 Hugo Bettauer (1872–1925), author of Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City without Jews) (1922) and Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street) (1924), and editor of the controversial journal Er und Sie: Wochenschrift für Lebenskultur und Erotik. See chapters 13, 25, and 31. 3 Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg (1899–1956), interior minister (1930), federal leader of the Fatherland Front (Vaterländische Front) and vice-chancellor (1934–1936), leading proponent of the fascist wing of the Heimwehr, and rival of Emil Fey.

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of finance, in October 1930. The Vienna-born Breitner had his Jewish heritage—and Starhemberg’s outspoken anti-Semitism—to thank for the fact that he was transformed into an Asian in Starhemberg’s violent fantasy. It is not fantasy, however, but the potential to implement that fantasy that characterizes latent violence. There was no shortage of weapons. They had been requisitioned from soldiers returning home at the end of the World War, including many soldiers who were only crossing through German Austria on their way to the former crown lands. Farmers spontaneously formed local Heimwehren to protect house and home from marauding troops, and workers formed local workers’ militias (Arbeiterwehren) to protect industrial operations from the same. Both of these were quickly reinforced by veterans who brought with them from the war not only their weapons, but also their combat experience and their revolutionary or counterrevolutionary attitudes. The People’s Guard (Volkswehr)—formed out of the remnants of the defunct imperial army—was disbanded after the 1920 Treaty of Saint-Germain and replaced with considerably reduced federal armed forces (a professional army). Social Democratic officers, chief among them Julius Deutsch,4 had played a leading role in creating the People’s Guard and preventing coup attempts by the Communists, whereas the workers’ militias were initially controlled by the local workers’ councils. Social Democrats took two steps to position themselves as the clear supporters of state power. The first— inspired by the examples of the Soviet Republics in Hungary and Bavaria in 1919—was to centralize the workers’ councils, and the second was to combine the workers’ militias into the Republican Protection League in 1923, as well as bringing both groups under control of the SDAP. A further step was the Linz Program of 1926. This manifesto was misunderstood by the political opponents as a call to revolution, when in fact it should be understood as a manifesto of defensive violence that was only to be implemented if the continued existence of the parliamentary democracy itself was under threat of violence. In the course of the 1918 revolution, confidants of Julius Deutsch had taken control of the Vienna Arsenal. The Social Democrats and Christian Socials agreed—even in writing in 1922—that the Arsenal should be used to hide large supplies of weapons from the victorious Entente powers. In March 1927, however, the police and the army— both under Christian Social control—joined forces to conduct a raid on the Arsenal. This was only a few months before the Palace of Justice fire, and it touched off a long series of encroachments and provocations. These must be understood as tests to determine whether the Social Democrats would in fact bring about an armed rebellion. The national election on November 9, 1930, was the last election of the First Republic, and during the electoral campaign the SDAP had warned of the threat of civil war. Votes for the Christian Social Party fell by 12.55 percent, while the newly formed Heimatblock—created by Starhemberg as a political arm of the Heimwehr—won 6.17 percent of the vote. In the Vienna state and municipal election on April 24, 1932, the Christian Social Party lost 16.3 percent, and the newcomer NSDAP won 17.4 percent. The SDAP remained stable, losing only minimal support in both elections, and became the strongest party across the board, with 41.14 percent in the national election and 59 percent in the state and municipal election. The Christian Socials made up for their losses at the voting booth with increasingly authoritarian rhetoric, authoritarian measures, expansion of the power of the Heimwehr, and intensified commissioning in the police and the army for political purposes. 4 Julius Deutsch (1884–1968), undersecretary, then state secretary, of the army (1918–1920), member of the National Council (1920–1933), and founder and chairman of the Republican Protection League (1923–1934).



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In her large-scale study on the theory and practice of violence, Ilona Duczynska argued that “the condition of latent civil war in Austria” had become “a kind of illegal constitution in the First Republic.” In “cold” February 1934, the latent civil war developed into an overt one, which the Social Democrats lost within a few days. It was not so much the sum of the individual acts of violence or the escalating spiral of violence that had led to direct military confrontation, but rather the shifting of the power dynamics between the political camps and the loss of trust in the mutual renunciation of violence. Further reading Botz 1976 Duczynska 1975 Maimann and Mattl 1984 Reventlow 1969

1. Anonymous Republic Day: Bloody Disruption of the Mass Demonstration First published as “Der Tag der Republik: Blutige Störung der Massenkundgebung,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, November 13, 1918, 1–4. Translated by Peter Woods. The Arbeiter-Zeitung did not have kind words on the day after the proclamation of the Republic: immature, irresponsible people; dimwits; scatterbrained communists. Their attempts at disruption, as they were called (another reading might be “attempted coup”), led to shooting, which resulted in five to ten serious injuries, thirty-two minor injuries, and the armed occupation of the editorial department of the Neue Freie Presse. It was supposedly a small group—the Arbeiter-Zeitung appeases the reader with talk of a handful of people with a small following—that did not understand that the transition to socialism would take time and patience. Had it not been for nearly unavoidable misunderstandings, there would probably have been not much harm at all, and things would have been even less serious than they actually were. Just as adults scold their naughty children and thereby simultaneously calm the other adults who are shocked by this behavior, this text—using occasionally bizarre rhetoric—attempts to paper over the family dispute that emerged regarding the attitude toward parliamentary democracy within the Marxist Left. A severe disruption marred the unveiling of the flag of the German-Austrian republic. The working men and women of Vienna had been invited to take part in the celebration, but it was interrupted by the unconscionable actions of a few irresponsible people. It even resulted in gunfire, and although it initially appeared much more terrible than it actually was, it could nevertheless have resulted in something far worse. According to our inquiries with credible witnesses, the disruption originated with a small group of people calling themselves communists, or more accurately with a few irresponsible individuals who belong to this group. This handful of people wanted to use the occasion of the proclamation to bring attention to themselves in a significant way. They have tried to recruit new followers among socialist students from the university and in looser public gatherings, although they have not come out for genuine public assemblies, being content to call their own open gatherings with their followers here and there to put forth their

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agenda. They did just that a few days ago at an assembly at the university. Comrade Max Adler,5 who is trying to organize the socialist students, confronted the group and rightly described their agenda as the “Platform of Impatience.” This small group does not have a clear concept of what socialism is and believes that the time has come to set up a communist world order without hesitation. Socialist speakers at assemblies and other meetings have tried to clarify things to this group, which consists of only a few dozen people. They have argued that the teachings of Marx—as well as the lessons of history—conflict with the notion that the capitalist world can be completely transformed into a socialist one overnight, but this has been in vain. The foggy-headed spokespersons of this group imagine that this time it can work without any transition period, and they know how to convince other foggy minds of the same. This sort of person is not exclusive to this group of communists, however. They are even to be found in the Red Guard, although out of respect to the Red Guard it must be explicitly stated that their number is vanishingly small.6 The Red Guard is right to maintain some honor for their flag. After all, as some members of the National Assembly assured themselves only yesterday, the vast majority of the Red Guard are thoroughly serious men—many of them delegates of the proletariat—who have operated in the well-disciplined army of Social Democracy for years. They will not tolerate having their honor tarnished by a few irresponsible individuals. We can only expect that, regardless of their previous association, they will cease to fraternize with those individuals who stooped so low as to allow themselves to become tools of scatterbrained communists. Such helpers will only do a disservice to the great cause of the proletariat that is intimately linked with the destiny of the republic. These associations only give a pretext to the bourgeoisie, already dim with fear, to set the blame for such incidents at the feet of Social Democracy and the Red Guard along with it. Social Democracy and the Red Guard must act as one body in rejecting responsibility for the actions of a few immature people. In eighteen rallies, all of which were jam packed, the Vienna proletariat made its will unanimously known: it will not allow such irresponsible elements to disrupt the beautiful work that the Provisional National Assembly has so successfully carried out thus far. According to reports that reached the State Office of the Army yesterday morning, the attempted disruption had been planned on a much larger scale than what was actually carried out. Had it not been for a host of misunderstandings—which were unavoidable given the state of affairs—the entire incident would likely not even have been as bad as it was. There were twenty-nine people injured, the most serious injury being suffered by writer and press director for the State Council Ludwig Brügel. Brügel was shot in the temple, but fortunately the wound is not life threatening. Dr. Bendiener,7 the writer, was pushed off of the platform and broke his lower leg. A soldier also suffered a gunshot wound, although the extent of the damage remains unknown at this time. Two others suffered severe chest bruises in the jostling crowd, one a broken clavicle, and a further twenty people experienced light bruising or fainting. Things grew quite calm 5 Max Adler (1873–1937), professor of sociology and social philosophy at the University of Vienna and leading theorist of Austro-Marxism. 6 The Red Guard was founded on November 1, 1918, under the leadership of journalist and reporter Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948). The communist-dominated paramilitary unit grew to one thousand members within four days, and on November 4, Julius Deutsch successfully argued for its entry into the People’s Guard. Along with the Deutschmeister Battalion of the People’s Guard, it was responsible for the violence of November 12. 7 Oskar Bendiener (1870–1940).



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thereafter, but it could have been much, much worse if impulsiveness had gotten the better of people. Around two hundred shots were fired at the Parliament, and although many were fired blindly, the gunshot wounds attest to the fact that live ammunition was used. Incidentally, traces can be seen on the shutters and windows of the Parliament building, as well as on the opposite walls. The terrible misunderstanding that led to the major part of the shooting came with the breaking of the glass door that leads into the portico. It was determined later that many witnesses mistook this for a gunshot coming from the [direction of the] Parliament. Careful inquiries concerning this were made about this immediately but were inconclusive. A few people who had made their way onto the cornice of the Parliament building did return a few shots, but this was only after the big round of shooting. There was also a rumor spread yesterday evening, and believed by many to be true, that machine guns had been set up on the roof of the Parliament building. Captain Ermers of the Red Guard,8 with the help of two guardsmen, was able to confirm that this was not the case. People had seen—or believed to have seen—a flash of fire, but no one other than the operator of a film company was posted on the roof. Thus, the misunderstanding was clearly a case of this man being mistaken for a fantastically armed force.

2. Georg Lukács The State as a Weapon (from Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought) First published as “Der Staat als Waffe,” in Lenin: Studie über den Zusammenhang seiner Gedanken (Vienna: Verlag der Arbeiterbuchhandlung, 1924), 53–62. Translated by Peter Woods. Published in Vienna, Georg Lukács’s (1885–1971) Lenin study is a direct critique of the conceptualization of democracy within Austro-Marxism, which Lukács attributes to a lack of dialectical thinking. Lukács argued that the awareness that one is representing the interests of the majority of the population feeds the Social Democratic illusion that one can take power by democratic means. To his mind, the idea of classless society being a rejection of any kind of class rule was utopian, democracy was the most developed form of bourgeois rule, and all forms of class rule were built on violence. He hints at a prediction that there would never be a proletarian revolution without violence, but he maintains that even though violence can start any number of processes, it cannot be depended upon as a long-term solution. Lukács, a member of the Party of Communists in Hungary since 1918, was the People’s Commissar for Education in the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 and participated in hostilities and executions in the Hungarian Red Army. The workers’ council as an apparatus of the state: that is the State as a weapon in the class struggle of the proletariat. From the fact that the proletariat is fighting the class rule of the bourgeoisie and striving to bring about a classless society, an opportunistic, nondialectical—and thus ahistorical and unrevolutionary—view draws the conclusion that the 8 Max

Ermers, born Maximilian Rosenthal (1881–1950), art historian and publicist, director of the Settlement Office of the City of Vienna (1919–1923).

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proletariat must also be fighting against any sort of class rule. It presupposes that the proletariat’s own form of government must not under any circumstances become institutions of class rule, of class oppression. Considered abstractly, this basic philosophy is utopic because such a rule of the proletariat can never really come to pass. Instead, when the view is examined in more depth and applied to the present, it proves to be an ideological capitulation to the bourgeoisie. Democracy—as the most developed form of bourgeois government—appears in this view to be at least a precursor to proletarian democracy. In this view care must be taken to ensure that the majority of the population is won over to the “ideals” of social democracy, and this is effected by means of peaceful agitation. The transition from bourgeois democracy to proletarian democracy is, thus, not necessarily revolutionary. What is revolutionary is simply the transition from backward forms of government to democracy, although a revolutionary defense of democracy against the social reaction may be necessary. (Just how false and counterrevolutionary it is to mechanically separate proletarian revolution from bourgeois revolution can be seen in practice: nowhere has social democracy put up serious resistance to a fascist reaction and made a revolutionary defense of democracy.) Following this view removes the revolution from historical development and depicts it as “growing into” socialism by means of all sorts of clumsily or elegantly construed transitions. Not only that, it obscures the bourgeois class nature of democracy for the proletariat. The moment of deception lies in the majority, a concept that is not formed dialectically. Because it is the rule of the working class in particular that is naturally representing the interests of the vast majority of the population, an illusion of what this means arises very easily in the minds of many workers. It appears as if a pure, formal democracy in which the voice of each individual citizen is taken into account is the bestsuited means of expressing and representing the interests of the whole. But in doing so, we only (only!) leave out the minor detail that people are not, in fact, abstract individuals. They are not abstract citizens or isolated atoms of the whole of a state; instead, they are—without exception—specific people who occupy a specific place in social production and whose social existence (which, in turn, informs their thinking, etc.) is determined by this. Pure democracy in bourgeois society eliminates this process: it directly connects the stark, abstract individual with the whole of the state, which in this context appears just as abstract. This formal, basic nature of pure democracy politically pulverizes bourgeois society, which is not merely an advantage for the bourgeoisie but virtually constitutes the decisive precondition of its class rule. After all, as much as any system of class rule is built upon violence in the end, no such system can endure permanently through the use of violence alone. As Talleyrand once said, “You can use bayonets to set anything in motion, but you cannot sit on them.” Every minority rule is socially organized in a way that unites the ruling class, while at the same time it disorganizes and fragments the oppressed classes. When it comes to the minority rule of the modern bourgeoisie, we must keep in mind that the large majority of the population does not belong to any of the pivotal classes that have arisen in the class struggle: neither to the proletariat nor to the bourgeoisie. Therefore, pure democracy has the social, classbased function of securing the leadership of these interlayers for the bourgeoisie. (The ideological disorganization of the proletariat is, of course, a part of this. The older the democracy in a country—the more purely it has developed—the greater the ideological disorganization, as one can see most clearly in England and America.) Admittedly, such a political democracy would in no way suffice to achieve this end on its own, but after all, it is merely the political apex of a social system. The system’s other parts include the ideological separation of economics and politics; the creation of a bureaucratic state apparatus



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that gives large parts of the petit bourgeoisie material and moral stakes in the continued existence of the state; the bourgeois party system; the press, the schools, religion, and so on. In a division of labor that is more or less deliberate, they all serve one goal in three parts: preventing the rise of an independent ideology among the oppressed classes of the population that would express their own class interests; establishing a connection between individual “citizens” (etc.) and the abstract state that sits enthroned above the classes; and disorganizing them by making the classes unaware of their classes and pulverizing them into atoms that can be easily manipulated by the bourgeoisie. Recognizing that the councils (the workers’ councils and the farmers’ councils and the soldiers’ councils) are the state power of the proletariat is embodied in the attempt by the proletariat—as the ruling class of the revolution—to work against this process of disorganization. The proletariat must first of all constitute itself as a class; however, it must simultaneously organize the active elements of the interlayers—those who instinctively rebel against the rule of the bourgeoisie—and spur them on to action. At the same time, the material and ideological hold that the bourgeoisie has on the other parts of these classes must be broken. Smarter opportunists such as Otto Bauer have also recognized that, for the most part, the social aim of the dictatorship of the proletariat—the dictatorship of the councils—is this: to ensure that the possibility of leading these classes ideologically—especially the farmers—is wrested from the bourgeoisie outright and this leadership is given to the proletariat for the transition period. The oppression of the bourgeoisie, the shattering of its state apparatus, the destruction of its press, etc., are essential for the proletarian revolution. This is because the bourgeoisie will in no way renounce the restoration of its role in economic and political leadership after its initial defeats in the fight for state power. In fact, it will long remain the more powerful class in the class struggle, even though this struggle will be fought under such different conditions.

3. Zsigmond Kunfi Lessons of July 15 First published as Sigmund Kunfi, “Der 15. Juli und seine Lehren” Der Kampf 20, no. 8 (1927): 345–52. Translated by Peter Woods. The ultimate definition of political violence can be found in the symbolism imbued on the smoldering ruins of Vienna’s Palace of Justice in 1927. On January 30 of that year, three members of the right-wing Front-line Soldiers’ Union (Frontkämpfervereinigung DeutschÖsterreichs) fatally shot a disabled veteran and a child who got caught up in a confrontation between the veterans and the Republican Protection League. This happened in the village of Schattendorf, a characteristically Social Democratic stronghold in Burgenland. On July 14, a Viennese jury found the shooters innocent, and the next day Vienna’s Palace of Justice was set on fire by masses of protesting workers. Johann Schober (1874–1932), the chief of police of Vienna and several times Christian Social chancellor of Austria, supplied the police with military weapons and had them shoot into the crowd. Eighty-four protesters died, and hundreds were wounded. In addition, 5 officials were killed, 120 suffered serious injuries, and 480 suffered minor injuries. One of the first to recognize this massacre as a prelude to overt civil war was Zsigmond Kunfi (1879–1929), 1919 minister of education in the First Hungarian Republic and the Soviet Republic that followed (predecessor of Georg Lukács). After his escape to Vienna, he served as a senior editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung.

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On July 15, the Austrian bourgeoisie took its revenge for all of the painful defeats inflicted by Social Democracy since the revolutionary days of 1918. A tragic coincidence, the exact nature of which made it unable to predict, supplied the bourgeoisie with an excuse and an opportunity. They, and their political representatives in particular, seized this opportunity and killed one hundred workers, injuring hundreds more. They also armed the fascist organizations of the states and unleashed the white terror of the police and administration, which is likely to be followed by that of the courts. In doing so, they freed themselves from the state of fear in which they had been living for almost eight years, namely that it was not possible to shoot workers in the Austrian Republic. Now the bourgeoisie heaves a sigh of relief. Ours is the strongest social democratic party in the world, and it is not the strongest because there are no others that are so tightly organized, but because this powerful organization is suffused with the spirit of the class struggle. And yet, in today’s counterrevolutionary world, even we had to endure the slaughter of workers by institutions of the bourgeois class rule. The bourgeoisie operated under the impression— even if it was not shared openly—that there was no state institution that would fire on the people. They believed that if it ever came to that, the revenge of the workers would be so terrible that it was better to govern by means of compromise than to try to get things done by hook or by crook. But the Mannlicher rifles from the police department were like a gift sitting on the laps of the bourgeoisie, a gift which led many to tremble. But it is impossible for any power to rip the bloody pages of July 15 from the history books of the Austrian class struggle. They were “strong” in the sense of the strong hand that they have so often invoked and praised, and they must now take responsibility for their strength and see how they manage it. Austrian Social Democracy has been dealt a heavy blow. It was no small task protecting those returning home after the war from the temptations of the politics of violence. This was particularly so given the powerful impression that the Russian Revolution had on the masses, along with the banners of the Soviet dictatorships of Budapest and Munich beckoning to them from the east and from the west. But Austrian Social Democracy was successful. It was no easy job confronting the frantic, starving masses with that greatest of democratic virtues: patience. Nor was it a trifle to slowly help them to experience and understand the entire mechanism of history, thus leading the proletariat toward the path of social revolution, which is only feasible in Central and Western Europe. And it was not easy to overcome the factional dispute in the proletariat—which we did by adhering to persuasion and enlightenment with iron discipline—so that we could salvage the unity of the class. After all, this unity is the basis of all of the successes that the working class has achieved in this state and affirmed in this counterrevolutionary world, and this despite the furious onslaught of the entire bourgeois society. It took a tremendous effort to take the ruins that the monarchy and the Christian Social administration left behind, and on these ruins to then build Red Vienna, the greatest socialist experiment besides the Russian Revolution. But in surmounting all of these obstacles, Social Democracy won the love of the masses, as well as their confidence and their devotion. Not only that, it attained considerable prestige the world over and increased its appeal among the public at large to such an extent that the rise of Social Democracy appeared to be unstoppable. Austria’s bourgeoisie felt as though it was sitting on death row. They saw the hour of their final vanquishing approaching and had hardly any real hope of salvation. Did the shots fired by the police return this hope to them? Has the balance of power among the classes fundamentally changed since July 15? The rally of July 15, its development in some places into a riot, the bloody crackdown of an uprising that had already died down by the time the shooting began—mere



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coincidence had a great share in all of these tragic and appalling things, and it was a relatively small number of people on both sides who brought about these fateful events. Perhaps only 400 out of 7,000 security personnel fired shots, and out of nearly 350,000 Social Democratic Workers’ Party members, at most 2,000 were involved in the disaster that pushed the demonstration toward fiery and bloody means. Nevertheless, these minorities do not amount to the same thing. The guards who did the shooting—numbering a handful of people—were acting on behalf of the authority of the state. In other words, they were operating according to the will of the National Council and with the approval of the bourgeois parties, which implies that they had the approval of the majority of the politically engaged population. On the other hand, the demonstrators who acted violently were met with resistance from the Social Democratic Party and all of its officials and organizations. In this way, it was solely the initiative of a minority that set in motion the events that gave the pretense for bloody retaliation. All the same, when we are forced to recognize the incidental nature of this clash, on this particular day, along with the preexisting causes, one thing becomes obvious: this clash could never have broken out had the class contradictions not been stretched beyond endurance and made such a discharge unavoidable. There can hardly be any country in Europe in which the deliberate class contradictions encompass all of society as deeply and as fully as they do in Austria. When viewed superficially this may well seem even more remarkable, given that there was not a single country—not one among all of those countries grappling with revolution and defeat in the postwar years—in which the bourgeoisie suffered as little and the proletariat as much as they did in the Austrian Republic. The upheaval of 1918 thoroughly ousted all bourgeois strata from power in nearly every country, if only temporarily. The complete, political changing of the guard was in effect everywhere. Power went to a revolutionary, rather than conservative, peasant dictatorship in Bulgaria; Hungary saw power slide into the hands of the proletariat and the revolutionary peasantry; and in Germany the first revolutionary rulers were the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Everywhere the reins of power were wrested from the hitherto dominant or codominant bourgeoisie. Only the GermanAustrian and Czechoslovak revolutions—though the latter was under very different circumstances—made their way under the sign of democracy. They served to prop up the bodies of the new state power in which the bourgeoisie would hold a certain measure of power. Sharing power with the bourgeoisie in the newly created, revolutionary state has influenced the pace of the revolution in multiple ways. The complete apathy in the realm of cultural and church policy is an unhappy result of these circumstances. It allowed for a rapid and relatively smooth constitution of the new legal system without any noteworthy, counterrevolutionary resistance and had a positive effect on other areas, all of which have proven to be an invaluable advantage. Nevertheless, this has also resulted in the fact that the bourgeoisie were suffering disproportionately less physical and mental anguish and that they were less threatened both in terms of their lives and in terms of their property. Even the rollback of the Bolshevist agitation was accomplished in Austria by incomparably calmer and safer means—including for the bourgeoisie—than it was in any other revolutionary country. The same is true for the fights surrounding the new constitution and the distribution of power, the controversy between capital and labor, and the development of the new state of social and economic equilibrium. If gratitude or simply fairmindedness played a role in the formation of class relations, we would have good reason to believe that the Austrian bourgeoisie would reciprocate toward a class that had made such measured and considerate use of its power in those months of their political prosperity. Precisely the opposite holds true, however. The stubborn, inconsiderate class hatred that penetrates every part of society is the thanks that the Austrian bourgeoisie show the

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workers. We might be tempted to say that the bourgeoisie is unwilling to forgive the Austrian proletariat for its restraint, its prudence, and its reluctance to engage in beguiling and seductive ventures. They lament that the Austrian worker did not follow the example of the Hungarians, the Bavarians, and the Italians, for they know full well that the pace for the counterrevolution was set by the masses dropping out of social democracy, by their very detachment. It seems like it must be a paradox, but it is true: one of the deepest sources of bourgeois class hatred is the leniency of the worker regime toward the bourgeoisie in the days of the upheaval. This is the wellspring of bourgeois class hatred: that the working class did not abuse its power and thereby give the bourgeoisie the pretext and the opportunity to confront the proletariat the way custom dictated among their class counterparts throughout the revolutionary world. During a time when the power and influence of the proletariat were being broken and rolled back everywhere, in Austria they were growing almost continuously. Inflation undermined the position of social democracy worldwide. When the German Mark dropped, a state of emergency was imposed in the German Reich, and General Müller used a military patrol to dig out the last truly socialist government in the German Reich, that of Saxony.9 When the Franc dropped, the left block in France collapsed and the political influence of the socialists was severely cut off. When the Polish currency was shattered, power went into the hands of those parties who hungered for dictatorship. Only this cursed Austrian Social Democracy overcame this period as well, although the inflation brought a capitalistic proconsul into the country in the form of the League of Nations commissioner! The most important position of power in the entire state—the Vienna Municipal Council—is firmly in the hands of the Social Democrats, who are forcing the rich to dip into their surpluses and contribute to a generous welfare and culture policy. Important positions of power beyond the state level—primarily the railroads and the telegraph—are under the control of the Social Democratic Party. Very few among the middle classes are capable of resisting the allure of the party, and the entire intellectual scaffolding of the party is proclaiming that it is consciously and systematically working toward capturing power. The hearts of the youth beat for it, and the agricultural program and the abandonment of antireligious policies are paving the way for Social Democracy to make headway in the villages. It may have been slow, but the tide of Social Democracy rose from election to election. The Austrian upper classes look upon this development with wrath, more so because they are witnesses to the fact that the bourgeoisie of most countries crushed the workers, defeated them, or at least pushed back their advance. Why should the Austrian upper classes be the only ones incapable of doing what their class counterparts accomplished everywhere else? This is how a hatred rose within them that overrode all political and social differences, a hatred came to the fore ahead of all differences in worldview. Free traders and protectionists, clericalists and liberals, the monarchists and the Pan-Germans, the agrarians and the industrial capitalists—they all joined forces in a single block whose only agenda is to fight against the power of the workers.10 Every decision on administrative issues, the fight over school questions, the entire justice system, even those social phenomena that appear to be entirely unrelated to politics—everything is pounced on by this opposition. All of their worker-averse energies are pooled and nurtured: the Jewish capitalist donates to the campaign fund of the anti-Semites; the convicted journalist racketeer has a place among journalists of the highest 9 Alfred Müller (1866–1925), lieutenant general of the Reichswehr, responsible for disbanding the proletarian “bands of hundreds,” a leftist paramilitary association in Saxony. 10 The Anti-Marxist Unity List that competed in the 1927 national election under Christian Social leadership, see chapter 34.



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integrity; every misdeed, every act of perfidy finds sympathy and approval if it can be legitimized by hostility to workers. The Geneva Convention is suspended in this bourgeois class war; the law of war is none other than to harm the enemy, to crush him, and to kill him. This was the mood during the 1927 election campaign. The upper classes gathered all of the forces at their disposal and launched an attack on the proletarian power position. The result was a crushing defeat for the bourgeoisie as measured by the goal that they had, by the effort that they put forth, and by the passions that they unleashed. The statement made by the journalistic mouthpiece of the chancellor and the prospective minister of justice regarding the trial of the Schattendorf combatants was only possible in this state of bitterness. How could a clericalist newspaper—and one that supposedly represents Christian principles in politics—report that the fatal shooting of a child was not a criminal offense? How could it describe the acquittal as “a clear judgment,”11 in other words a “just” one? How is it that it is not even trying to keep up appearances? The only answer is that it all comes from this eruption of crippling hatred.

4. Walter Heinrich Korneuburg Oath First published as Richtung und Gesetz des Heimatschutzes, ed. Bundesführung österreichischer Heimatschutz [Korneuburger Eid, May 18, 1930], leaflet. Translated by Peter Woods. A clear commitment to a (conservative) revolution, a rejection of the multiple party system and parliamentary democracy, a declaration of intent for the violent seizure of power: the very determination that the Social Democrats lacked—according to their critics from the Left—was one that their right-wing opponents had in excess. On May 18, 1930, the Heimwehr—which was very close to the Christian Social and pan-German parties—met in Korneuburg. At this meeting, Richard Steidle (1881–1940), the federal leader of the Heimwehr, read out the now famous vow known as the “Korneuburg Oath” and in doing so swore the roughly eight hundred officers present into a fascist system by acclamation. The words of the oath come from Sudeten-German economist Walter Heinrich (1902–1984), a pupil of Othmar Spann (1878–1950) and—along with him—one of the sources of Austrofascism.12 Unlike the atomization of society diagnosed by Georg Lukács, division into corporate groups (Stände) was seen as a way to cement class rule. The invocation of the pan-German ethnic community paved the way to National Socialism, which assigned Steidle, Heinrich, and Spann a place that they had not expected: the concentration camp. We want to rebuild Austria from its very foundations! We want a state of the Volk, controlled by the Heimatschutz. We demand from every compatriot, unflinching belief in the Fatherland, tireless zeal for supporting our struggle, and passionate love for the homeland. We want to seize power in the state and reorder the state and the economy for the good of the entire nation. 11 See 12 See

“Ein klares Urteil,” Reichspost, July 15, 1927, 1–2. chapter 32.

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We must forget about what benefits ourselves, and we must subordinate all bonds and demands of the parties to the objective that we are fighting for, as we want to serve the brotherhood of the German nation! We reject Western, democratic parliamentarianism and the party state! We want to replace the party state with self-governing corporate groups and firm state leadership, composed not of party officials but proven leaders of the great corporate groups, the most competent and battle-worthy men of our Volk’s movement. We fight against the subversion of our nation by Marxist class struggle and liberal-capitalist economic structures. We want the economy to be controlled by corporate groups. We shall overcome the class struggle and establish social dignity and justice. We want to elevate the prosperity of our nation by means of an economy that is not for profit and that is rooted in our native soil. The state is the embodiment of the entire nation, its power and leadership watching to ensure that the corporate groups remain arranged according to needs of the national community. Every compatriot should profess himself to be a supporter of the convictions of the new German state. He must be ready to sacrifice his own wealth and his own blood. He must be subservient to three powers: his belief in God; his own firm will; and the word of his leaders.

5. Otto Bauer The Rebellion of the Austrian Workers: Its Causes and Its Effects First published as Der Aufstand der österreichischen Arbeiter: Seine Ursachen und seine Wirkungen (Prague: Verlag der Deutschen sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei in der Tschechoslowakischen Republik, 1934), 3–5; 24–26. Translated by Peter Woods. For those who still had not understood, Otto Bauer (1881–1938) once again made a commitment to Social Democrats’ loyalty to the constitution that was not rewarded by their Christian Social opponents. The short Austrian civil war of February 1934 was lost, the SDAP was outlawed, their organizations disbanded, their leading officeholders under arrest or, like Bauer himself, in exile. Red Vienna was at an end. In his bitter summary, Bauer reminds readers that the Social Democrats’ renunciation of violence carried a condition: that their political opponents also renounce violence. As everyone knew, the latter had not honored this, and people could see it coming. Bauer’s reflection on Social Democracy and violence is a lament about a lost opportunity, an admission that the rebellion of the Austrian workers came too late. On March 15, 1933, the federal government—led since May 1932 by the Christian Social chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß (1892–1934)—used a procedural crisis in the Austrian Parliament as a pretext for dissolving it with police violence and imposing a dictatorship. When, if not then, would have been the moment for the uprising?



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Fascism is winning. The blood of workers is flowing like water. Workers are dying on the battle lines, in the bullet-ridden houses, in the infirmaries, on the gallows. Fascism is rejoicing! Fascism is winning! The Social Democratic Party, the same party that received 41 percent—more than two-fifths—of the Austrian people’s votes in the last elections, has been disbanded. Almost all of its leaders have been arrested. Even the ones who took no part in the fighting, the ones who on Monday—as on all other days—were sitting in union offices, at their government jobs in the Vienna City Hall, in the state governments, in the offices of district and municipal governments . . . they, too, have all been arrested. The only ones who have escaped arrest are the ones who were on the battle lines and were thus unreachable by the police. By decree, the government revoked the mandate of all Social Democratic members of the National Council and the Federal Council, as well as that of all members of state assemblies and municipal councils, despite the fact that this mandate was given by the people in free elections. The party headquarters and the people’s houses [Arbeiterheime] have been occupied, and the party press has been outlawed. Everything that hundreds of thousands of Austrian workers have built for forty-five years has been destroyed. Property is sacred; that is to say, the property of the capitalists is sacred. The collective property of the organized workers has been robbed by an illegitimate power. The proudest fortress of the Austrian Social Democracy, the Vienna City Hall, has been taken. It is occupied by the military, and since it is in the middle of the city where no workers live, there was no one there to resist them. Only Mayor Seitz offered up personal resistance.13 He explained to the fascist government lackies: “I will not leave my office! Two-thirds of the people of Vienna put me here; no one has the right to remove me. I will not bow to a breach of the constitution.” Mr. Dollfuß’s lackies grabbed hold violently of the ill, sixty-six-year-old man—the man who was the first president of the Austrian Republic—and because he did not go willingly, they dragged him to the police detention center. Mr. Schmitz,14 whose Christian Social Party won only one-fifth of the votes of the Viennese people in the last elections, now has absolute control over Vienna. No more of this nonsense about building nice and inexpensive apartments for the rabble! Apartments are for making sure that the landlords earn their annuity. No more of this school reform, of this welfare! Down with the Social Democratic officials; clerical overachievers are waiting for their positions! The free trade unions have been disbanded along with the party. The bulwark against exploitation and the caprice of the masters in the workshops has been shattered. Outright rejoicing prevails at the headquarters of the Industrialists’ Association at Vienna’s Schwarzenbergplatz. A few hundred proletarian bodies was not too high a price to pay for expanding the opportunities to wring profits out of the muscles and nerves of blueand white-collar workers alike. All of the workers’ associations are being disbanded. The sports clubs of the young workers; the workers’ alpine club “Friends of Nature” [Naturfreunde], which led tens of thousands of workers out of the pub to more noble pleasures; the Workers’ Temperance League, which rescued thousands of proletarians from the dangers of alcoholism and 13

Karl Seitz (1869–1950), from October 1918 one of the co-equal presidents of the Provisional National Assembly for German Austria, after the death of Victor Adler on November 11, 1918, chairman of the SDAP, president of the Constituent National Assembly and thus head of state of the republic (1919–1920), mayor of Red Vienna (1923–1934). 14 Richard Schmitz (1885–1954), Christian Social politician, minister of education (1922–1924, 1926–1929), vice-chancellor (1930), and once again minister of social affairs (1933–1934). After February 12, 1934, the mayor of Vienna.

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preserved the happiness and human dignity of thousands of families—everything, everything that the labor movement has achieved for mass culture by virtue of valuable work, it is all over. The pedantic destructiveness of the Christian regime has not even spared the Union of Religious Socialists. The consumer associations that could not be disbanded on the spot have been “brought to heel,” in full accordance with Hitler’s glorious model. Social Democracy and violence. What has become of Austria, which was once so peaceful and so “comfortable”? The Habsburg Empire fell in 1918 and left in its wake nothing for the newly arisen republic but a lost war, a shattered economic area, the most terrible food shortage, and runaway inflation. Nevertheless, the great upheaval in Austria was carried out much more peacefully than in neighboring countries. This was a time when soldiers were returning home from the blood and filth of the trenches to find starving masses at home. The Austrian Social Democracy was able to appease their wild agitation and make it useful for the peacetime work of reconstruction. It did all of this without violence, with the peaceful means of a persuasive word. While Austria remained an island of peace between the republic of Soviet dictatorships that held sway in both Hungary and Bavaria, blood flowed like water to the east and the west. At the height of their Social Democratic power, our leaders motivated the starving masses to show so much self-restraint and willing moderation. Now, the wartime propaganda spread by victorious fascism depicts these same men as a band of bloodthirsty criminals who had nothing else in mind but to plunge the country into a bloody disaster. The fascists point out that the Austrian workers secretly kept machine guns, ammunition, and explosives. Is this not evidence that Social Democracy wanted a civil war and was arming itself for one? Yes, the Austrian workers have had weapons since the revolution of 1918, just as the fascist Heimwehren and monarchist Frontkämpfer have had weapons since that time of upheaval in 1918. But had the workers ever made use of these weapons before February 12, 1934? Had these weapons not remained in their hiding places for fifteen years, even in the most fevered times, such as the days of upheaval in 1918/1919 and after the bloody massacre of July 15, 1927? The Austrian Social Democracy has always—even in its much-decried 1926 Linz Party Platform—asserted the following: The democratic republic ensures that every citizen has full freedom to promote their ideas and delegates state power to those whose ideas are able to capture the hearts of the majority of the people. In this republic, we want to seize state power by peaceful means that are in accordance with the constitution, by means of ballots and winning the majority by the virtue of our ideas. There is only one case in which we are ready and determined to use violent means: only when fascists or monarchists overthrow the democratic republic, only when they rob us of the universal and equal right to vote and the right to promote our ideas, only when they seek to take away the opportunity for the working class to fight for democracy—with peaceful means—to reshape society—only in this case do we hold our weapons at the ready. [. . .] Our mistakes. We have been defeated, and the question that torments our brains is whether we brought about this bloody disaster through political mistakes of our own making, whether we carry the blame for this ourselves.



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Some say that our policies had been too doctrinaire for years, too radical, too un­­ conciliatory, and far too leftist, and that this provoked the collapse of the party. Others say the opposite, that our policies were too timid and far too tentative. They say that these policies were lacking in the revolutionary drive that alone could have electrified the entirety of the masses, that they put off the struggle for far too long and caused the defeat, that they were far too right wing. Where is the truth? There is no doubt that we made mistakes; it is only the ones who never act who make no mistakes. It is useful to admit these mistakes frankly so that those who follow may learn something important from our experience. It is easier for me to admit our errors since I am not shifting the burden onto anyone else. After all, I am more responsible than anyone else for the mistakes that have been made. [. . .] The two-hour protest strike by the railroad workers on March 1, 1933, was answered by the Dollfuß-Fey government with a crackdown on railroad workers, an action which we tried to prevent on March 4 with a motion in Parliament.15 Because the government had a one-vote majority, it came down to every vote, but we were one vote short because Renner16—as president of the National Council—was acting as chairman and could not participate in the vote. We did not want to be responsible for abandoning hundreds of railroad workers to this crackdown by losing this vote because of Renner’s position as president. Therefore, Renner took my advice and used a conflict with the Christian Socials to step down from the presidency. At that point the vice presidents—a Christian Social and a member of the Pan-German People’s Party—also resigned. The following day, Hitler carved out his big electoral victory in Germany. In our zeal to protect the railroad workers threatened by the crackdown, we did not consider what a direct influence the upheaval in Germany could have on Austria. With Renner’s resignation we handed the Dollfuß government the pretext for dissolving Parliament. This was unquestionably a mistake, and yes, a misstep to the left. Parliament was dissolved. The dictatorship consolidated itself. Dollfuß violently prevented the March 15 attempt to resume the work of Parliament. We could have answered this with a general strike on March 15. The conditions for effective action were never as ripe as they were on that day. The German counterrevolution, tumultuous even then, had roused the masses in Austria. The working masses awaited the signal to fight; the railroad workers were not yet as worn down as they would be eleven months later; the organization of the military loyal to the government was much weaker at that time than in February 1934. We might have been able to prevail at that time, but we shied away from the fight. We still believed that we could come to a peaceful solution through negotiations. Dollfuß had promised that he would shortly— at the end of March or the beginning of April—negotiate with us about reforms to the constitution and rules of procedure. At the time, we were still foolish enough to 15

Emil Fey (1886–1938), leader of the Heimwehr, Christian Social politician, after October 1932 state secretary for security. After assuming office, he had all Social Democratic, Communist, and National Socialist gatherings and parades banned. On March 15, 1933, he consolidated the Heimwehr units in Vienna so that they could support the Dollfuß’s coup d’état when needed. Federal minister from May 1933 and vice-chancellor after September 1933, he had a leading role in quashing the resistance during the Austrian civil war. Gradually deprived of his power beginning in July 1934 due to internal rivalries. 16 Karl Renner (1870–1950), chancellor of Austria (1918–1920), Social Democratic member of the National Council (1920–1934), president of the National Council (1931–1933).

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trust in a promise from Dollfuß. We dodged the fight because we wanted to spare our country the disaster of a bloody civil war. The civil war broke out eleven months later just the same, but under circumstances that were considerably less favorable to us. This was a mistake—the most fatal of our mistakes—and this time it was a misstep to the right.

6. Hans Kelsen Defense of Democracy First published as “Verteidigung der Demokratie,” Blätter der Staatspartei 2, no. 3–4 (April 1932): 90–98. Translated by Peter Woods. In the German Reichstag elections of July 31, 1932, the NSDAP gained 19 percent of the votes to control 37.3 percent of the total, making them the strongest party by far. The Communist Party of Germany made slight gains and emerged with 14.3 percent. For the first time in the Weimar Republic, two parties that opposed the republic made up a combined majority. Three months earlier in Berlin, Hans Kelsen (1881–1973) had advocated a democracy that would have the right to abolish itself by a majority resolution. Kelsen defended (bourgeois) democracy against its enemies on the left and on the right, but not against itself. Does the admonition not to defend democracy with violence hold true even in the case in which people resort to violence in order to destroy it? The strongest objection raised against democracy from the socialist side—and, to my mind, it is the strongest objection of all—is that democracy is the political form taken by the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the proletariat. Although it represents equality in principle, in reality it has only brought a formal, political equality and no material or social equality. Furthermore, it is merely a political democracy, not a social one and, therefore, it constitutes only a state of the bourgeoisie and not one of the proletariat. [. . .] If democracy has remained a bourgeois-capitalist democracy, it is because the socialistoriented proletariat has not yet been able to become the majority of the people, and this is due to reasons that lie beyond any political design. But everything that the proletariat has actually become, and the position of political power that the proletariat has won as a class, would have been impossible without democracy. The influence that it has acquired over the formation of the will of the state—even given that it is only a minority as a political organization, and one that is even split between two parties in Germany— would have been impossible without the democracy that has been created primarily by the bourgeoisie. Communism imagines its task to be to revile democracy, to discredit it in the eyes of the proletariat so that it can mentally prepare them for a dictatorship. Communism forgets or denies, however, that democracy is the form of government that enabled the rise of the proletariat. And it is a rise that has taken place much faster than the one that the bourgeoisie carried out in the feudal police state at the expense of the nobility. As the bourgeoisie carves out democracy, it is creating the possibility of political development of the so-called fourth estate and thereby the most important requirement for the realization of the very socialism that is so hostile to the bourgeois-capitalist economic system. Thus, the bourgeoisie is not fighting for its own benefit alone but is simultaneously acting in the interest of the so-called fourth estate, the proletariat. So far, however, it does not appear that democracy is the form that will usher in a final conquest



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of power led by a socialist-minded proletariat. After all, this is the reason for the split in the party of Marxist socialism. What essentially separates communists and social democrats is that the latter cling to democracy while the former—who no longer see democracy as the appropriate form for realizing socialism—are dropping it. Perhaps Marx and Engels—despite certain vacillations and equivocations—truly did envision the proletariat fighting for democracy and saw the transition state of the rule of the proletariat as a democracy. If this is so, then it is because they were convinced by the immiseration thesis that the proletariat—namely the class-conscious and, therefore, socialist-minded proletariat—would inevitably become the prevailing majority of the people. They appear to have been mistaken in this assumption, and not only with respect to the economic structure of this proletariat, in which we ignore the vast stratum that exists between the completely dispossessed and the richly propertied. No, it is also a mistaken assumption with respect to the psychological situation that the proletarianized, or half-proletarianized, middle classes are headed toward. Rather than anchoring themselves in the pride of a new class consciousness, of a socialist ideology, they are finding their footing in the ideology of National Socialism. They are trying to offset the unavoidable economic proletarianization with a heroic-romantic mindset. And this new proletariat is turning away from democracy not—like the communists—because they want socialism, but because they do not want it. This strengthens the political aspirations of the remaining elements of the bourgeoisie, the upper classes. They, too, are abandoning the democratic camp because—in the face of the tide of socialism that continues to rise in spite of everything—it no longer seems to offer them any security for the capitalist system. This flight from democracy is just one piece of evidence that the political form of democracy is not suited for a class struggle, one that will invariably end with the decisive victory of one party and the ruinous defeat of the other. This is because democracy is the political expression of social harmony, of the balancing out of extremes, of a mutual understanding that settles in the middle. [. . .] What criticism do those on the right have to make of democracy? If you listen in that direction, you get a confusing earful of the most varying, and often contradictory, arguments. Among the most common is that democracy is the intrinsic breeding ground of corruption. In actual fact, this grievance is no less felt in an autocracy; however, it remains unseen because the reigning principle is to conceal any faults in the interests of the state. The principle of disclosure is characteristic of democracy, and so the opposite tendency prevails. Precisely because all of its faults are dragged into the light in this system, there is an effective guarantee for their remedy. The reproach that democracy encourages corruption is not heard any more often than the charge that democracies breed a lack of discipline, or the objection regarding insufficient military power and soft foreign policy. However pointedly this argument against democracy may appear to strike our innermost nerve, the experience of history proves that it misses the mark. The great democracies have just proven as much in the World War, both militarily and diplomatically. There remains the principle, theoretical argument that the champions of dictatorship put forward against democracy again and again. That is, that the fundamental principle of democracy, the principle of the majority, is entirely unsuitable for guaranteeing an accurate formulation of the public will. The majority should not be the one deciding because it provides no guarantee for the benevolence of the order that has been created. This is because the principle of the majority provides only a method of making decisions, not a means of determining how accurately the will behind those decisions is reflected. On the contrary, it is the best who should govern. Since Plato, this has always been the formula

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used when groups fought against democracy, without having anything better to put in its place. It is a formula that is as alluring in its negative capacity as it is meaningless in its positive capacity, because it is a given that the best should rule. After all, the rule of the best means only that the social order should have the best—the proper—substance, but everyone is in agreement about this. What it comes down to is the answer to the following questions: What is the proper capacity, what comprises it? Who is the best, and what is the method for making sure that the best, and only the best, comes to power and maintains that power against the onslaught of the bad ones? From the point of view of social theory and praxis, this is the decisive question, and the antidemocratic side has no answer to it. They expect everything good from the Führer, but his creation—a creation that would take place in the bright light of a publicly controllable process, namely an election, in a democracy—remains shrouded in mysterious darkness in an autocracy. It is here that the belief in a social miracle replaces the rational method. The existence of the Führer— who is blessed by God and knows and desires what is good—is simply assumed. Rather than solving the social-technical problem of organizing, this puts it off and disguises it in ideology. Nevertheless, the reality of the dictatorship shows that power decides and that he counts as best who understands how to subdue the rest. In most cases, behind this assumption that the best have the exclusive right to rule lurks an extremely uncritical adoration of power and a willingness to believe in miracles. [. . .] In the end, we must come up with an objection to democracy that one can make not as a bolshevist and not as a fascist, but as a democrat. It is precisely the form of government that defends itself against its opponents the least. It seems to be the tragic destiny of democracy that she must suckle even her worst enemy at her own breast. If democracy is to remain true to itself, then it must even endure a movement aimed at the destruction of democracy and must grant it the same opportunity to develop as any other political conviction. Thus, we witness this bizarre spectacle: that the quintessential forms of democracy should be eliminated and that a people should demand that the very rights they gave themselves be taken away, all because the people have been made to believe that their own rights are also their greatest ill. In light of such a situation, we might come to believe Rousseau’s pessimism: If there were a nation of gods, it would govern itself democratically; a government so perfect is not suited to men. But in light of this situation, the question arises whether we should but defend democracy only in theory. The question arises whether democracy should defend itself even against a people who no longer want it, even against a majority that agrees on nothing but the wish to destroy democracy. To ask this question is to answer in the negative. A democracy that takes a stand against the will of the majority, that tries to make such a stand even with violence, has ceased to be a democracy. Rule of the people cannot remain when it is set against the people, it should not even attempt to try. No one who supports democracy may entrap themselves in the fatal contradiction of trying to save democracy by reaching for dictatorship. We must remain true to our banner, even if the ship sinks, and take with us into the depths only the hope that the ideal of freedom is indestructible and that the deeper it sinks, the more passionately it will be revived.

CHRONOLOGY

1918

November 12

1919

Declaration of the Republic of German Austria Following winter starvation in 1918/1919, 13,366 Viennese children are sent to foster parents in foreign countries in order to spare them from hunger and neglect. Women are admitted as regular students at the Law School of the University of Vienna, and at the Colleges of Technical Arts, Business, Agriculture, and Veterinary Medicine.

March

Eight women enter the Constituent National Assembly: seven Social Democratic representatives (Anna Boschek, Emmy Freundlich, Adelheid Popp, Gabriele Proft, Therese Schlesinger, Amalie Seidel, Maria Tusch) and one Christian Social representative (Hildegard Burjan).

April 10

The Glöckel Decree: Austrian schools no longer require participation in religious practices and courses.

May 4

First Viennese municipal council election under universal suffrage for men and for women. The Social Democrats win with 54.2 percent of the vote.

May 22

Jakob Reumann is elected as the first Social Democratic mayor of Vienna.

June

Introduction of a standard entertainment tax in Vienna, the first in a series of new luxury taxes.

September 9

Decree by Albert Sever, the Social Democratic state governor of Lower Austria, demanding the expulsion of former imperial citizens of the monarchy who do not have the right of residence in the state. The decree is mostly aimed at Jewish war refugees from the former imperial region of Galicia. Officials, however, do not enforce the decree.

October 10

The German and Austrian Alpine Club allows its local ­sections to introduce Aryan clauses into their bylaws.

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 Chronology

1920

Founding of the Settlement Office of the City of Vienna (Siedlungsamt der Stadt Wien). Publication of Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Edgar Herbst, the director of the Research Institute for Scientific Firm Management (Forschungsgesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Betriebsführung) in Vienna, publishes Der Taylorismus als Hilfe in unserer Wirtschaftsnot (Taylorism as a remedy to our economic crisis). Trude Fleischmann sets up her photographic studio near the Vienna City Hall. January 13

Commissioned by the Vienna Urania, Albert Einstein gives a speech to some 3,000 listeners in Vienna at the Konzerthaus.

April

The daily newspaper Der neue Tag (The new day) is shut down; former editor Joseph Roth moves to Berlin and becomes famous for his feuilleton articles and novels about Vienna.

June 14

Women are permitted for the first time to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

August 22

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt found the Salzburg Festival with the opening of Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann (Everyman).

October 1

Enacting of the Austrian Federal Constitutional Law.

November 11

Julius Tandler is appointed as city councillor of welfare and public health.

1920/1921 Winter

Completion of the first section of the Metzleinstaler Hof, known as the “first municipal housing complex.” Architect: Robert Kalesa.

1921

Publication of Else Feldmann’s novel Löwenzahn: eine Kindheit (Dandelion: story of a childhood). The author is known for her ruthless social reportages about conditions in Viennese slums. September

Founding of the Association for Settlements and Allotment Gardens (Österreichischer Verband für Siedlungs- und Kleingartenwesen, ÖVSK) and of the Public Utility and Building Material Corporation (Gemeinwirtschaftliche Siedlungs- und Baustoffanstalt, GESIBA), a municipal nonprofit support office and building supply clearinghouse for settlers.



Chronology



September 11

First Vienna Trade Fair.

November 8

Founding of Gewista, the city of Vienna’s municipal advertising company, which took control of all public advertising space in 1923.

1922

727

Publication of Hugo Bettauer’s novel Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews). Founding of the Vienna Psychological Institute by Karl and Charlotte Bühler. Publication of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus. January 1

According to the Federal Constitution of 1920, Vienna becomes an Austrian state.

February

Grete Lihotzky’s draft of a rationalized kitchen with washing facilities appears in her article about the “Settlers’ Cottages” in the journal Schlesisches Heim.

June 1

Opening of the city-sponsored municipal Marriage Counseling Center (Eheberatungsstelle) at the Vienna City Hall.

October 4

The Austrian Republic signs the Geneva League of Nations Bond (harsh austerity measures).

October 13

Premiere of Michael Curtiz’s monumental biblical film Sodom und Gomorrha: Die Legende von Sünde und Strafe (Queen of Sin and the Spectacle of Sodom and Gomorrha), one of the most expensive Austrian films ever made. Thousands of extras film scenes on Vienna’s Laaer Berg.

October 15

Workers’ Symphony Concert (Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzert) held in the Great Hall of the Konzerthaus. Director: Anton Webern. On the program: Richard Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transformation) and a Beethoven piano concerto. Organizer: David Josef Bach.

1923

For the first time, the University of Vienna is closed down because of anti-Semitic unrest spanning a number of weeks. January 17

In spite of intense resistance by the Christian Social– dominated federal government, the newly completed crematorium (Feuerhalle Simmering), next to Vienna Central Cemetery, is put into operation.

February 1

Implementation of a dedicated housing construction tax led by the initiative of Vienna’s city councillor of finance Hugo Breitner.

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1924

 Chronology

February 19

Founding of the Republican Protection League (Republikanischer Schutzbund), a Social Democratic paramilitary organization.

February 25

Founding of the Society for the Advancement of Modern Art (Gesellschaft zur Förderung moderner Kunst) in Vienna.

April 2

“Battle on the Exelberg”: clashes between right-wing Hakenkreuzler and Social Democrats.

April 15

International soccer match against Italy played in the Hohe Warte Stadium in front of more than 75,000 spectators.

May 6–11

First World Congress of the International Council of Jewish Women in Vienna.

July 24

Opening of the film Opfer des Hasses (Victims of hate), a film showing the fate of Jewish refugees who flee their homelands and are helped by the institutions of Vienna’s Jewish Relief Agency. Director: Hans Marschall.

August 2

With her feuilleton “Auf der Jagd nach einem ‘Job’ in New York” (Hunting for a job in New York) Ann Tizia Leitich begins her prolific career as the American correspondent for the bourgeois Neue Freie Presse.

August 16

World Congress in Vienna of the orthodox Jewish Agudas Jisroel movement.

September 21

The Vienna Municipal Council adopts a building program for public housing (renewed in 1926).

September 22

First issue of the Social Democratic newspaper Die Unzufriedene (The dissatisfied woman). Editor: Eugenie Brandl.

October 21

Vienna state and municipal election (Social Democrats win 55.9 percent).

November 14

Karl Seitz succeeds Jakob Reumann as mayor of Vienna.

November 20

Socialist student and faculty groups demonstrate in the Volkshalle of the Vienna City Hall against the violent developments at the University of Vienna. Karl Renner threatens to organize an alternate university. The municipality of Vienna takes over the local train network (Stadtbahn). The city begins the first electrification projects and a sweeping rebuilding of the municipal transportation network.



Chronology

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729

Gertrud Bodenwieser’s dance performance Demon Machine includes dancers who transform into machines. Development of her concept of “workers’ dance” (Arbeitstanz). Organization of the Vienna Society for the Cultivation of Race (Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege) at the University of Vienna. April 1

With his production of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, director Max Reinhardt opens the newly renovated Theater in der Josefstadt as the artistic home of his famous theatrical ensemble.

April/May

The central committee of the German and Austrian Alpine Club recommends that its local sections should forbid Social Democratic Friends of Nature (Naturfreunde) from using their mountain huts.

May 15–18

Cinema Reform Conference (Kinoreformtagung) is held at the Urania building in Vienna. Among the guests: Fritz Lang, who gives a talk titled, “Der künstlerische Aufbau des Filmdramas” (The artistic structure of film drama).

June 1

Assassination attempt against Chancellor Ignaz Seipel at Vienna’s South Train Station.

June 6

The Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung publishes the first of Felix Salten’s feuilletons about his visits to the Zionist settlements in Palestine, a collection later compiled in his book Neue Menschen auf Alter Erde: Eine Palästinafahrt (New humans on ancient ground: A trip to Palestine).

July 20

The general assembly of the German and Austrian Alpine Club demands the expulsion of the local Austrian Donauland section which had been organized to counter anti-Semitic agitation in other local sections.

July 25

Premiere in Vienna of Hans Karl Breslauer’s film adaptation of Hugo Bettauer’s Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews).

September

Financial speculator Camillo Castiglioni declares bankruptcy.

September 14– October 10

International Music and Theater Festival in Vienna.

September 24– October 12

International Exhibition of Modern Theater Techniques at the Konzerthaus.

October 1

The national radio station (Radio Verkehrs AG, RAVAG) begins broadcasting in Vienna.

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 Chronology

December 12

First issue of the journal Die Mutter: Halbmonatsschrift für alle Fragen der Schwangerschaft, Säuglingshygiene und Kindererziehung (The mother: semiannual journal for all questions of pregnancy, infant hygiene and childhood education), including the writings and research of scientists in the individual psychology movement. Founder: novelist and dramatist Gina Kaus.

1924/1925

The Jewish sport club SC Hakoah wins Austria’s first professional soccer championship.

1925

The organization of the Social and Economic Museum (Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum) arises out of the Settlement Museum that had been in existence since 1923. The methodological heart of the museum is Otto Neurath with his Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics (Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik), later known as Isotype. International exhibit GESOLEI: Gesundheit, soziale Fürsorge und Leibesübung (health, social welfare, and physical exercise) at the Vienna City Hall. Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (Dream Story) is printed as a serial novel in the Berlin fashion magazine Die Dame (The lady). January 1

Introduction of the Austrian schilling as currency; end of the inflation crisis.

January 31

Stefan Zweig’s feuilleton “The Monotonization of the World” is published in the Neue Freie Presse. Zweig blames American mass culture for destroying European art and culture. His ideas give rise to a strong polemical discussion about Americanism.

March

Twenty-one-year-old Theodor W. Adorno travels to Vienna to start private composition instruction from Alban Berg.

March 10

Murder of the author, journalist, and cultural critic Hugo Bettauer.

June 25

“Bekéssy Scandal”: Beginning of Karl Kraus’s public campaign against the unethical journalistic practices espoused by the newspaper publisher Imre Bekéssy.

July 4

Opening of the Intake Center for Children (Kinderübernahmsstelle, Küst) in Vienna’s Ninth District, Alsergrund.

August 18–31

Fourteenth Zionist Congress in Vienna, accompanied by anti-Semitic riots.



Chronology

1926

1927



731

Founding of the Cinema Operations Company Ltd. (Kinobetriebsanstalt Ges. m.b.h., Kiba), an organization influenced by the Social Democratic Party. Goal of Kiba: to buy and run movie theaters in order to promote socialist film production. May 4

Founding of the German National Socialist Workers’ Association or Hitler Movement (Deutscher Nationalsozialistischer Arbeiterverein) in Vienna (previously DNSAP or Schulz Group) which became the Austrian NSDAP.

May 12

An opinion piece by P. Haller in the Zionist Wiener Morgenzeitung decries the use of Yiddish. He claims that “das Jüdeln” (using Jewish vernacular) is a side effect of the sickness of the Jewish “Galuth” (diaspora).

June 27

Opening of the Reumannhof municipal housing complex on Vienna’s Gürtel (outer beltway street). The complex comes to be known as the “crown jewel of the proletariat Ring-Boulevard” and the prototype for later Social Democratic residential apartment palaces for the people (Volkswohnpaläste). Architect: Hubert Gessner.

July 8

Opening of the opulent Amalienbad public indoor bathing complex in the working-class Favoriten District.

July 4–11

Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Festival (Arbeiter-Turnund Sportfest) in Vienna.

September 14–19

International Residential Building and City Planning Congress held in Vienna.

September 27–29

Fifth Congress of the German Society for Sociology held in Vienna.

November 3

Resolution of a new party platform for the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, passed at the party convention in Linz (aka “Linz Programm”), a key document of Austro-Marxism.

November 19

Works by Erika Giovanna Klien, a student of art education reformer Franz Čižek, are shown in Katherine Dreier’s International Exhibition of Modern Art in the Brooklyn Museum. Klien is the only representative of modern Austrian art in the exhibition.

December 18

Performance of the Ur-Cabaret, the first performance of the Socialist Performance Group (Sozialistische Veranstaltungsgruppe). High point of violent anti-Semitic acts by University of Vienna students, especially at the anatomical institutes.

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 Chronology

Publication of Alfred Adler’s Menschenkenntnis (Understanding Human Nature), a collection of his lectures given at the popular education center (Volkshochschule) in the working-class Ottakring District. Publication of architect Richard Neutra’s Wie baut Amerika? (How does America build?) March 1

First issue of Das Kleine Blatt, a small-format newspaper and an organ of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party.

March 4

Premiere of Gina Kaus’s drama Toni: Eine Schulmädchenkomödie in zehn Bildern (Toni: A schoolgirl comedy in ten scenes) at the Schauspielhaus in Bremen. Awarded with the Goethe Prize of the City of Bremen.

March 22

The Vienna City Senate votes for the distribution of layette packets (Säuglingswäschepaket) to all new mothers residing in Vienna.

April 20

The Arbeiter-Zeitung publishes the Rallying Cry of Vienna’s Intellectuals (Kundgebung des geistigen Wien) in which prominent cultural and scientific personalities call for the election of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Cosignatories include Sigmund Freud, Franz Čižek, Alma Mahler, Anton Webern, and many others.

April 24

Vienna state and municipal election (Social Democrats win 60.3 percent). In the concurrent national election, the anti-Marxist Unity List (Christian Social Party, Pan-German People’s Party, as well as National Socialist factions under Walter Riehl and Karl Schultz) win 48.2 percent, the Social Democrats win 42.3 percent.

July 5–19

First Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen).

July 15

Palace of Justice fire (Justizpalastbrand), aka July revolt (Julirevolte), following a criminal justice court’s exoneration of right-wing gunmen who killed citizens during a conflict in Schattendorf in the Austrian state of Burgenland. After demonstrating workers storm the Palace of Justice, the police open fire and kill eighty-four protesters. Five policemen lose their lives. Hundreds were wounded on both sides.

August 2

In a compromise with the school reformers, new federal constitutional education laws are passed for high school and middle school curricula.

September 14–15

Second Congress of Socialist Individual Psychologists in Vienna.



Chronology

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733

September 17–19

Karl Kraus organizes a poster campaign urging the Viennese police president Schober to resign because of his role in the massacre during the Palace of Justice fire.

October

Publication of Stefan Zweig’s Sternstunden der Menschheit (Decisive Moments in History).

October 26

Opening of the Jewish theater Jüdische Künstlerspiele in the Nestroyhof in Vienna’s predominantly Jewish Leopoldstadt District. Opening production: Der Glaube (Faith) by Sholem Asch.

November 25

Premiere (in Vienna) of Gustav Ucicky’s silent film Café Elektric. First starring role for Marlene Dietrich.

December 13

Death of Zwi Perez Chajes, acting Chief Rabbi of the Jewish Community Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien) of Vienna. Chajes was a Zionist and a strong supporter of Vienna’s Hebrew Schools and Jewish welfare institutions.

December 31

Ernst Krenek’s jazz-inspired opera Jonny spielt auf premieres at the Vienna State Opera; sets designed by Oskar Strnad.

1928

Publication of Käthe Leichter’s pioneering sociological study Wie leben die Wiener Heimarbeiter? Eine Erhebung über die Arbeits- und Lebensverhältnisse von tausend Wiener Heimarbeitern (How do the Viennese homeworkers live? A study of the working and living conditions of a thousand Viennese homeworkers). May 20

Opening of the Kongressbad in Vienna’s working-class Ottakring District. With its 100-meter pool, it was the largest man-made swimming facility in Vienna. Architect: Erich Franz Leischner.

July 19–22

German Singers’ Association Festival (Deutsches Sängerbundfest) in Vienna.

November 12

Celebrations surrounding the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Austrian Republic, including a concert organized by the Social Democratic Arts Council (Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle) with performances of the music of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, directed by Anton Webern.

November 23

Founding meeting of the Ernst Mach Society. The public engagement of the Vienna Circle begins.

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 Chronology

December 27

1929

Wilhelm Reich and Marie Frischauf-Pappenheim found the Socialist Society for Sex Counseling and Research (Sozialistische Gesellschaft für Sexualberatung und Sexualforschung). The society opens several Sex Counseling Centers for Workers and Employees in Vienna. Opening of the city kindergarten in the Sandleitenhof municipal housing complex. Architect: Erich Franz Leischner. The kindergarten was run as a Montessori school. The Sandleitenhof was Vienna’s largest municipal housing complex with some 1,600 apartments and 4,000 inhabitants. Publication of the novel Ein österreichischer Don Juan (An Austrian Don Juan) by Marta Karlweis. Publication of Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung—Der Wiener Kreis (The Vienna Circle’s scientific conception of the world) by the Ernst Mach Society.

March 7

Premiere of Paul Czinner’s film adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, with Elisabeth Bergner in the title role.

April 6

First issue of Der Kuckuck (The cuckoo), an illustrated magazine of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party.

April

Exhibition “The Weekend of the Viennese” (“WeekendSchau”) in the Loos House on Michaelerplatz.

June 9

Industry parade (as a part of the Vienna Festival).

July 12–14

International Socialist Youth Meeting in Vienna.

October

Dedication of the Hietzing Synagogue on Eitelbergergasse, designed by Arthur Grünberger and Adolf Jelletz as a modern interpretation of a Jewish sacred edifice. Richard Neutra, Hugo Gorge, and Fritz Landauer participate in the architectural competition. Head of the jury: Josef Hoffmann.

December

The Austrian Association for Housing Reform (Österreichischer Verband fur Wohnungsreform) opens the Advice Bureau for Interior Design and Domestic Hygiene (BEST), a permanent exhibition in the newly built Karl-Marx-Hof.

1929/1930

Completion of the tuberculosis pavilion in the Lainz Municipal Hospital as the final step of the tuberculosis care plan begun in 1923.

1930

Grete Wiesenthal choreographs the ballet Der Taugenichts in Wien (The ne’er-do-well in Vienna).



Chronology

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735

Publication of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Jewish students restricted access to the University of Vienna by the Gleispach Student Regulation (Gleispach’sche Studentenordnung). Publication of the first volume of Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities). May

Publication of Handbuch der Frauenarbeit in Österreich (Handbook of women’s labor in Austria), edited by Käthe Leichter and the Chamber for Workers and Employees (Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte) in Vienna. The first Gauparteitag convention of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party at the Konzerthaus.

1931

May 18

The right-wing paramilitary Heimwehr militias take the Korneuburger Oath.

May 28

Opening of the International Women’s Congress in Vienna.

September

The election victory of the National Socialists in Germany unleashes a new storm of violence in Austrian universities.

September 16–23

Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform (Weltliga für Sexualreform) in Vienna.

October 12

Official opening of the massive Karl-Marx-Hof municipal housing complex in the predominantly bourgeois Döbling District. Architect: Karl Ehn.

October 18

Premiere of the full-length propaganda film for the national election Das Notizbuch des Mr. Pim (Mr. Pim’s Trip to Europe) in which an American newspaper owner is convinced of the achievements of Red Vienna.

January 3

Viennese premiere of Lewis Milestone’s film version of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front. The National Socialists protest the film, and the federal government bans it four days later.

Spring

Cancellation of the first “Vienna Skyscraper,” a municipal high-rise complex project in the Alsergrund District designed by architect Rudolf Frass.

May 11

Collapse of the Creditanstalt.

July 11

Opening of the Prater Stadium.

July 19–26

Second International Workers’ Olympics by the Socialist Workers’ Sport International (SASI) held in Vienna.

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 Chronology

July 23

International Women’s Conference under the auspices of the 4th Labor and Socialist International Congress in Vienna.

July 25–August 1

Congress of the Labor and Socialist International held in Vienna.

November 2

Premiere of Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald (Stories from the Vienna Woods) by Ödön von Horváth.

1932

Publication of Joseph Roth’s novel Radetzkymarch. Publication of Käthe Leichter’s foundational sociological study So leben wir: 1320 Industriearbeiterinnen berichten über ihr Leben (This is how we live: 1,320 female industrial workers tell about their lives). Production of the full-length election campaign film Die vom 17er Haus (The people from house no. 17). Director: Artur Berger. April 24

Vienna state and municipal election: Social Democrats win 59 percent of the vote, the National Socialists represented for the first time with 17.4 percent of the vote.

May

May festival at the Prater Stadium, a mass theater performance organized by the Austrian Workers’ Association for Sports and Physical Culture (Arbeiterbund für Sport und Körperkultur in Österreich, ASKÖ).

June 5–August 7

Opening of the Werkbundsiedlung model home settlement in Vienna’s Hietzing District, led by Josef Frank.

October 9

Demonstration on Vienna’s Heldenplatz by the union of pan-German organizations in support of Germany’s Anschluss of Austria, members of right-wing gymnastic clubs parade around the Ringstrasse.

October 16

“Simmeringer Blutsonntag”: Clashes between Nazis, Social Democrats, and the police in Vienna’s Simmering District.

November 17

Federal president Wilhelm Miklas dedicates the Hochhaus Herrengasse (Highrise on Herrengasse). Architects: Siegfried Theiss and Hans Jaksch. With its sixteen stories, the privately financed building is derisively called Hochhäuserl (mini skyscraper).

November 25

Hugo Breitner resigns as city councillor of finance.

December 7

Soccer match between the national teams of England and Austria (Wunderteam) held at Stamford Bridge in London before a crowd of 42,000 spectators (England won 4–3).



Chronology

1933

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737

Publication of Marie Jahoda, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Hans Zeisel, and a team of researcher’s pioneering empirical sociological study Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal: Ein soziographischer Versuch über die Wirkungen langdauernder Arbeitslosigkeit (Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community). February 18

Vienna Premiere of Ekstase (Ecstacy), filmed in Czechosovakia and in Vienna. Director: Gustav Machatý. The infamous nude scenes assured the fame of the film’s Viennese star Hedwig Kiesler, later known as Hedy Lamarr.

March 4

Resignation of the three presidents of the National Council, followed by a coup d’état led by the governing Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß.

March 15

Police hinder the new assembly of the Parliament.

May 1

Social Democrats forbidden from holding their May Day demonstration.

May

Widespread damage after anti-Semitic riots at universities; serious injuries, many foreign students break off their studies.

May 10

Prohibition of state elections in Austria.

May 18

First authors’ reading sponsored by the newly founded Association of Socialist Writers (Vereinigung sozialistischer Schriftsteller). Readings by Klara Blum, Adolf Unger, Franz Trescher, and Alfred Werner.

May 23

The Constitutional Court is dissolved.

May 26

Prohibition of the Communist Party of Austria.

September 8–12

German Catholic Congress in Vienna.

September 18

The film Unsichtbare Gegner (Invisible Opponent) premieres in Berlin. Director: Rudolf Katscher. The spy thriller was filmed in Vienna after the producer Sam Spiegel, the actors Peter Lorre and Oskar Homolka, and other Jewish members of the crew were forced to flee from Hitler’s Germany.

September 23

Edict creating internment camps (Anhaltelager) for members of the political opposition.

October

Adolf Unger’s musical revue Da stimmt was nicht (Something is not right) is performed by the Rotes Kunstkollektiv.

October 3

Nazi assassination attempt against Chancellor Dollfuß.

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1934

 Chronology

November

Publication of Franz Werfel’s Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (The Forty Days of Musa Dagh).

November 10

Introduction of court-martials and death sentences.

December

Double Income Ordinance of the Dollfuß government: Married women are dismissed or retired from state employment, no married women as new hires.

February 11

Last Workers’ Symphony Concert (Arbeiter-SinfonieKonzert) in the Great Hall of Vienna’s Musikverein.

February 12–14

Civil war; arrest of Mayor Karl Seitz, prohibition of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Erik Born is an assistant professor in the Department of German Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of articles on medieval media theory, early German science fiction, and the media histories of cinema and television. His current book project examines the emergence of wireless media in German modernity. Nicole G. Burgoyne is an assistant instructional professor in Germanic Studies and the Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. Her most recent article is entitled “Christa Wolf’s Socialist Realism of the 1950s: Canon, Critique, and Reform.” She has taught language courses using works by Stefan Zweig, Felix Salten, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin. Veronika Duma is a postdoctoral research fellow in the History Department at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Chair for the Study of the History and Legacy of the Holocaust. Her publications include the monograph Rosa Jochmann: Politische Akteurin und Zeitzeugin (2019) and articles about Käthe Leichter, Austro-Fascism and Nazism, and gender and the economic crisis in the interwar period. She was part of the curatorial team of the 2019–2020 exhibition Das Rote Wien 1919–1934 at Wien Museum MUSA. Wolfgang Fichna is a Vienna-based independent historian and a researcher at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna. He was part of the curatorial team of the 2019–2020 exhibition Das Rote Wien 1919–1934 at Wien Museum MUSA. His publications include a contribution to the Rote Wien exhibition catalog titled “David Josef Bach. Die Vermittlung der Musik der Moderne in der sozialdemokratischen Kulturpolitik” and articles about Ernst Krenek, Alban Berg, Jazz, and popular culture. He is also coeditor (with Rosa Reitsamer) of “They say I’m different”: Popularmusik, Szenen und ihre Akteurinnen (2011). Kristin Kopp is an associate professor of German Studies at the University of Missouri. She is the author of Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (2012) and coeditor (with Joanna Niżyńska) of Germany, Poland, and Postmemorial Relations: In Search of a Livable Past (2012). Her other publications include articles on colonial and geopolitical cartography, imperial minorities, and post-imperial anxieties. Aleks Kudryashova is a PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She has written articles on Mela Hartwig-Spira, Peter Kahane’s Die Architekten (1990), and Herrmann Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne (1982). Her dissertation, Politics of the Reel: Urban Imagination and Production of Public Space

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in East and West Berlin, investigates cinematic representations of architecture and urban public space during the last decade before the Wende. Richard “Tres” Lambert is assistant professor of German Studies at Gettysburg College. His research focuses on Austrian modernism and novels of the interwar period. He is a past recipient of a Fulbright-Mach grant and has served as a Resident Fellow at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History. He also published articles on Hermann Broch and Felix Dörmann and translated essays by Alexander Kluge. Rob McFarland is a professor of German at Brigham Young University, and the codirector of Sophie: A Digital Library of Works by German-Speaking Women. He is the author of Red Vienna, White Socialism and the Blues: Ann Tizia Leitich’s America (2015) and the coeditor (with Michelle James) of Sophie Discovers Amerika: German-Speaking Women Write the New World (2014). He has also written articles about urban literature and film, gender, and architectural history. Birgit Nemec is a historian of science and medicine at the University of Heidelberg, where she holds a position as a research fellow at the Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine. Her publications include articles on Julius Tandler, anatomical images, and concepts of modernity and urban reform in early twentieth-century Vienna. Her monograph, Norm und Reform: Anatomische Körperbilder in Wien um 1925, will be published in 2020. Vrääth Öhner is a film, media, and cultural scientist and a researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History. He is the coeditor (with Elisabeth Büttner and Lena Stölzl) of Sichtbarmachen: Politiken des Dokumentarfilms (2018) and (with Siegfried Mattl, Carina Lesky, and Ingo Zechner) of Abenteuer Alltag: Zur Archäologie des Amateurfilms (2015). Katrin Pilz is a cultural historian and researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History, most recently involved in the Austrian Science Fund project “Educational Film Practice in Austria.” Her research focuses on the visual history of medicine and science, as well as urban history, body politics, history of sexuality, and educational film history. She was part of the curatorial team of the 2019–2020 exhibition Das Rote Wien 1919–1934 at Wien Museum MUSA, providing insight into welfare, health, and social politics of the era. Alicia Roy is a PhD candidate in German at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently completing her dissertation, titled Authorship in Crisis: German Cinema and the Changing Roles of the Writer. Joachim Schätz is a postdoctoral university assistant at the University of Vienna’s Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Studies. He is leading an Austrian Science Fund research project on “Educational Film Practice in Austria” and recently published a monograph on Austrian industrial and advertising film, Ökonomie der Details (2019). He is also the coeditor of a volume on German filmmaker Werner Hochbaum (1899–1946) and author of articles on documentary and travel film and American comedy.



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Werner Michael Schwarz, habilitated historian, has been a curator at Wien Museum since 2005. His duties include exhibits, publications, and education, and he specializes in urban, media and film history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dr. Schwarz also curated the 2019–2020 exhibition Das Rote Wien 1919–1934 at Wien Museum MUSA and coedited (with Georg Spitaler and Elke Wikidal) the catalog Das Rote Wien 1919– 1934: Ideen, Debatten, Praxis. Georg Spitaler is a researcher at the Austrian Labor History Society (VGA) in Vienna. He held a postdoctoral position at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna (2008–2014) and serves as a lecturer at several Austrian Universities. His publications include books, edited volumes and articles on labor history, political theory, and political aspects of sport. He also cocurated the exhibition Das Rote Wien 1919–1934 at Wien Museum MUSA (2019–2020) and coedited (with Werner Michael Schwarz and Elke Wikidal) the catalog Das Rote Wien 1919–1934: Ideen, Debatten, Praxis. Cara Tovey is a visiting assistant professor of German at the College of Charleston. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation titled Life as a Dance: Lebensreform and the Promise of an Alternative Modernity (2019). Her research centers on early twentieth-century literature, film, and dance with a particular focus on the body, conceptions of utopia, and the intersection of aesthetics and politics. Gabriel Trop is associate professor of German at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His publications include a monograph titled Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century (2015) and articles about Hölderlin, Goethe, Novalis, Schelling, Hegel, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Wieland. Most recently, he coedited (with Edgar Landgraf and Leif Weatherby) an essay collection entitled Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences after Kant (2018). Georg Vasold is an art historian in Vienna. He has worked as a teacher and researcher at the University of Vienna, at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and at the Leopold-Franzens Universität in Innsbruck. Recently he worked on the curatorial team for the 2019–2020 exhibition Das Rote Wien 1919–1934 at Wien Museum MUSA. Vasold is the author and editor of several articles about the Viennese school of art history. Gernot Waldner is a research postdoc at the Robert Musil Institute Klagenfurt. He was part of the curatorial team for the 2019–2020 exhibition Das Rote Wien 1919– 1934 at Wien Museum MUSA and curated an exhibit on Otto Neurath’s statistical picture language, Isotype (International system of typographic picture education). His publications include articles on Stanley Kubrick, Elfriede Jelinek, and Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando. Azadeh Yamini-Hamedani is an associate professor of world literature at Simon Fraser University. She is currently working on a manuscript on world literature and nuclear technology in Iran. Marie-Noëlle Yazdanpanah works as a historian, cultural studies scholar, and film educator in Vienna. She researches and publishes on consumer culture, visual culture, and on women’s politics, with a focus on interwar Vienna. Since 2010 she has been a researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History, focusing on visual and

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 Contributors

urban culture, most recently in the Austrian Science Fund project on “Educational Film Practice in Austria.” As part of the curatorial team of the 2019–2020 exhibition Das Rote Wien 1919–1934 at Wien Museum MUSA, she worked on women’s political history and on gender and architecture in Red Vienna. Ingo Zechner is a philosopher and historian, serving as director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History. From 2013–2016 he also served as associate director of the IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies. He was an academic staff member at the Jewish Community Vienna from 2000–2008, heading the Holocaust Victims’ Information and Support Center from 2003–2008 and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies in 2009. His publications include Bild und Ereignis (Image and event, Vienna 1999) and Deleuze: Der Gesang des Werdens (Deleuze: The chant of becoming, Munich 2003). He also coedited an exhibition catalog and three edited volumes and has published articles on film, literature, music, archival theory and practice, and Holocaust studies.

INDEX OF SUBJECTS Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der bildenden Künste), 431, 447, 455, 530, 726 Academy of Music and Performing Arts (Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst), 675 Academy of Sciences (Akademie der Wissenschaften), 642 Advice Bureau for Interior Design and Domestic Hygiene (Beratungsstelle für Inneneinrichtung und Wohnungshygiene, BEST), 425, 431, 734 Agudas Jisroel, 190, 192, 728 allotment gardens (Kleingärten), aka Schreber gardens (Schrebergärten), aka settlement gardens (Siedlergärten), 341, 349, 370, 375, 392, 396, 397, 419, 595. See also settler movement Alpine Club. See German and Austrian Alpine Club Alpine Mining Company (Alpine Montangesellschaft), 184 Amalienbad, 598, 731. See also public baths American Relief Administration (ARA), 569 European Children’s Fund (ECF) of (Europäischer Kinderfonds), 569 Anti-Semites League (Antisemitenbund), 23, 609, 615 Apolitical List (Unpolitische Liste), aka the Apoliticals (die Unpolitischen), 187. See also trade unions Aryan clause (Arierparagraph), 369, 377–79, 725 Association of Jewish Writers and Artists Haruach (Verein jüdischer Schriftsteller und Künstler Haruach), 203 Association of Museum Friends in Vienna (Verein der Museumsfreunde in Wien), 642 Association of Socialist Writers (Vereinigung sozialistischer Schriftsteller), 485, 488, 737 Association of the Disabled (Invalidenverband), 296 Association of Universities (Verband der Universitäten), 216

Austrian Association for Housing Reform (Österreichischer Verband für Wohnungsreform), 425, 734 Austrian Association for Settlements and Allotment Gardens (Österreichischer Verband für Siedlungs- und Kleingartenwesen, ÖVSK), 391, 398, 434, 439, 726. See also settler movement Austrian Association of Individual Psychology (Verein für Freie Psychoanalytische Forschung, later Österreichischer Verein für Individualpsychologie), 134, 141 Austrian Association of Women Artists (Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs), 447 Austrian civil war 1934, 2, 9, 604, 708, 709, 718, 721, 722, 738 Austrian Economic Efficiency Board (Österreichisches Kuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit, ÖKW), 570 Austrian League for Regeneration and Heredity (Österreichischer Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde), 289 Austrian Leo Society (Österreichische LeoGesellschaft), 631, 641 Austrian Museum of Art and Industry (Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie), 429 Austrian Research Center for Economic Psychology (Österreichische Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungsstelle), 4, 48, 49, 70, 80, 85–89, 333, 346, 562, 689 Austrian Tourist Club (Österreichischer Touristenklub), 377 Austrian Workers’ Association for Sports and Physical Culture (Arbeiterbund für Sport und Körperkultur in Österreich, ASKÖ), 3, 352, 355, 357, 361, 364, 699–703, 736 Austrofascism (Austrofaschismus), 7, 34, 43, 46, 91, 135, 217, 244, 623, 627–28, 636, 654, 678, 717 Away from Rome! Movement (Los-von-RomBewegung), 208

754

 Index of Subjects

Bauhaus, 92, 317, 409, 426, 432, 590 Baumgarten Children’s Home (Kinderheim Baumgarten), 139, 314 Bavarian Soviet Republic, 2, 182, 411, 694, 708, 714, 720 Bears Cave (Bärenhöhle), 628, 642 Belgian Seminary (Belgisches Seminar), 535 Biological Experiment Station, “Vivarium” (Biologische Versuchsanstalt, BVA, “Vivarium”), 283, 284 blue shirts (blaue Blusen), 682, 686, 690, 701, 702, 703 Blue Shirts agitprop groups (Blaue Blusen), 682, 694 Burgtheater, 160, 453, 467, 504, 505, 506, 509, 516, 520, 549, 675 Career Counseling Office of the City of Vienna and the Chamber of Labor (Berufsberatungsamt der Stadt Wien und der Arbeiterkammer, BBAW), 49, 246, 247, 248, 293, 304 Carltheater, 505, 515 Cartellverband, 628 Catholic Action (Katholische Aktion), 631 Central Federation of Industry (Hauptverband der Industrie), 33 Central Office for Workers’ Education (Arbeiterbildungszentrale, aka Sozialistische Arbeiterbildungszentrale, aka Zentralstelle für das Bildungswesen), 312, 313, 334, 458, 492, 527, 533, 693 Chamber for Workers and Employees (Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte), aka Chamber of Labor (Arbeiterkammer), 49, 69, 70, 184, 185, 234, 246, 286, 570, 655, 735 Female Labor Unit of the Chamber of Labor (Referat für Frauenarbeit der Arbeiterkammer), 4, 49, 69, 71, 73, 246, 248 Children’s Friends (Kinderfreunde), later Free School Association–Children’s Friends (Verein Freie Schule-Kinderfreunde), 220, 221, 277, 293, 314, 319, 320, 381, 418 Children’s House (Haus der Kinder), 317 Christian Social Party (Christlichsoziale Partei), 16, 22, 24, 38, 39, 45, 126, 158, 159, 170, 186, 213, 235, 299, 337, 405, 454, 570, 596, 609, 615, 617, 623, 624, 627, 629–31, 650, 660, 674, 676, 677, 683, 700, 707, 708, 717, 719, 732 Christian Socials (Christlichsoziale), 3, 17, 18, 23, 24, 25, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43,

44, 45, 46, 47, 71, 114, 119, 124, 158, 159, 165, 166, 167, 169, 233, 234, 235, 276, 294, 298, 299, 301, 314, 325, 390, 454, 483, 489, 491, 550, 592, 609, 610, 611, 615, 616, 619, 621, 622, 627, 629, 630, 661, 662, 663, 671, 672, 677, 678, 681, 682, 684, 691, 694, 700, 707, 708, 713, 714, 716, 717, 718, 719, 721, 725, 727 Christian Social Party of Germany (ChristlichSoziale Partei Deutschlands), 658 Christian Social Workers’ Association (Christlichsozialer Arbeiterverein), 23, 615 Christian socialism, 630 Cinema Operations Company Ltd. (Kinobetriebsanstalt Ges. m. b. h., Kiba), 531, 672, 731 Cinema Reform Conference (Kinoreformtagung), 6, 729 city councillors (Stadträte), aka members of the Vienna City Council, later members of the Vienna City Senate, 2, 3, 23, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 44, 49, 175, 217, 238, 257, 273, 293, 302, 395, 526, 589, 598, 603, 621, 676, 707, 726, 727, 736 civil war, 29, 114, 124, 125, 651, 680, 708, 709, 713, 720, 722 Austrian, 1934, 2, 9, 604, 709, 718, 721, 722, 738 Communist Party of Austria (Kommunistische Partei Österreichs, KPÖ), 41, 127, 137, 178, 189, 365, 411, 495, 534, 549, 588, 703, 737 Communists, 20, 49, 122, 164, 186, 269, 637, 653, 703, 704, 708, 721, 723 Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD), 652, 722 Conservatory for Popular Folk Music (Konservatorium für volkstümliche Musikpflege), aka Workers’ Conservatory (Arbeiterkonservatorium), 466, 470 Constituent National Assembly (Konstituierende Nationalversammlung), 16, 22, 23, 42, 115, 153, 156, 158, 181, 191, 235, 335, 613, 614, 615, 617, 719, 725. See also Parliament Constitutional Court (Verfassungsgerichtshof), 737 Constitutional Party (Verfassungspartei), aka German-Liberal Party (Deutschliberale Partei), 166

Index of Subjects

consumer associations (Konsumvereine), 61, 89, 120, 666, 720 consumer cooperatives (Konsumgenossenschaften), 62, 64, 66, 117 cooperative economic committee (Konsumgenossenschaftlicher Wirtschaftsausschuß), 118 Counseling Center for Mothers (Mutterberatungsstelle), 253, 291, 293, 300, 301, 303, 692. See also Vienna municipal authorities and organizations coup d’état, 113, 124, 127, 128, 159, 365, 707 Austrian, March 1933, aka dissolution of Parliament, 7, 39, 46, 115, 128, 314, 718, 721, 737 Creditanstalt, 34, 44, 62, 735 Crematorium Simmering (Feuerhalle Simmering), 216–18, 590, 597, 727 Cultural League (Kulturbund), 227 Deutsches Theater, Berlin, 521 Deutsches Volkstheater, 503, 505, 508, 675 dissolution of Parliament. See coup d’état, March 1933 economic consumer protection movement (Konsumentenbewegung), 118 Education Counseling Center (Erziehungsberatungsstelle), 287, 315. See also Vienna municipal authorities and organizations Elisabeth House (Elisabethheim), 209 entertainment tax (Lustbarkeitsabgabe), 3, 33, 39, 352, 468, 527, 725. See also taxes Ernst Mach Society (Verein Ernst Mach), 91, 97–99, 355, 733, 734 European Children’s Fund (ECF), 569. See also American Relief Administration (ARA) Farmers’ Federation (Bauernbund), 610 Lower Austrian Farmers’ Federation (Niederösterreichischer Bauernbund), 608 Fatherland Front (Vaterländische Front), 46, 623, 624, 628, 650, 707 Federal Constitutional Law (Bundesverfassungsgesetz), 17, 726 Federal Council (Bundesrat), 16, 23, 24, 25, 78, 719. See also Parliament Federation of Austria’s Independent Trade Unions (Bund unabhängiger



755

Gewerkschaften Oesterreichs, BUGÖ), 188. See also trade unions Federation of Cultural Workers (Bund geistig Tätiger), 447 Female Labor Unit of the Chamber of Labor (Referat für Frauenarbeit der Arbeiterkammer), 4, 49, 69, 71, 73, 246, 248. See also Chamber for Workers and Employees Fordism, 227 Frankfurt Housewives’ Association (Frankfurter Hausfrauenverein), 435 Frankfurt School (Frankfurter Schule), 92 Franz-Domes-Hof, 402. See also Vienna municipal housing complexes Free School Association (Verein Freie Schule), later Free School Association– Children’s Friends (Verein Freie SchuleKinderfreunde), 98, 186, 277, 322–24, 381 Free Trade Unions (Freie Gewerkschaften), 184, 187, 248, 328, 679, 687, 719. See also trade unions freethought movement, 219, 379 Freethinkers’ Association (Freidenkerbund), 355 Freudo-Marxism (Freudomarxismus), 8, 10, 133–49, 254, 664 Friends of Nature (Naturfreunde), 3, 334, 351, 370, 379, 380–82, 516, 527, 528, 719, 729 Front-line Soldiers’ Union (Frontkämpfervereinigung DeutschÖsterreichs), 27, 713 Fuchsenfeldhof, aka Fuchsenfeld-Hof, 403, 404, 412, 413–15, 424, 592. See also Vienna municipal housing complexes Gänsehäufel, 374, 375. See also public baths Gemeinde Wien–Städtische Ankündigungsunternehmung (Gewista), 416, 672, 689, 727 General Austrian Women’s Association (Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein, AÖFV), 235 General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein), 552 Geneva League of Nations Bond (Völkerbundanleihe), 34, 39, 44, 727. See also League of Nations German and Austrian Alpine Club (Deutscher und Oesterreichischer Alpenverein, DuOeAV), 193, 369, 370, 375, 377, 378, 379, 725, 729

756

 Index of Subjects

German and Austrian Alpine Club (continued) Austria section (Sektion Austria), 377 Donauland section (Sektion Donauland), later Alpine Club Donauland (Alpenverein Donauland), 370, 377–79, 729 German-Austrian People’s Guard (Deutschösterreichische Volkswehr), 165, 708, 710 German Board for Socialist Education (Deutscher Reichsausschuß für sozialistische Bildungsarbeit), 511 German Confraternity (Deutsche Gemeinschaft), 628 German Gymnastics Federation 1919 (Deutscher Turnerbund 1919), 359 German Hygiene Museum, Dresden (Deutsches Hygienemuseum Dresden), 285 German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei), 655, 656 German National Socialist Workers’ Party (Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei, DNSAP), 621, 644, 649, 650, 651–53, 707, 731. See also National Socialism German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei, DVP), 354 German Trade Union Confederation in Austria (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund für Österreich, DGB), 187, 188. See also trade unions German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP), 649, 655, 662. See also National Socialism Gleispach Student Regulation (Gleispach’sche Studentenordnung), 735 Glöckel Decree (Glöckel-Erlass), 214, 314, 725 Goethehof, 317. See also Vienna municipal housing complexes gymnast militias (Wehrturner), 352 Health Counseling Center for Engaged Couples (Gesundheitliche Beratungsstelle für Ehewerber), aka Marriage Counseling Center (Eheberatungsstelle), 253, 256–59, 289, 293, 301, 303, 600, 727. See also Vienna municipal authorities and organizations health insurance, 42, 289, 303, 704 statutory health insurances (Krankenkassen), 33, 275, 291, 381 Heimatblock, 46, 654, 662, 682, 708 Heimhof, 244, 417, 437. See also singlekitchen building

Heimvolkshochschule, Leipzig, 328. See also popular education centers Heimwehr, 46, 114, 126, 127, 188, 367, 380, 555, 604, 610, 626, 627, 628, 631, 650, 654, 681, 682, 694, 707, 708, 717–18, 720, 721, 735 Heimatblock, 46, 654, 662, 682, 708 Heldenplatz, 362, 736 Homeless Shelter of the City of Vienna (Obdachlosenheim der Stadt Wien), 41 House of Deputies (Abgeordnetenhaus), 17, 18, 114. See also Parliament housing construction tax (Wohnbausteuer), 3, 4, 33, 37, 39, 175, 390, 405, 411, 412, 413, 590, 592, 598, 601, 602, 676, 727. See also taxes Housing Office (Wohnungsamt), 174, 175–77, 401, 589, 595. See also Vienna municipal authorities and organizations Hungarian Soviet Republic, 26, 161, 174, 182, 448, 536, 708, 711, 713, 714, 720 Imperial Council (Reichsrat), 18, 164, 219, 627, 649, 671. See also Parliament Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD), 20, 637. See also Social Democratic Party of Germany Industrial District Commission of Vienna (Industrielle Bezirkskommission für Wien und Umgebung), 42, 185 Industrialists’ Association (Industriellenverband), 719 inflation, 3, 34, 35, 44, 45, 50, 54, 84, 165, 257, 478, 491, 516, 528, 538, 555, 596, 597, 650, 716, 720, 730 Intake Center for Children (Kinderübernahmsstelle, Küst), 132, 135, 148, 293, 294, 300, 302, 303, 304–7, 305, 306, 401, 590, 692, 730. See also Vienna municipal authorities and organizations International Conference of Individual Psychologists (Kongress für sozialistische Individualpsychologie), 143 International Council of Jewish Women (ICJW), 201, 728 International Labour Conference (ILC), 336. See also League of Nations International Labour Organization (ILO), 336. See also League of Nations International Lenin School (ILS), Moscow (Internationale Leninschule), 588, 589

Index of Subjects

International Red Aid (Internationale Rote Hilfe), 534 International Residential Building and City Planning Congress (Internationaler Wohnungs- und Städtebaukongress), 588, 591–92, 731 International Socialist Youth Meeting (Internationales Sozialistisches Jugendtreffen), 587, 701, 734 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) (Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, IGNM), 465 International Transport Workers’ Congress (Internationaler Transportarbeiterkongreß), 470 International Women’s Congress (Internationaler Frauenkongress), 246, 735 International Working Group of Socialist Youth Organizations (Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft Sozialistischer Jugendorganisationen, IASJ), 693 International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) (Internationale Arbeiterassoziation, IAA), aka The First International (Erste Internationale), 336 internment camps (Anhaltelager), 737 Iron Front (Eiserne Front), 685 Jewish Community Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, IKG), 192, 193, 202, 207–9, 613, 677, 733 Jewish National Party (Jüdischnationale Partei, aka jüdisch-nationale Partei, later Jüdische Partei), 181, 192, 613, 617, 619, 677 Jewish Relief Agency (Jüdisches Hilfswerk), 190, 192, 728 Jewish Youth Office (Jüdisches Jugendamt), 209 Jüdische Künstlerspiele, 193, 733 Julius-Popp-Hof, 402. See also Vienna municipal housing complexes Karl-Marx-Hof, 431, 588, 603, 682, 683, 734, 735. See also Vienna municipal housing complexes Kiba. See Cinema Operations Company Ltd. kineticism (Kinetismus), 446, 452, 453 Viennese Kineticism (Wiener Kinetismus), 5, 148 Kleines Theater, Berlin, 520 Kongressbad, 733. See also public baths Konzerthaus. See Wiener Konzerthaus Kuenburg School (Kuenburg-Schule), 186



757

Kuomintang, 535 Labor Statistics Office (Arbeitsstatistisches Amt), 72 Lainz Municipal Hospital (Städtisches Krankenhaus Lainz), 44, 294, 301, 734 tuberculosis pavilion (Tuberkulosepavillon), 44, 294, 301, 734 Law School of the University of Vienna (Juridische Fakultät der Universität Wien), 725 layette packets (Säuglingswäschepakete), 292, 294, 303, 307, 308, 309, 692, 732 League of Catholics of Austria (Volksbund der Katholiken Österreichs), 631 League of Nations (Völkerbund), 3, 34, 35, 39, 44, 170, 336, 394, 561, 597, 716 Geneva League of Nations Bond (Völkerbundanleihe), 34, 39, 44, 727 International Labour Conference (ILC), 336 International Labour Organization (ILO), 336 League of Nations’ Committee for Infant Welfare, 279 Maternity Protection Convention, 1919 (Washingtoner Übereinkommen, 1919), 42 life reform movement (Lebensreformbewegung), 369, 373 Linz Program (Linzer Programm), 114, 124– 26, 130, 170, 214, 215–16, 235, 324–25, 570, 581, 679, 708, 720, 731 London School of Economics, 603 Loos House (Looshaus), 734 Lower Austrian Farmers’ Federation (Niederösterreichischer Bauernbund), 608. See also Farmers’ Federation luxury taxes, 3, 4, 32, 33, 39, 49, 527, 597, 676, 725. See also taxes Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, MSPD), 637. See also Social Democratic Party of Germany Marriage Counseling Center. See Health Counseling Center for Engaged Couples Maternity Protection Convention, 1919 (Washingtoner Übereinkommen, 1919), 42. See also League of Nations Matteottihof, aka Matteotti-Hof, 81, 682. See also Vienna municipal housing complexes

758

 Index of Subjects

Metzleinstaler Hof, aka Metzleinstalerhof, 390, 402, 403, 592, 726. See also Vienna municipal housing complexes Municipal Health Office (Städtisches Gesundheitsamt), 253, 257, 259. See also Vienna municipal authorities and organizations municipal housing complexes. See Vienna municipal housing complexes municipal kindergartens (Städtische Kindergärten), 78, 248, 250, 279–82, 302, 303, 313, 314, 317–19, 323, 390, 401, 403, 405, 412, 589, 598, 599–600, 683, 584, 692, 694, 734. See also Vienna municipal authorities and organizations Municipal Planning and Building Office (Stadtbauamt), 280, 415, 420. See also Vienna municipal authorities and organizations municipal planning and building office of the City of Frankfurt (Stadtbauamt Frankfurt), 409, 435, 437 Municipal Welfare Office (Städtisches Wohlfahrtsamt), 256, 280. See also Vienna municipal authorities and organizations Musikverein, 465, 467, 738 National Assembly. See Parliament National Council (Nationalrat), 16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 42, 47, 126, 235, 621, 627, 629, 653, 661, 671, 672, 674, 676, 680, 682, 693, 708, 715, 716, 721, 732, 735, 737. See also Parliament National Council of Women–Austria (Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine, BÖF, aka BÖFV), 246, 437 National Socialism (Nationalsozialismus), 7, 10, 92, 148, 194, 264, 494, 623, 628, 649–50, 655–59, 661, 664–67, 699–703, 717, 723 National Socialists, Austria, 3, 10, 28, 168, 208, 274, 359, 360, 367, 489, 490, 528, 542, 587, 610, 615, 621, 622, 624, 628, 631, 644–45, 648, 649–50, 653–55, 659–61, 662–63, 672, 674, 676, 677, 678, 682, 684, 685, 686, 687, 690, 695, 699–703, 707, 721, 728, 732, 735, 736 National Socialists, Germany, 90, 114, 169, 269, 274, 367, 466, 587, 590, 628, 644–45, 649, 651, 655–59, 664–67, 685, 690, 699–703, 735

National Socialist Parties German Workers’ Party, Austria 1903–1918 (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP), 649, 655, 662 German National Socialist Workers’ Party, Austria 1918–1926 (Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei, DNSAP), 621, 644, 649, 650, 651–53, 707, 731 National Socialist German Workers’ Association, Austria after 1926 (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Arbeiterverein), aka Hitler Movement (Hitlerbewegung), later National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP), 3, 489, 628, 650, 653–55, 659–61, 662–63, 707, 708, 731, 732, 736 National Socialist German Workers’ Party, Germany 1920–1945 (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP), 628, 645, 649, 650, 655–59, 664–67, 722, 735 Nestroyhof, 193, 733 Neuber Ballet (Neuber-Ballett), 539 Neues Theater, Berlin, 520 New Frankfurt, 406, 407, 409, 435 New Human (Neuer Mensch), 198, 203, 234, 273, 274, 283, 293, 313, 317, 346, 351, 370, 406, 449, 460, 503, 573, 632, 633, 644, 690 Oesterreichische Nationalbank, 39, 630, 663 Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA), 162 Palace of Justice fire (Justizpalastbrand), aka July revolt (Julirevolte), 27, 127, 137, 519, 678, 704, 708, 713–17, 732, 733 pan-German movement (deutschnationale Bewegung, aka großdeutsche Bewegung, aka völkische Bewegung), 17, 45, 163, 164, 186, 187, 208, 235, 351, 359, 609, 610, 611, 616, 619, 627, 628, 636, 643, 644, 645, 649, 650, 662, 684, 700, 716, 717 Pan-German People’s Party (Großdeutsche Volkspartei, GdP, aka GdVP), 16, 18, 45, 46, 126, 235, 599, 609, 621, 627, 631, 649, 662, 677, 700, 707, 717, 721, 732 Parliament (Parlament), 2, 7, 14, 35, 39, 41, 44, 45, 46, 78, 79, 115, 120, 121, 126,

Index of Subjects

128, 157, 158, 233, 314, 336, 561, 565, 614, 615, 617, 627, 652, 656, 659, 660, 681, 687, 711, 718, 721, 737 Imperial Council, 1861–1918 (Reichsrat), 18, 164, 219, 627, 649, 671 House of Deputies, 1861–1918 (Abgeordnetenhaus), 17, 18, 114 Provisional National Assembly of German Austria, 1918–1919 (Provisorische Nationalversammlung Deutschösterreichs), 2, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 114, 219, 333, 710, 719 Constituent National Assembly, 1919–1920 (Konstituierende Nationalversammlung), 16, 22, 23, 42, 115, 153, 156, 158, 181, 191, 235, 335, 613, 614, 615, 617, 719, 725 National Council, since 1920 (Nationalrat), 16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 42, 47, 126, 235, 621, 627, 629, 653, 661, 671, 672, 674, 676, 680, 682, 693, 708, 715, 716, 721, 732, 735, 737 members of, 23, 42, 157, 165, 238, 467, 708, 719, 721 Federal Council, since 1920 (Bundesrat), 16, 23, 24, 25, 78, 239, 719 Party of Communists in Hungary, 58, 711 Pedagogical Institute of the City of Vienna (Pädagogisches Institut der Stadt Wien), 134, 147, 314 PEN Club Austria (Österreichischer P.E.N.Club), 264 people’s houses (Arbeiterheime), 175, 470, 532, 533, 551, 719 people’s stage at the Carltheater (Volksbühne im Carltheater), 515 Poale Zion, 191, 192, 676–78 Political Cabaret (Politisches Kabarett), 59, 60, 342, 502, 519 popular education (Volksbildung), aka university extension movement, 91, 98, 285, 287, 329–30, 446, 456, 457, 505, 534, 535 Verein Volkshochschule Wien Volksheim, aka Wiener Volksheim, 80, 81, 82, 83, 98 Vienna Association for Popular Education (Wiener Volksbildungsverein), 98, 456 popular education centers (Volkshochschulen), 80, 92, 98, 102, 141, 314, 329, 330, 466, 528, 534, 570, 732 Heimvolkshochschule, Leipzig, 328 Urania, 306, 534, 535, 726, 729



759

Volksheim Ottakring, aka Volkshochschule Ottakring, 80, 141, 329, 732 Prater, 254, 284, 334, 373, 395, 619 Prater Stadium (Prater Stadion), 304, 351, 364, 365, 735, 736 Prometheus Film, 527 Provisional National Assembly of German Austria (Provisorische Nationalversammlung Deutschösterreichs), 2, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 114, 219, 333, 710, 719. See also Parliament public baths, 286, 293, 299, 304, 374, 395, 401, 404, 405, 410, 411, 414, 415, 416, 417, 499, 590, 598, 599, 681, 683, 692 Amalienbad, 598, 731 Gänsehäufel, 374, 375 Kongressbad, 733 Public Utility and Building Material Corporation (Gemeinwirtschaftliche Siedlungs- und Baustoffanstalt, GESIBA), 726 Quarry Hill Flats, 588 Radio Traffic Company (Radio Verkehrs AG, RAVAG, aka Ravag), 495, 547, 558, 559, 562, 564–65, 729 Raimundtheater, 503, 505 Rallying Cry of Vienna’s Intellectuals (Kundgebung des geistigen Wien), 1, 3, 5, 11, 134, 466, 484, 674–75, 732 Rapid Vienna (Sportklub Rapid Wien), 352 Red Falcons (Rote Falken), 293, 343, 682, 701 Red Guard (Rote Garde), 710, 711 Red Players (Rote Spieler), 672. See also Socialist Performance Group Reichswehr, 657, 716 Schwarze Reichswehr, 658 religious teachers’ seminar (Religionslehrerseminar), 208 rent control (Mieterschutz), 8, 36, 118, 130, 389, 411, 592, 596, 602, 603, 676, 677, 704 Republican Protection League (Republikanischer Schutzbund), 27, 28, 121, 157, 352, 357, 604, 662, 679, 707, 708, 713, 728 Research Institute for Scientific Firm Management (Forschungsgesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Betriebsführung), 726 Reumannhof, aka Reumann-Hof, 393, 402, 403, 592, 599, 731. See also Vienna municipal housing complexes

760

 Index of Subjects

Revolutionary Socialists of Austria (Revolutionäre Sozialisten Österreichs), 327 Rockefeller Foundation, 70 Rural League (Landbund), 16, 45, 46, 126, 610, 624, 627, 654, 662 Salon d’Automne, 420 Salzburg Festival (Salzburger Festspiele), 504, 726 Sandleitenhof, 280, 303, 734. See also Vienna municipal housing complexes SC Hakoah, 193, 351, 360–61, 730 Schattendorf trial (Schattendorf-Prozess), 27–29, 707, 713, 717, 732 Schönbrunn School (Schönbrunner Erzieherschule, aka Schönbrunner Schule, aka Kinderfreundeschule Schönbrunn), 78, 314, 320, 355 Schwarze Reichswehr, 658. See also Reichswehr Schwarzwaldschule, 355 Second International (Zweite Internationale), 127, 333 Settlement Office of the City of Vienna (Siedlungsamt der Stadt Wien), 396, 401, 427, 711, 726. See also Vienna municipal authorities and organizations settlements, 389, 390, 391, 396–98, 401, 405, 409, 418, 419, 429–29, 509, 595, 726. See also settler movement Siedlung Altmannsdorf-Hetzendorf, 341 Siedlung Schmelz, 298–99 Weissenhof Settlement, Stuttgart (Weißenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart), 409 Werkbundsiedlung Wien, 736 settler movement (Siedlerbewegung), 389, 390, 391, 396–98, 401, 405, 409, 418, 419, 429, 509, 595, 726 allotment gardens (Kleingärten), aka Schreber gardens (Schrebergärten), aka settlement gardens (Siedlergärten), 341, 349, 370, 375, 392, 396, 397, 419, 595 Austrian Association for Settlements and Allotment Gardens (Österreichischer Verband für Siedlungs- und Kleingartenwesen, ÖVSK), 391, 398, 434, 439, 726 Sex Counseling Center for Workers and Employees (Sexualberatungsstelle für Arbeiter und Angestellte), 137, 254, 268, 734. See also Socialist Society for Sex Counseling and Research

Siedlung Altmannsdorf-Hetzendorf, 341. See also settler movement Siedlung Schmelz, 298–99. See also settler movement Simmeringer Blutsonntag, 736 single-kitchen building (Einküchenhaus), 234, 237, 244–46, 417–19 Heimhof, 244, 417, 437 Social Aid Community Anitta Müller (Soziale Hilfsgemeinschaft Anitta Müller), 200 Social and Economic Museum (Gesellschaftsund Wirtschaftsmuseum), 4, 68, 69, 92, 274, 285, 286, 388, 391, 424, 485, 587, 671, 688, 690, 730 Social Democratic Arts Council (Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle), 57, 59, 334, 352, 381, 464, 465, 467, 468–71, 492, 503, 504, 505–6, 510, 512, 515, 516, 517, 531, 533, 733 Social Democratic Bulk-Buying Society of Austrian Consumer Associations (Großeinkaufsgesellschaft österreichischer Consumvereine, GÖC), 61–62 Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), 20, 637, 650 Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD), 20, 637 Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, MSPD), 637 Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz, SP), 35 Socialist Party of Austria (Sozialistische Partei Österreichs, SPÖ), 7 Socialist Performance Group (Sozialistische Veranstaltungsgruppe), 59, 502, 503, 512, 518, 519, 731 Red Players (Rote Spieler), 672 Socialist Society for Sex Counseling and Research (Sozialistische Gesellschaft für Sexualberatung und Sexualforschung), 137, 254, 268, 734 Sex Counseling Center for Workers and Employees of (Sexualberatungsstelle für Arbeiter und Angestellte), 137, 254, 268, 734 Socialist Workers’ Sport International (Sozialistische Arbeiter-SportInternationale, SASI), 357, 364, 735

Index of Subjects

Socialist Workers’ Youth (Sozialistische Arbeiterjugend, SAJ), 78, 351, 352, 478, 682, 701 Socialist Youth Front (Sozialistische Jungfront), 365, 686, 695, 696, 697, 701 Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen), 465, 475 Society for the Advancement of Modern Art (Gesellschaft zur Förderung moderner Kunst), 728 Society of Socialist Doctors, Berlin (Verein sozialistischer Ärzte), 139, 140 Sokol, 179, 186 soviet republic, aka soviet system (Räterepublik), 2, 20, 21, 115, 121, 164. See also workers’ councils Bavarian, 2, 182, 411, 694, 708, 714, 720 Hungarian, 26, 161, 174, 182, 448, 536, 708, 711, 713, 714, 720 Spartacus League (Spartakusbund), 637 State Council (Staatsrat), 2, 710 statutory health insurance (Krankenkasse), 33, 275, 291, 381. See also health insurance taxes entertainment tax (Lustbarkeitsabgabe), 3, 33, 39, 352, 468, 527, 725 housing construction tax (Wohnbausteuer), 3, 4, 33, 37, 39, 175, 390, 405, 411, 412, 413, 590, 592, 598, 601, 602, 676, 728 luxury taxes, 3, 4, 32, 33, 39, 49, 527, 597, 676, 725 Taylorism, aka Taylor system, 339, 355, 356, 396, 426, 485, 570, 580, 726 temperance movement (Abstinenzbewegung), 375 Workers’ Temperance League (ArbeiterAbstinentenbund), 719 Theater in der Josefstadt, 6, 504, 520–21, 539, 729 trade unions, 21, 38, 44, 59, 64, 117, 118, 120, 127, 130, 185, 234, 236, 250, 328, 397, 408, 531, 552, 556, 589, 652, 666, 679, 687, 701, 719 Apolitical List (Unpolitische Liste), aka the Apoliticals (die Unpolitischen), 187 Federation of Austria’s Independent Trade Unions (Bund unabhängiger Gewerkschaften Oesterreichs, BUGÖ), 188 Free Trade Unions (Freie Gewerkschaften), 184, 187, 248, 328, 679, 687, 719



761

German Trade Union Confederation in Austria (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund für Österreich, DGB), 187, 188 tuberculosis, 44, 133, 198, 257, 258, 275, 276, 286, 293, 294, 295, 301, 302, 355, 374, 383, 605, 734 tuberculosis pavilion (Tuberkulosepavillon), 44, 294, 301, 734. See also Lainz Municipal Hospital unemployment insurance (Arbeitslosenversicherung), 75, 87, 129, 582, 663 Union of German-Austrian Jews (Union deutsch-österreichischer Juden), aka Austrian-Israelite Union (ÖsterreichischIsraelitische Union), later Union of Austrian Jews (Union österreichischer Juden), 192, 677 Union of Religious Socialists (Bund Religiöser Sozialisten), 229, 720 Unity List (Einheitsliste), 621, 622, 627, 674, 676, 677, 678, 716, 732 University of Vienna (Universität Wien), 69, 70, 83, 91, 135, 139, 147, 325, 498, 540, 562, 596, 609, 628, 636, 644, 675, 709, 710, 725, 727, 728, 729, 731, 735 Law School (Juridische Fakultät), 726 Urania, 306, 534, 535, 726, 729. See also popular education centers Verein Volkshochschule Wien Volksheim, aka Wiener Volksheim, 80, 81, 82, 83, 98 Vienna Association for Popular Education (Wiener Volksbildungsverein), 98, 456 Vienna Central Cemetery (Wiener Zentralfriedhof), 206, 217, 727 Vienna Central Savings Bank (Wiener Zentralsparkasse), 37 Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis), 5, 90, 91, 92, 93, 97–99, 102, 106, 108, 498, 733, 734 Vienna City Council (Wiener Stadtrat), 2, 126 Vienna City Hall (Wiener Rathaus), 35, 256, 259, 285, 299, 300, 396, 413, 470, 614, 698, 719, 726, 727, 728, 730 Vienna City Senate (Wiener Stadtsenat), 2, 307, 732 Vienna College of Agriculture (Hochschule für Bodenkultur), 675, 726 Vienna College of Business (Hochschule für Welthandel), 726 Vienna College of Technical Arts (Hochschule für Technik), 726

762

 Index of Subjects

Vienna College of Veterinary Medicine (Tierärztliche Hochschule), 726 Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen), 466, 504, 732, 734 Vienna Free People’s Stage (Wiener Freie Volksbühne), 492, 505 Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, Isotype (Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik, Isotype), 4, 285, 587, 671, 690, 695, 730 Vienna municipal authorities and organizations Counseling Center for Mothers (Mutterberatungsstelle), 253, 291, 293, 300, 301, 303, 692 Education Counseling Center (Erziehungsberatungsstelle), 287, 315 Health Counseling Center for Engaged Couples (Gesundheitliche Beratungsstelle für Ehewerber), aka Marriage Counseling Center (Eheberatungsstelle), 253, 256–59, 289, 293, 301, 303, 600, 727 Housing Office (Wohnungsamt), 174, 175–77, 401, 589, 595 Intake Center for Children (Kinderübernahmsstelle, Küst), 132, 135, 148, 293, 294, 300, 302, 303, 304–7, 401, 590, 692, 730 Municipal Health Office (Städtisches Gesundheitsamt), 253, 257, 259 Municipal kindergartens (Städtische Kindergärten), 78, 248, 250, 279–82, 302, 303, 313, 314, 317–19, 323, 390, 403, 405, 412, 589, 598, 599–600, 683, 584, 692, 694, 734 Municipal Planning and Building Office (Stadtbauamt), 415, 420 Municipal Welfare Office (Städtisches Wohlfahrtsamt), 256, 280 Settlement Office of the City of Vienna (Siedlungsamt der Stadt Wien), 396, 401, 427, 711, 726 Vienna Youth Relief Organization (Wiener Jugendhilfswerk), 289, 302, 692 Youth Office (Jugendamt), 276, 279, 293, 301, 304, 309, 692 Vienna Municipal Council (Wiener Gemeinderat), 2, 41, 42, 43, 127, 128, 167, 233, 256, 303, 405, 411, 420, 590, 591, 660, 671, 677, 684, 691, 692, 697, 704, 716, 728 members of, 36, 37, 193, 217, 255, 571, 590, 693, 707, 719

Vienna state and municipal elections (Wiener Landtags- und Gemeinderatswahlen), 3, 7, 234, 307, 586, 588, 627, 650, 659, 662, 670, 672, 674, 676–78, 684, 699, 708, 725, 728, 732, 736 Vienna municipal housing complexes (Gemeindebauten), 6, 145, 234, 245, 250, 276, 298, 389, 390, 395–96, 398–400, 405, 409, 411–17, 421–23, 426, 431, 528, 588, 589, 590, 591, 596, 601–2, 603–4, 682–83, 698, 726, 734, 735 Franz-Domes-Hof, 402 Fuchsenfeldhof, aka Fuchsenfeld-Hof, 403, 404, 412, 413–15, 424, 592 Goethehof, 317 Julius-Popp-Hof, 402 Karl-Marx-Hof, 431, 588, 603, 682, 683, 734, 735 Matteottihof, aka Matteotti-Hof, 681, 682 Metzleinstaler Hof, aka Metzleinstalerhof, 390, 402, 403, 592, 726 Reumannhof, aka Reumann-Hof, 393, 402, 403, 592, 599, 731 Sandleitenhof, 280, 303, 734 Winarskyhof, aka Winarsky-Hof, 411, 412 Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung), 139 Vienna Psychoanalytic Outpatient Clinic of (Wiener Psychoanalytisches Ambulatorium), 133, 137 Vienna Psychological Institute (Wiener Psychologisches Institut), 70, 83, 562, 675, 727 Vienna Public Kitchen Service (Wiener öffentlicher Küchenbetrieb, WÖK), 281 Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule), 444, 447, 451, 675 Vienna Secession, 445 Vienna Society for the Cultivation of Race (Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege), 729 Vienna Sociological Society (Wiener Soziologische Gesellschaft), 289 Vienna state and municipal elections (Wiener Landtags- und Gemeinderatswahlen), 3, 7, 234, 307, 586, 588, 627, 650, 659, 662, 670, 672, 674, 676–78, 684, 699, 708, 725, 728, 732, 736. See also Vienna Municipal Council Vienna State Assembly (Wiener Landtag), 47, 678, 904. See also Vienna Municipal Council Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staatsoper), 467, 478, 479, 505, 733

Index of Subjects

Vienna State School Council (Stadtschulrat für Wien), 187, 314, 592 Vienna vice squad (Büro für sittenpolizeiliche Angelegenheiten, aka Wiener Sittenamt), 256 Vienna Workers’ Libraries (Wiener Arbeiterbüchereien), 312, 482, 483, 492, 547, 600, 690 Vienna Workshop (Wiener Werkstätte), 431 Vienna Youth Relief Organization (Wiener Jugendhilfswerk), 289, 302, 692. See also Vienna municipal authorities and organizations Viennese Kineticism (Wiener Kinetismus), 5, 148. See also kineticism Volksbühne, Berlin, 520 Volksheim Ottakring, aka Volkshochschule Ottakring, 80, 141, 329, 732. See also popular education centers Wednesday Psychological Society (MittwochGesellschaft), 141 Weissenhof Settlement, Stuttgart (Weißenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart), 409. See also settler movement; Werkbund welfare workers (Fürsorger, Fürsorgerinnen), 81, 248, 275, 294, 295–297, 301, 302, 303, 304, 692 Werkbund Austrian, 93, 425, 431 German, 432, 435, 528 Werkbundsiedlung Wien, 736. See also settler movement Werkstätten Bildender Kunst, Berlin, 317 Wiener Amateur-Sportverein, later FK Austria, 352, 353 Wiener Konzerthaus, 238, 261, 322, 458, 465, 475, 476, 570, 726, 727, 729, 735 Wiener Plakatier-AG (WIPAG), 672 Wiener Sport-Club, 362



763

Winarskyhof, aka Winarsky-Hof, 411, 412. See also Vienna municipal housing complexes Winter Help (Winterhilfe), 362 Workers’ Bank (Arbeiterbank AG), 531, 532, 533 Workers’ College (Arbeiterhochschule), 313, 327–29, 411, 458, 492 workers’ councils (Arbeiterräte), 21, 121, 182, 708, 713. See also soviet republic Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Festival (Arbeiter-Turn- und Sportfest), 352, 358, 731 Workers’ Holiday Act (Arbeiterurlaubsgesetz), 335, 340 Workers’ International Relief, (WIR) (Internationale Arbeiterhilfe, IAH), 534 workers’ militias (Arbeiterwehren), 708 Workers’ Olympics (Arbeiterolympiade), 350, 351, 358, 364, 504, 587, 735 Workers’ Symphony Concerts (ArbeiterSinfonie-Konzerte), 5, 464, 465, 466, 467–68, 469, 505, 727, 738 Workers’ Temperance League (ArbeiterAbstinentenbund), 719. See also temperance movement works councils (Betriebsräte), 130, 335 World Congress of Jewish Women (Weltkongress jüdischer Frauen), 201, 728 World League for Sexual Reform, (WLSR) (Weltliga für Sexualreform), 253, 254, 261, 735 World Movement Against Racial Hatred and Human Suffering (Weltverband gegen Rassenhass und Menschennot), aka Harand Movement (Harand-Bewegung), 623 Young Germany (Junges Deutschland), 377, 691 Youth Office (Jugendamt), 276, 279, 293, 301, 304, 309, 692. See also Vienna municipal authorities and organizations

INDEX OF PERSONS Addams, Jane, 572 Adler, Alfred, 1, 4, 5, 134, 141–43, 144, 145, 253, 263, 287, 305, 314, 315, 316, 466, 675, 732 Adler, Max, 20, 113, 114, 115–16, 117, 122, 145, 273, 313, 320, 328, 329, 635, 638– 40, 710 Adler, Victor (aka Viktor), 15, 98, 164, 191, 216, 221, 222, 719 Adorno, Theodor W., 6, 70, 465, 466, 476– 78, 730 Aesop, 205 Aichhorn, August, 140, 309–10 Aichinger, Hermann, 413, 414 Alexander, Franz, 31 Alighieri, Dante, 548 Alt, Rudolf Ritter von, 530 Altenberg, Peter, 4 Ambrosius, 634 Anderle, Franz, 558 Anderson, Benedict, 547 Ankwicz-Kleehoven, Hans, 429–31 Aquinas, Thomas, 612, 638 Arnold, Franz, 44 Arntz, Gerd, 92, 388 Asch, Sholem (aka Shalom), 193, 197, 733 Auerbach, Berthold, 673 Augustine of Hippo (aka Saint Augustine), 638, 640 Austerlitz, Friedrich, 27–29, 164, 165–67, 174, 515, 553–54 Ayer, Alfred, J. 91 Bach, David Josef, 59, 465–66, 467, 468–71, 477, 503, 504, 505–6, 515, 547, 727 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 343, 466, 474 Balázs, Béla, 8, 528, 536–37, 538, 560 Bálint, György (aka Balint, Georg), 57–58 Bartók, Béla, 477 Basarov, Vladimir, 95 Bauer, Otto, 2, 7, 8, 10, 15, 16, 20, 44–46, 69, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119–21, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 169–71, 174, 191, 196, 213, 214, 215, 328, 346, 351, 352, 478,

570, 581–83, 637, 650, 662–64, 694, 613, 718–22 Bauer, Otto “the little,” 214, 229–31 Bauer Wurster, Catherine, 404 Beck-Gaden, Hanns, 533 Beer-Hofmann, Richard, 520 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 455, 466, 467, 469, 474, 506, 727 Behrens, Peter, 392, 409, 411, 412 Békessy, Imre, 551, 553, 555, 730 Bekker, Paul, 477 Beller, Steven, 194, 610 Ben-Gavriêl, Moshe Ya’akov. See Höflich, Eugen Bendiener, Oskar, 710 Benjamin, Walter, 11, 460 Bennersdorfer, Ernestine, 672 Bennett, Arnold, 420 Benvenisti, J. L., 202–3 Berg, Alban, 6, 465, 476, 477, 730 Berg, Sepha, 539 Berger, Artur (aka Arthur), xxx, 62, 736 Berger, Martin, 531 Bergmann, Gustav, 91 Bergner, Elisabeth, 734 Bergner, Zechariah Choneh. See Ravitch, Melech Berisch, Emil, 515 Berndl, Florian, 375 Bernfeld, Siegfried, 5, 134, 139–41, 314, 664 Bertalanffy, Ludwig, 93 Bettauer, Hugo, 252, 302, 483, 489–91, 617– 18, 707, 727, 729, 730 Bienenfeld, Elsa, 475–76 Binet, Alfred, 305 Birnecker, Franz, 28 Biró, Mihály, 671 Bismarck, Otto von, 105, 612 Blau, Eve, 6, 7, 389, 390, 407, 427, 588 Blum, Klara, 737 Bodenwieser, Gertrud, 729 Boehmer, Jakob, 635 Bogdanov, Alexander, 95 Bohnen, Michael, 549

766

 Index of Persons

Bohr, Niels, 96 Bölsche (Boelsche), Wilhelm, 642 Born, Wolfgang, 528, 540–42 Börner, Wilhelm, 675 Boschek, Anna, 233, 725 Bosel, Sigmund, 50 Botz, Gerhard, 707, 709 Boudin, Louis B., 113 Brandl, Eugenie, 728 Braunthal, Julius, 17, 335–36, 672, 680 Brecht, Bertolt (Bert), 85, 353, 504, 564 Brehm, Alfred, 64, 642 Breitner, Hugo, 3, 4, 23, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37–39, 40, 41, 49, 130, 191, 478, 526, 621, 622, 674, 676, 677, 678, 707, 708, 727, 736 Brenner, Anton, 409–11, 425, 426 Breslauer, Hans Karl, 617, 729 Broch, Hermann, 92, 483, 498–500 Brod, Max, 227 Bronnen, Arnold, 353 Bruckner, Adele, 275–76, 295–97 Brügel, Fritz, 465, 650, 655–59 Brügel, Ludwig, 710 Brüning, Heinrich, 34 Brunngraber, Rudolf, 92, 274, 485–86 Brunswik, Egon, 93 Brusenbauch, Arthur (aka Artur), 280, 675 Bucharin, Nikolai Ivanovich, 195 Bühler, Charlotte, 6, 70, 78, 83, 84, 132, 135, 147, 148, 305, 306, 314, 317, 318, 727 Bühler, Karl, 1, 70, 83, 91, 134, 135, 147–49, 314, 317, 318, 675, 727 Buresch, Karl, 44, 46 Burjan, Hildegard, 233, 725 Buttinger, Joseph (aka Josef), 327–29 Carnap, Rudolf, 91, 92, 97–101, 106, 110 Casals, Pablo, 580 Castiglioni, Camillo, 50, 520, 729 Chagall, Marc, 452 Chajes, Zwi Perez, 208, 733 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 614 Chaplin, Charlie, 56, 57, 574, 703 Chapman Catt, Carrie, 572 Christensen, Benjamin, 532 Čižek (aka Cizek), Franz, 1, 5, 148, 314, 444, 446, 451–53, 675, 731, 732 Clemenceau, Georges, 152, 154 Confucius (Kung-fu-tse), 535 Coogan, Jackie, 574 Courths-Mahler, Hedwig, 490 Crispien, Arthur, 20

Curie, Marie, 91 Curtiz, Michael, 727 Czermak, Emmerich, 609, 623 Czernin, Ottokar, 22 Czinner, Paul, 734 Czuczka, Fritz, 441–42 Daniels, Bebe, 57 Danneberg, Robert, 23–25, 33, 35–37, 39, 191, 235, 671, 678–79, 689, 694 Darwin, Charles, 273, 283, 289, 642 Dawes, Charles G., 656 de Ferro, Pascal Joseph, 374 Debussy, Claude, 476 Dehmel, Richard, 511 Delitz, Leo, 675 DeMille, Cecil B., 533 Denk, Karl, 62 Deutsch, Helene, 134, 664 Deutsch, Julius, 10, 157–59, 165, 191, 352, 357–59, 694, 708, 710 Deutsch-Kramer, Marie (aka Maria), 364–65 Dicker(-Brandeis), Friedl, 317 Diem, Carl, 353 Dietrich, Marlene, 6, 733 Dirnhuber, Karl, 411 Dobrovsky, Josef, 675 Dollfuß, Engelbert, 7, 603, 623–625, 718– 722, 737, 738 Dongen, Kees van, 452 Dowisch, Emil, 368 Dreier, Katherine, 731 Dubislav, Walter, 98 Duczynska, Ilona, 709 Dürer, Albrecht, 540, 541 Duse, Eleonora, 537 Dvořák, Max, 460 Eberle, Joseph, 609, 610–12, 628, 634–35, 640 Ehmcke, Fritz Helmuth, 453 Ehn, Karl, 735 Ehrenzweig, Robert (aka Lucas, Robert; aka Neon), 59–60, 503, 518, 519–20 Eichler, Edmund W., 177–79 Einstein, Albert, 91, 109, 499, 726 Einstein, Carl, 452 Eisenbarth, Johann Andreas, 455 Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich, 531 Eisler, Max, 193, 205–7 Eldersch, Matthias, 181, 615 Elisabeth of Austria (aka Sisi), 548 Emmerling, Georg, 44

Index of Persons

Endres, Stephanie (aka Steffi), 10, 355–57, 364, 699–703 Engels, Friedrich, 107, 138, 723 Eriksen, Erich, 533 Ermers, Max (aka Rosenthal, Maximilian), 711 Essad Pasha. See Toptani, Essad Pasha Euripides, 506 Fabian, Ewald, 140 Fadrus, Viktor, 148, 314, 325 Faludi, Heinrich, 689 Federn, Paul, 134, 664 Feigl, Herbert, 91 Feldmann, Else, 483, 488–89, 726 Fénelon, François, 634 Fenichel, Otto, 134, 664 Ferch, Johann, 483 Fescourt, Henri, 412 Fey, Emil, 707, 721 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 612, 639 Fickert, Auguste, 235, 437 Fink, Jodok, 158 Fischer, Ernst, 62–64, 254, 265–68, 343–46, 365–67, 483, 497–98, 503, 504, 510, 512–15, 518, 519 Flake, Otto, 412 Flaubert, Gustave, 412 Fleischmann, Trude, 726 Floch, Josef, 455 Foges, Ida, 339–40 Fontane, Theodor, 412 Foppa, Hermann, 45 Ford, Henry, 227, 534, 570, 578, 580, 581 Forest, Karl, 675 Förster, Wolfgang, 7, 254, 390 Forstner, August, 467–68 Foucault, Michel, 7 Fourier, Charles, 116 France, Anatole, 412 Frank, Josef, 91, 92, 389, 392, 406, 409, 411, 421–23, 426, 427, 431, 432–34, 453, 736 Frank, Philipp, 91, 92, 95–97 Frankenstein, Max, 538–39 Frankowski, Philipp, 279–82 Franz Joseph (I), 4, 218, 394, 598 Frass, Rudolf, 735 Fraß, Wilhelm, 281 Frauenfeld, Alfred Eduard, 650, 659–61 Frederick the Great (aka Frederick II of Prussia), 657 Frei, Bruno, 172, 182–84 Freidenreich, Harriett Pass, 194 Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 691



767

Freud, Anna, 317 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 4, 5, 10, 29, 94, 133–35, 135–37, 138, 139, 140, 141, 148, 149, 222–25, 253, 254, 305, 466, 628, 664, 675, 726, 732, 735 Freundlich, Emmy, 34, 233, 320, 327, 725 Freyer, Hans, 102 Friedjung, Josef Karl, 134, 253, 255–56, 261, 664 Frischauer, Alma Stefanie, 528, 540 Frischauf(-Pappenheim) Marie, 137, 254, 268, 734 Fröschl, F., 350 Fuchs, Gustav A. (Adolf), 413–15, 424 Fülöp-Miller, René, 528 Furtmüller, Carl, 141, 146 Gandhi, Mahatma, 587 Gardner, Sheldon, 135 Gastgeb, Hans, 361 Gebühr, Otto, 657 Geert, Gisa, 62 Gerlach, Martin Jr., 404, 528 Gessner, Hubert, 393, 421, 731 Gföllner, Johannes Maria, 403 Giedion, Siegfried, 407 Giese, Friedrich, 355 Gilbreth, Frank, 581 Giorgione (Castelfranco, Giorgio da), 565 Giraud, Albert, 475, 476 Gleispach, Wenzel, 735 Glöckel, Otto, 4, 186, 187, 214, 313, 314, 315, 322–25, 451, 534, 592, 694, 725 Gödel, Kurt, 91 Goebbels, Joseph, 657, 658 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 64, 259, 362, 474, 491, 506, 517, 518, 612, 695, 732 Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich, 488, 511 Goldhammer, Leo, 193, 209–10 Goldoni, Carlo, 521, 729 Goldscheid, Rudolf, 40, 261, 273, 289 Golitsyn, Prince, 178 Gomperz, Theodor, 98 Gorge, Hugo, 430, 734 Gorky, Maxim, 95 Görres, Joseph, 634 Grabbe, Christian Dietrich, 515 Graf, Max, 675 Gramsci, Antonio, 8, 571, 581 Greger, Marie, 539 Gregor, Hans, 62 Gregor the Great, 634 Gregor VII, 634 Grelling, Kurt, 98

768

 Index of Persons

Großmann, Stefan, 505 Gruber, Helmut, 7, 50, 115, 235, 255, 334, 548, 691, 698 Grünbaum, Fritz, 675 Grünberger, Arthur, 734 Guizot, François, 635 Gunther, John, 604–5 Habermas, Jürgen, 547 Habsburg, Karl I, 18, 158, 161, 164, 550 Habsburg, Otto, 159 Haeckel, Ernst, 371, 642 Hahn, Hans, 91, 97–99 Hahn-Neurath, Olga, 91 Haidenbauer, Hans, 232, 234 Halle, Fanina, 675 Hamber, Edmund, 531 Hammer, Viktor Carl, 455 Hanak, Anton, 1, 205, 309, 455, 675 Handel, George Frideric, 343 Hanisch, Walter, 444 Hannak, Jacques, 352, 361–63, 612–14 Hansen, Miriam, 548 Hanusch, Ferdinand, 335 Harand, Irene, 623–25 Hardy, Charles O., 603–4 Harta, Felix Albrecht, 455 Harter, Gustav, 373–75 Hartleben, Otto Erich, 476 Hartmann, Ludo Moritz, 80, 98, 313, 329–30 Hartwig, Theodor, 379–80 Haydn, Joseph, 343, 362, 656 Hayek, Friedrich August, 7, 8 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 640, 641 Hegemann, Werner, 400–402, 590, 657 Heidegger, Martin, 92, 99, 109 Heine, Albert, 549, 675 Heinrich, Walter, 717–18 Hellmuth, G. F., 558 Henry VIII of England, 635 Herbst, Edgar, 570, 726 Herbst, Eduard, 166 Herrnheiser, Annie, 437, 438 Herzl, Theodor, 192, 614 Herzog, Herta, 562 Hetzer, Hildegard, 148, 149, 305, 306 Hiden, Rudolf, 362 Hilarius (aka Hilary of Poitiers), 634 Hilferding, Margarete (aka Margret), 52–54, 287–88 Hilferding, Rudolf, 113, 114 Hille, Peter, 540 Hilscher, Albert, 112

Hirsch, Bettina, 244–46 Hirschel-Protsch, Günter, 590 Hirschfeld, Ludwig, 54–56, 549 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 253, 254, 261 Hitler, Adolf, 105, 128, 169, 187, 604, 623, 645, 650, 655, 656, 657, 660, 665, 666, 667, 690, 720, 721, 737 Hitschmann, Eduard, 133, 134 Hoffmann, Josef, 411, 453, 734 Hoffmann von Fallersleben, August Heinrich, 656 Höflich, Eugen (later Ben-Gavriêl, Moshe Ya’akov), 194–95 Hofmann, Else, 437–38 Hofmann, Michael, 618, 619 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 154, 504, 520, 528, 726 Holek, Heinrich, 298–99 Holzer, Rudolf, 520–21 Holzmeister, Clemens, 409 Homolka, Oskar, 737 Honay, Karl, 302–4 Honneth, Axel, 8 Horthy, Miklós, 26, 58 Horváth, Ödön von, 6, 521–23, 736 Hug-Hellmuth, Hermine von, 140 Hugenberg, Alfred, 667 Hughes, Charles Evans, 580 Hughes, Langston, 584 Huppert, Hugo, 534–35 Imboden, Martin, 528 Jahoda, Marie, 4, 8, 49, 69, 70, 83–89, 333, 346–49, 562, 737 Jaksch, Franz, 570 Jaksch, Hans, 736 Jalkotzy, Alois, 276–79, 684–85 James, Henry, 98 James, William, 98 Jannings, Emil, 539 Jarno, Josef, 675 Jaspers, Karl, 92, 102, 103, 104, 105 Jelletz, Adolf, 734 Jellinek, Adele, 383–85 Jeritza, Maria, 580 Jerzabek, Anton, 22, 23, 609, 615 Jodl, Friedrich, 98 Johannesson, Adolf, 511 Joseph II, 161 Jung, Carl Gustav, 222 Jung, Rudolf, 649, 655 Justin Martyr, 635

Index of Persons

Kadečka, Ferdinand, 19 Kaes, Anton, 8, 9, 10, 528 Kalesa, Robert, 726 Kammerer, Paul, 273, 283–85 Kampffmeyer, Hans, 398 Kanitz, Otto Felix, 78, 313, 319–22, 329, 699–703 Kant, Immanuel, 101, 102, 376, 640, 641 Karau, Elisa, 510–12 Karau, George, 61, 328 Karlinsky, Elisabeth, 444 Karlweis, Marta, 734 Karpeles, Benno, 549 Kassák, Lajos (aka Ludwig), 446, 448–51 Kästner, Erich, 484 Katscher, Rudolf, 737 Kaus, Gina (nee Wiener, Regina), 6, 10, 315– 17, 509–10, 730, 732 Kautsky, Karl, 20–22, 257 Kautsky, Karl Jr., 256–59, 300 Kautsky, Luise, 246 Kelsen, Hans, 1, 16, 17–20, 23, 91, 92, 122– 24, 466, 636, 675, 722–24 Kienböck, Viktor, 39–41, 630 Kienzl, Wilhelm, 675 Kiesler, Friedrich, 446, 507 Kiesler, Hedwig (later Lamarr, Hedy), 6, 737 Kirchsteiner, Hans, 483 Kisch, Egon Erwin, 353, 710 Klages, Ludwig, 99 Klebinder, Ernst, 621–22 Klein, Stefan Isidor, 58 Kleinhans, Franz, 193, 377–79 Kleist, Heinrich von, 146 Klien, Erika Giovanna, 6, 444, 731 Klimt, Gustav, 4, 445 Klinger, Julius, 56–57 Klotz-Dürrenbach, Theodor, 675 Koffka, Kurt, 460, 462 Köhler, Elsa, 314 Kokoschka, Oskar, 6, 445, 455, 460 Kolisch, Rudolf, 476 Kollontai, Alexandra, 269 Korda, Alexander, 533 Körner, Ignaz Hermann, 361 Korner, Sophie, 447–48 Kornhäusel, Joseph, 205 Koschat, Thomas, 168 Kosel, Hermann, 56, 689 Kovarik, Franz, 28 Kraepelin, Emil, 642 Kraft, Viktor, 91, 93 Kralik, Richard von, 609



769

Kramrisch, Stella, 447–48 Kraus, Karl, 10, 50, 56, 57, 60, 458, 466, 474, 494, 503, 515, 547, 551–53, 553–54, 730, 733 Kraus, Rudolf, 675 Kreisky, Bruno, 7, 315 Krenek, Ernst, 465, 466, 477, 478, 479, 733 Kuczynski, Robert René, 603 Kuh, Anton, 51, 167–69, 489–91, 644–46, 698–99 Kun, Béla, 26 Kunfi, Zsigmond (aka Sigmund), 613–17 Kunschak, Leopold, 22, 23, 37, 38, 39, 158, 609, 610, 615 Kyselak, Joseph, 373 Lafargue, Paul, 343 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste (de), 273, 283, 289 Lamarr, Hedy. See Kiesler, Hedwig Lammasch, Heinrich, 18 Landauer, Fritz, 734 Landauer, Gustav, 277 Landmann, Heinz, 353 Lang, Fritz, 6, 729 Lanner, Joseph, 470 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 95, 97, 109 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 122, 124, 128, 552, 652 Lazarsfeld, Paul F., 4, 8, 49, 69, 70, 78–80, 85, 346, 562, 737 Lazarsfeld, Sofie (aka Sophie), 134, 145–47, 254, 263 Lederer, Josefine (aka Joe), 491–92 Lederer, Max, 313, 325–27 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 640 Leichter, Käthe, 4, 10, 34, 49, 68, 69, 70, 71–78, 80, 114, 128–30, 191, 234, 246, 248–51, 417, 733, 735, 736 Leisching, Eduard, 456–58 Leischner, Erich Franz, 280, 733, 734 Leitich, Ann Tizia, 528, 570, 578–81, 583, 728 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, 92, 95, 96, 269, 537, 581, 588, 652, 711 Lenz, Maria, 61 Leo XIII, 641 Lernet-Holenia, Alexander, 242 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 518 Leuthner, Karl, 214 Levy Moreno, Jacob, 507 Libényi, János, 394 Lichtblau, Ernst, 1, 4, 431–32, 675 Lichtenfels, Eduard Peithner von, 530 Lichtenstern, Robert, 675

770

 Index of Persons

Liebermann, Max, 540 Liebknecht, Karl, 637 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 171 Liederer, Rosa, 279–82 Lihotzky, Grete. See Schütte-Lihotzky, Margarete Linder, Max, 574 Liszt, Franz von, 30, 611 Löwenherz, Josef, 193, 207–9 Löwitsch, Franz, 507–9 London, Jack, 483 Loos, Adolf, 389, 392, 396–98, 406, 411, 420–21, 426, 427–29, 434, 455, 734 Lorre, Peter, 737 Louis XIV, 160, 432, 576 Louis XIX, 160 Lucas, Robert. See Ehrenzweig, Robert Lucka, Emil, 575 Ludendorff, Erich, 646 Lueger, Karl, 491, 610, 622, 627, 630, 660 Luitpold, Josef. See Stern, Josef Luitpold Lukács, Georg, 8, 711–13, 717 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 95 Luxemburg, Rosa, 637 Mach, Ernst, 91, 92, 95, 96, 273, 289, 628 Machatý, Gustav, 737 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 486 Maderthaner, Wolfgang, 3, 35, 352, 610, 690, 691 Mahan, J. Alexander, 596–97 Mahler(-Werfel), Alma, 1, 4, 466, 675, 732 Mahler, Gustav, 5, 464, 466, 469, 476, 477, 733 Mann, Heinrich, 227 Marinelli, Wilhelm, 93 Marlett-Stamler, Kurt, 538 Marschall, Hans, 190, 728 Martin, Charles, 56, 57 Marx, Karl, 69, 105, 107, 122, 124, 138, 140, 144, 199, 228, 229, 335, 336, 652, 683, 710, 723 Mattl, Siegfried, 7, 9, 50, 115, 548, 571, 588, 671, 672, 691, 709 May, Ernst, 407, 409, 435 May, Karl, 483 Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 480 Mayer, Maria, 675 Mayreder, Rosa, 235, 259, 260 Meisl, Hugo, 353 Meisl, Willy, 353–55 Meister, Richard, 325 Mendele (aka Mocher Sforim, Mendele), 197

Menger, Karl, 92 Menghin, Oswald, 628 Menzinger, Hans, 553 Merkel, Georg, 675 Metternich, Klemens Wenzel Lothar von, 177, 178, 642 Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emilyevich, 520 Micheler, Ferry, 62 Miklas, Wilhelm, 736 Milestone, Lewis, 653, 735 Mill, John Stuart, 98 Minor, Margarethe (aka Margarete), 675 Mises, Ludwig (von), 7, 603 Mises, Richard (von), 91 Missong, Alfred, 628, 640–42 Moholy-Nagy, László, 448 Montessori, Maria, 303, 314, 317, 319, 451, 734 Morris, Charles W., 91 Morris, William, 433 Morus, Thomas, 634 Moser, Koloman, 445 Motzko, Alma, 44 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (aka Amadé), 161, 291, 343, 565 Müller, Alfred, 716 Müller, Gustav, 375–77 Müller, Robert, 447 Müller-Cohen, Anitta, 193, 200–201 Münzenberg, Willi, 689 Musil, Franz, 398, 591 Musil, Robert, 1, 6, 10, 92, 154, 242, 460, 466, 484, 497–98, 528, 675, 735 Neon. See Ehrenzweig, Robert Neubauer, Wilhelm, 675 Neufeld, Max, 533 Neumayer, Josef, 627 Neurath, Otto, 4, 7, 10, 69, 91, 92, 93–95, 97–99, 106–10, 273, 274, 285–87, 328, 389, 391–93, 398, 400, 406, 417–19, 485, 538, 587, 603, 671, 690, 693, 695–97, 730 Neutra, Richard, 732, 734 Neuzil, Walter, 507–9 Newton, Isaac, 96 Nielsen, Asta, 539 Niernberger, Leopold, 417 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 260, 536 Norris, Pippa, 671, 672 Nowotny, Paula, 697–98 Nußbaum, Anna, 570, 583–84 O. Henry (Porter, William Sydney), 483

Index of Persons

O’Connel, 634 Onno, Ferdinand, 675 Owen, Robert, 116 Pächt, Otto, 447, 460–63 Palla, Edmund, 328 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 98 Perco, Rudolf, 44 Peter, Heinrich, 591–92 Petzold, Alfons, 483 Petzold, Joseph, 98 Pfemfert, Franz, 452 Piffl, Friedrich Gustav, 218–19 Pink, Louis H., 598–99 Pirquet, Clemens (von), 279, 282 Pisk, Paul Amadeus, 458, 465, 466, 471–73, 477 Pius VII, 634 Pius IX, 634 Pius X, 218 Plaschkes, Leopold, 677 Plato, 638, 639, 723 Ploderer, Rudolf, 473 Polak-Hellwig, Otto, 417 Polanyi, Karl, 7, 93 Polgar, Alfred, 1, 159–61, 547, 548–51, 675 Pollak, Marianne, 240–42, 254, 261–62, 320 Pollak, Oscar (aka Oskar), 456, 468–71, 483, 503, 515–17, 547, 553, 554, 555–56 Polycarp, 635 Popp, Adelheid, 34, 233, 234, 238, 261, 336– 38, 694, 725 Popper, Karl Raimund, 8, 91 Portheim, Leopold, 284 Prankl, Franz, 539 Preis, Ferdinand, 160 Prevost, Marie, 57 Prießnitz, Vincenz, 374 Proft, Gabriele, 42–43, 233, 725 Prokofiev, Sergei, 466 Protazanov, Yakov Alexandrovich, 537 Prutscher, Otto, 205, 675 Przibram, Hans Leo, 284 Pückler-Muskau, Hermann, 634 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 91, 92 Rabinbach, Anson, 2, 7, 115, 650 Radek, Karl, 651 Radermacher, Lotte, 80–83 Rauchberg, Helene, 675 Ravitch, Melech (aka Bergner, Zechariah Choneh), 193, 197–99 Reger, Max, 476



771

Reich, Emil (1864–1940), 80, 329 Reich, Emil (1884–1944), 351 Reich, Wilhelm, 5, 8, 93, 134, 137–39, 143, 254, 261, 268–69, 664, 734 Reichenbach, Hans, 98 Reik, Theodor, 224 Reinhardt, Max, 6, 504, 508, 520–21, 539, 726, 729 Reith, John, 564 Remarque, Erich Maria, 653–55, 735 Renner, Karl, 16, 22–23, 113, 114, 117–19, 156, 186, 328, 380–82, 629–31, 694, 721, 728 Reumann, Jakob, 186, 216–18, 627, 725, 728 Reutterer, Ludwig, 453 Reventlow, Else, 59 Richter, Paul, 694 Riehl, Walter, 615, 621, 622, 644, 645, 649, 650, 651–53, 707, 732 Rikli, Arnold, 374 Roch. See Stricker, Robert Rochowanski, Leopold W., 451–53 Roh, Franz, 541 Rohan, Karl Anton, 227 Rokitansky, Carl Freiherr von, 374 Room, Abram, 412 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 34 Rosenberg, Alfred, 628, 658 Rosenfeld, Fritz, 527, 531–34, 560–61 Rosenthal, Maximilian. See Ermers, Max Rossak, Frank Ward, 571, 681 Roth, Joseph, 10, 51, 154, 192, 547, 618–21, 726, 736 Rothschild, Family, 611 Rothstock, Otto, 489 Roubiczek(-Peller), Lili (aka Lilli), 317–19 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 228, 369, 724 Roux, Wilhelm, 284 Rübelt, Lothar, 542–44 Rubiner, Ludwig, 452 Rühle-Gerstel, Alice, 5, 134, 143–44 Russell, Bertrand, 98 Rutherford, Ernest, 91 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 116 Salmhofer, Franz, 675 Salomon, Alice, 571–73, 583 Salten, Felix, 193, 203–5, 253, 570, 576–77, 583, 621–22, 729 Schacherl, Franz, 407–9, 421 Schäfer, Wilhelm, 657 Schapiro, Meyer, 460 Schatz, Otto Rudolf, 458–60

772

 Index of Persons

Schaub, Edward L., 601–2 Schenk-Danzinger, Lotte, 85 Scherer, Rudolf, 507–9 Scheu, Gustav, 420, 571 Scheu-Riesz, Helene, 570, 571–73, 583 Schiele, Egon, 4, 445 Schiller, Friedrich, 148, 218, 228, 469, 509, 518 Schlesinger, Therese, 6, 29–31, 233, 235–37, 239, 244, 254, 259–60, 325, 417, 725 Schlick, Moritz, 91, 92, 97, 106, 461, 628 Schmid, Heinrich, 413, 414 Schmieger, Wilhelm (aka Willy), 362 Schmitz, Richard, 22, 23, 43, 217, 325, 719 Schneeberger, Pius, 694 Schneller, Karl, 675 Schnitzler, Arthur, 5, 10, 193, 202–3, 213, 488, 730, 734 Schober, Johann, 16, 126, 642, 713, 733 Schoenberg (aka Schönberg), Arnold, 5, 464, 465, 466, 469, 473, 474, 475–76, 477, 733 Schönerer, Georg (von), 164, 609, 649 Schorske, Carl E., 4 Schreber, Daniel Gottlob Moritz, 375, 396, 397 Schrödinger, Erwin, 91 Schroth, Johann, 374 Schubert, Franz, 339, 598 Schulhof, Emanuel, 539 Schuschnigg, Kurt, 34 Schuster, Franz, 407–9, 411, 421, 439–40 Schütte-Lihotzky, Margarete (aka Lihotzky, Grete), 389, 406, 411, 426, 434–36, 437, 727 Schwarz, Heinrich, 528, 540 Schwarzwald, Eugenie, 6, 254, 314, 559, 564–65, 583 Sedlmayr, Hans, 460, 461, 462 Seidel, Amalie, 233, 725 Seidl, Eduard, 662 Seipel, Ignaz, 22, 35, 39, 158, 170, 213, 239, 489, 555, 621, 622, 627, 629, 630, 631– 33, 674, 677, 681, 683, 729 Seitz, Karl, 189, 402, 654, 694, 707, 719, 728, 738 Seume, Johann Gottfried, 373 Sever, Albert, 174, 175, 180, 621, 725 Seyß-Inquart, Arthur, 628 Siebert, Karl, 132 Siegel, Franz, 395–96, 598 Silburg, Moshe, 193, 196–97 Simmel, Georg, 140 Sinclair, Upton, 483 Sindelar, Matthias, 362 Singer, Franz, 317

Sitte, Camillo, 406 Skoda, Joseph, 374 Šnejderov, Vladimir, 534 Sobel, Karl, 519 Solano, Solita, 594–96 Sombart, Werner, 638 Soyfer, Jura, 483, 503, 518–19 Spann, Othmar, 99, 628, 636–40, 717 Speiser, Paul, 186 Spengler, Oswald, 99, 569, 570, 583 Sperber, Manès, 134, 141, 143 Spiegel, Sam, 737 Spinoza, Baruch de, 198, 199 Srbik, Heinrich, 628, 642–44 Stadler, Friedrich, 93, 690, 691 Starhemberg, Ernst Rüdiger (von), 46, 654, 682, 707, 708 Staub, Hugo, 31 Steidle, Richard, 717 Stein, Erwin, 475 Stein, Franko, 662 Stein, Viktor, 328 Stern, Josef Luitpold (aka Josef Luitpold), 313, 328, 458–60, 465, 483, 484, 492–93, 503, 505, 678 Sternberg, Josef von, 532 Steuermann, Eduard, 475 Stevens, Gwendolyn, 135 Still, Karl, 28 Stöcker, Adolf, 658 Strafella, Franz Georg, 681, 682, 683, 694 Strauß (Strauss), Johann, 470, 598, 727 Strauss, Richard, 476, 504 Streeruwitz, Ernst, 570 Stresemann, Gustav, 354 Stricker, Robert, 180, 181, 360–61, 613, 616, 617 Strigl, Richard, 93 Strizhevsky, Vladimir, 533 Strnad, Oskar, 1, 193, 205, 207, 392, 409, 411, 426, 434, 508, 675, 733 Strzygowski, Josef, 447 Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, 477 Suchomel, Hugo, 19 Sun, Yat-sen, 535 Swoboda von Weitenfeld, Marie, 539 Tacitus, 374 Täuber, Harry, 453 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles-Maurice de, 712 Tandler, Julius, 10, 44, 191, 219, 238–39, 253, 257, 261, 272, 273, 274, 280, 288– 91, 293, 300–302, 306, 603, 726

Index of Persons

Tarski, Alfred, 91 Taschwer, Klaus, 274, 628 Taussky-Todd, Olga, 91 Taylor, Frederick W., 339, 356, 426, 485, 570, 581 Taylor, Sam, 533 Tesarek, Anton, 320, 343 Tessenow, Heinrich, 434, 439, 451 Thaller, Leopold, 693–95 Theiss, Siegfried, 570, 736 Thiess, Frank, 353 Tietze, Hans, 193, 445, 446, 453–56, 457, 458 Tobler, Hermann, 592–93 Toller, Ernst, 60, 411–13, 425 Tolstoy, Leo (aka Count Lev Nikolayevich), 228, 495, 574, 637 Tonningen, Rost van, 39 Toptani, Essad Pasha, 179 Träger, Richard, 528 Trebitsch, Oskar, 25–27, 29 Trescher, Franz, 737 Trotsky, Leon, 95, 126–28, 178, 581, 651 Trubetskoy, Prince, 178 Tusch, Marie, 233, 725 Ucicky, Gustav, 733 Uitz, Béla, 448 Ullmann, Marianne (aka Ullmann, My), 444 Unger, Adolf, 737 Urbanitzky, Grete von, 254, 264–65 Urussow, Prince, 204 Uthmann, Gustav Adolf, 694 Válery, Paul, 227 Vaugoin, Carl, 22, 682 Verlaine, Paul, 476 Veuillot, Louis, 634 Vogelsang, Karl von, 629, 630 Wagner, Erika, 476 Wagner, Gertrude, 70 Wagner, Otto, 4, 5, 207, 390, 402, 406, 421, 431, 445, 507 Wagner, Otto Erich, 444 Wagner, Richard, 467, 540, 580, 611, 612 Wald, Lillian, 572 Waldinger, Ernst, 483 Waldmüller, Ferdinand Georg, 303, 455 Walsh, Raoul, 532 Wasserman, Janek, 7, 214, 610, 611, 627, 628 Weber, Anton, 44, 175, 589, 603, 694 Weber, Carl Maria von, 161, 467



773

Weber, Max, 69 Webern, Anton, 1, 5, 464, 465, 466, 473–75, 675, 727, 732, 733 Weidinger, Anton, 539 Weigel, Helene, 564 Weill, Kurt, 477 Weinheber, Josef, 494 Weininger, Otto, 315, 509, 510 Weiskirchner, Richard, 158, 299, 627 Wellesz, Egon, 466, 675 Werfel, Franz, 1, 227–29, 453, 466, 506, 675, 738 Werner, Alfred, 737 Weyr, Siegfried, 526, 528, 529–30 Whitehead, Alfred North, 98 Wiegele, Franz, 455 Wiese, Leopold von, 638 Wiesenthal, Grete, 734 Wildgans, Anton, 494 Wilhelm II, 657 Wilson, Woodrow, 153, 155 Winckelmann, Emilie, 437 Winkler, Franz, 654 Winter, Ernst Karl, 618 Winter, Max, 10, 219–22, 277 Winter, Robert, 371–72 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 91, 92, 101, 108, 109, 225–26, 727 Witzmann, Karl, 429, 430, 675 Wlach, Oskar, 411, 417 Wolf, Hugo, 467 Wolter, Charlotte, 539 Woolworth, Henry, 393, 394 Wu, Peifu, 535 York-Steiner, Heinrich, 192, 193 Zapf, Josef, 694 Zeisel, Hans, 49, 70, 85, 93, 562, 737 Zemlinsky, Alexander, 475 Zerner, Liesl, 246–48 Zieler, Karl Wilhelm Felix, 256 Zilsel, Edgar, 90, 91, 92, 102–5 Zimbler, Liane (nee Fischer, Juliana), 427, 437, 438 Zimmermann, Alfred, 394 Zita of Bourbon-Parma, 158, 159, 164 Zucker, Erwin, 588–89 Zülow, Franz, 675 Zur Mühlen, Hermynia, 486–87 Zweig, Stefan, 102, 154, 242–44, 483, 484, 495–96, 569, 570, 571, 573–76, 577, 578, 730, 733