by Philipp Blom
Red Vienna
IN THE PERILOUS AFTERMATH OF THE WAR, hope and fear were closely linked. For socialists and social democrats, the collapse of the empire was an opportunity to start anew and to realize the dreams of social justice that animated their movement. When Vienna itself became a socialist-led federal state in 1922, the city government embarked on a hugely ambitious program of social reform in education, health care, and public housing. In spite of the economic difficulties, a whole series of large housing projects were constructed. These Gemeindebauten (municipal buildings), however, were designed to provide far more than clean, dry apartments with running water and central heating at a price affordable to workers: they were to be elements of a social utopia.
A utopia in stone: Built between 1927 and 1930, the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna was a vast housing project representing the hope for a better life for all.
The largest of the new projects, the Karl-Marx-Hof, constructed between 1927 and 1930, is still a monument to these ambitions, and still the largest contiguous housing complex in the world, consisting of some fourteen hundred apartments sheltering five thousand inhabitants. But it was not the sheer numbers that made this vast enterprise so astonishing. The huge structure of the Karl-Marx-Hof, with its imposing, sculptural façade more than half a mile long, also contained kindergartens and laundries, shops and medical offices, community rooms, baths, and a lending library. Other housing complexes also had their own theaters. Everything here was a statement of faith in the dignity of workers, the little people who formed the constituency of the city government. The housing complexes were generous and light: the Karl-Marx-Hof covered a vast area, but only one-fifth of the ground was built up, the rest being left for spacious courtyards, playing fields, and playgrounds, all adorned by sculptures, frescoes, and mosaics.
During the interwar period the Vienna city government provided new apartments for more than 220,000 people on modest incomes. Such public largesse, financed by a special housing tax, created a great loyalty among the left-leaning electorate; it was part of a flourishing socialist public culture with its own newspapers, sports clubs, workers’ education associations, theaters, savings banks, cooperative stores, night schools, soup kitchens, children’s organizations, garden collectives, and publishing houses.
On May 1 of every year, the socialist movement demonstrated its power with a huge procession attended by hundreds of thousands of workers, parading with banners, brass bands, and decorated floats, marching along the Ringstrasse past the historicist buildings and the imperial palace built only a few years earlier to celebrate a very different past.
Conservatives watched these parades with horror and regarded the city’s socialist culture in general with a suspicion bordering on hatred. While the city government was firmly in social democratic hands, the federal government, elected by the entire, largely rural country, was controlled by the Christian democrats under the leadership of “the pitiless prelate,” Ignaz Seipel, a Catholic priest who had taught theology before becoming first imperial minister of social affairs and then, after the war, chancellor of Austria from 1922 to 1924 and again from 1926 to 1929.
Seipel’s Austria looked very different from the collectivist utopia propagated in Vienna’s public housing projects. His vision for the country was faith-based and authoritarian. Despite his birth in Vienna, where his father had been a coachman, the Christian democratic chancellor stood firmly on the side of the conservative countryside—the winning side, as it seemed to him. Vienna, which before 1914 had been not only the fifth-largest city in the world but also one of the world’s main cultural centers, was now atrophying. Until 1918, the city at the heart of a multinational and notably multicultural empire had been home to 2.1 million people, but after the war almost four hundred thousand of them left the capital of the now much smaller, almost exclusively German-speaking country. “Vienna by the Danube has become Vienna by the Alps,” sighed one of its most famous journalists, Anton Kuh.1
To conservative Austrian nationalists the Alpine connection could not be strong enough. In their search for a national identity, they promoted the Trachten, the traditional dress of the Upper Austrian, Styrian, and Tyrolian peasants, which had already enjoyed considerable popularity among townspeople before the war, when it had been adopted as a trendy form of vacation clothing for the lawyers, businessmen, journalists, and municipal administrators who could afford to take their families away from the city during the summer for a few weeks of carefree rambling and vacationing. Now, however, yesterday’s slightly affected holiday gesture of dressing up in dirndls with tight bodices and flowery aprons or lederhosen and green felt jackets with deer-horn buttons—even Sigmund Freud was photographed wearing them—was becoming an ideological statement. With politics, the Trachten came into the cities. Official associations and style guides made certain that the clothing was authentic enough to pass muster.
The metropolitan intellectuals were horrified by what they saw as the progressive provincializing of an erstwhile European cultural hub, particularly as nationalists of all stripes propagated their ideas with increasingly strident anti-Semitic overtones. Vienna was home to just under two hundred thousand Jews, most of whom had moved there from other parts of the empire during the second half of the nineteenth century. They formed some 10 percent of the city’s population, but with their traditional respect for education and a great new eagerness to assimilate, they were quickly overrepresented in secondary schools, in universities, and in journalism, law, medicine, and other professions. Having been challenged to discard the kaftans and long beards of their forebears, to stop speaking Yiddish, and to become good Habsburg citizens and, later, Austrian patriots, most had succeeded beyond all expectations.
Even before the war, the assimilatory success of Vienna’s Jews had turned against them, as the resentful losers of modernity looked for an object on which to vent their anger. Anti-Semitism, of course, had a long tradition in central Europe, but its nature had been changing with an increasingly industrial, complex, and capitalist social reality. Jews were among the winners of this transformation, which had taken them out of the humiliation of the ghetto and into the heart of bourgeois society. Like the demonic machine Maria in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, they were now caricatured as the epitome of a new urban, rootless, soulless, sexualized, neurotic, money-grabbing present.
Even toward the end of the nineteenth century, as the social transformations resulting from industrialization had begun to bite, writers in Germany, France, the Habsburg Empire, Russia, and elsewhere in Europe had fulminated against Jews, singling them out not on religious grounds, as once would have been the case, but on “scientific” and “racial” grounds, and particularly as the embodiment of international capitalism, which appeared to be destroying the certainties of the old ways. Now, after the war, anti-Semitism was being plied with renewed force. In prewar Vienna, it had been carried into the very heart of politics by the highly successful mayor Karl Lueger, who had manipulated the prejudices of his electorate with virtuosic brio. As a society without orientation or identity began to look about for scapegoats, the Jews were singled out in a new wave of contempt.
City Without Jews?
IN THE CAPITAL OF THE NEW REPUBLIC, the perceived drift toward a provincial Vienna-by-the-Alps was creating feelings of claustrophobia for some. The city was still home to a flourishing Jewish community, ranging from the Orthodox denizens of the Leopoldstadt district, the “matzo island,” to liberal religious practitioners and totally assimilated families intolerant of anything reminding them of the religion and the historical humiliations of their ancestors. Many of these latter had changed their names along with their faith and would not allow even a word of Yiddish to be spoken in their presence. This very determined assimilation was countered by the many equally determined Zionist associations—from youth clubs and sports associations such as the iconic football team of the Vienna Hakoah Football Club to the quasi-Masonic lodges of B’nai B’rith—whose activiti
es testified to the feeling of many Jews that they had no future in an increasingly hostile Europe.
True, Vienna was still home to great Jewish intellectuals—Sigmund Freud; the writer and dramatist Arthur Schnitzler, and other authors such as Josef Roth, Franz Werfel, and Stefan Zweig; Karl Kraus and a host of distinguished journalists; social democratic or socialist politicians such as Otto Bauer and Julius Tandler; actors and stage satirists commenting on the country’s varying fates and political climates; and scientists and civic leaders—a vibrant society gathering and debating in cafés and private salons, in theaters, and on the pages of the great newspapers. But as the debate about Austrian identity became more restrictive and more removed from the Habsburg embrace of variety, the visions for the future became less optimistic. In 1922, the novelist Hugo Bettauer published his Stadt ohne Juden (City Without Jews), imagining a future in which ethnic Austrians would expel all Jews and rapidly decline into a yokelish Catholic provincialism so shocking that in the end the yokels would be obliged to call back the people they had banished.
Two novelists who witnessed the events of July 15 and who would return to the image of the burning Palace of Justice in their work exemplify the tensions within Vienna’s population and reveal the importance the event had in the imagination of people of very different backgrounds and outlooks. Elias Canetti is the first of them. Born in 1905 in Ruse in today’s Bulgaria, then part of the Habsburg Empire, he belonged to a Ladino-speaking Jewish family that had been part of the forced exodus from Spain in 1492, and which had relatively recently moved from the city of Edirne in the Ottoman Empire. Having been taken at the age of six from the richly oriental atmosphere of Ruse to Manchester, where his father was pursuing a business opportunity, Canetti was soon moved again, first to Lausanne and Vienna, then to Zürich and Frankfurt, then back to Vienna, where at the time of the 1927 riots he was a student in chemistry.
Canetti was a quintessential cosmopolitan, comfortable in five languages (Ladino, Romanian, German, English, and French) and in different environments, passionate about literature, and eternally unsure of himself. The events he witnessed that July left a deep impression on him, giving rise to his principal philosophical work, Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power), the initial spark of which he explicitly traced back to that summer’s day when he himself was caught up in the surge of bodies, voices, and sheer atavistic instinct, feeling himself become part of the ecstatic, collective, and ever-hungry organism that is a crowd.
The other witness who devoted an entire novel to the events of July 15 was a very different man, Heimito von Doderer. Born into a family of the minor nobility, Heimito’s curious first name was inspired by his mother’s infatuation with Spain and, very possibly, with a Spanish gentleman by the name of Jaime. The boy spent his entire childhood and youth in Vienna, where he received a conservative, class-conscious education. After a listless stab at studying law, in 1915 he enlisted in a cavalry regiment and was sent to the front, first to Galicia and then to Bukovina, where he became a Russian prisoner of war.
During his time in a Siberian prison camp, Doderer had decided to become a writer, and after his return to Vienna in 1918 he worked hard, but largely without success, to realize his ambition. His first novels found hardly any readers, and the young author struggled to make a living through journalism and various literary odd jobs. Times had changed, and the world he had been educated for had vanished. In many of his narrative works, Doderer ruefully reflected on this transformation and on his sense of living outside of his own time. He was as much an exile from the epoch of his birth as Canetti was an exile from the place of his childhood. Neither of them now “belonged.”
Vienna, however, was now a city for people who did not belong. In fact, nobody felt at home in the new state that was post-Habsburg Austria. Doderer’s seismographic sensibility charted the many ways of being lost in this new world, along with nostalgia for a former world that memory and longing made appear idyllic. To him, July 15 was a moment of original sin, when violence seized the heart of what had once been a tolerant and benevolent empire.
Indeed, for Doderer the entire year 1927 was both eventful and traumatic. Without any real enthusiasm, he married his Jewish girlfriend of many years; it was a torturous and tortured relationship between a gifted pianist from a worldly and intellectual background and a struggling writer whose deeply wounding anti-Semitic tirades were frequently used as weapons against her. The marriage ended with their final separation in 1932, with Doderer joining the NSDAP, the Nazi party, then still illegal in Austria, the following year. After Austria’s annexation by the German Reich in 1938, he would sue for divorce, thus removing the last layer of relative safety shielding his wife from persecution.
Though personally unappealing, Doderer as a writer was a virtuoso of plot and characterization. His powerful, highly idiosyncratic language, with its use of dialect and frequent Viennese allusions, resists the efforts of even the ablest translators. In his monumental Die Dämonen (The Demons), he charted his city’s fall from grace as the “seam” connecting Gentile and Jewish Vienna began to split, a split symbolized by the burning of the Palace of Justice. As always, Doderer’s own attitude was profoundly contradictory, snobbish, and laced with self-loathing. He was a Nazi who despised Nazism, an anti-Semite who admired Jews, a racist who believed that the concept of race was fraudulent (“in Vienna, the concierges form an entire race apart,” he remarked), a man too weighed down by his own contradictions to regard as true the things he believed in. In other words, as many noted, he was an archetypal Viennese of his day.
Opposing Forces
THE TENSIONS BETWEEN the visions and forces of the left and right in Austria increased with each year. In 1920, the conservatives had founded the Heimwehr (Home Defense), an armed militia that functioned as the military wing of the Christian Democratic Party, which was tolerated and at times actively assisted by army officers and the police. Political leaders of the Heimwehr identified Marxism and all left-wing groups and ideas as their particular enemy. Their demonstrations of power eventually led the social democrats to create the Republikanischer Schutzbund (Republican Protection League), which was also armed.
Sporadic confrontations between members of the Heimwehr and the Schutzbund were part of life during the First Republic, creating a constant atmosphere of menace in Vienna and other parts of the country. When on January 30, 1927, the two rival organizations held meetings in the village of Schattendorf, in the eastern province of Burgenland, defiantly congregating in inns only a few hundred yards from each other, the threat of violence was heavy in the air. Leftist Schutzbund adherents were in the majority. They shouted menacing slogans: “Down with the [Heimwehr] veterans! Down with the Christian dogs! Down with the monarchist murderers!” There were isolated scuffles as some Schutzbund members crossed the threshold of the rival inn. Then the Schutzbund left, all of them, marching triumphantly down the street.
Two of the Heimwehr men, armed with rifles, were standing by the iron-grated window of their inn, watching the hated leftist crowd depart. Aiming at their enemies’ backs, they opened fire, emptying their magazines. A Croatian demonstrator, Matthias Csmarits, fell to the ground, mortally wounded. An eight-year-old boy was also killed. Five others were injured.
When the case against the two Schattendorf shooters, together with one accomplice, was finally heard in July 1927, Austrian workers expected justice for the callous murders of two of their own. But the members of the jury—a butcher’s apprentice, a carpenter, a carpenter’s apprentice, a civil servant, a landlord, a secretary, a printer’s apprentice, a hairdresser, a pensioner, a plumber’s apprentice, a farmer, and a housewife—found that they could not reach a verdict on account of the contradictory witness statements. When the judgment was read on July 14, the defendants were acquitted of all charges and fully rehabilitated as “honorable men.” The news was in the papers the next morning.
Elias Canetti described his own reaction when reading of the acquittal of
the men who had shot unarmed workers in the back. On the morning of July 15, he was sitting in a café in a comfortable suburb, reading the papers. Incensed by the news he learned from the front page, he took his bicycle and made his way to the city center, where thousands of workers were already gathering in protest. It was not an organized gathering. The Socialist Party leadership had tried not to inflame an already tense situation even further and refrained from scheduling protest marches and strikes, with the result that the workers coming together in spontaneous anger had no leadership and no official route for any demonstration. Apparently without direction, they converged on the Palace of Justice, where the judgment had been handed down. The events unfolding there were to haunt the republic for years; they would later be seen as a bloody prelude to the country’s full-blown civil war seven years later.
The Hatred of Patriots
LIKE AUSTRIA, POSTWAR FRANCE SUFFERED a lacerating and traumatic postwar legacy that the intervening decade had done little to heal. The country’s losses had been horrifying, with 1.7 million dead, almost 4.3 percent of the total population—a higher death toll than any other western European nation. A further 4.2 million soldiers had been wounded or maimed, and an untold number of the returning soldiers had been psychologically scarred by their experiences. In addition to the human tragedy, the structural damage caused by trench warfare and intense bombardments had left deep marks on the landscape of northern France, an area that not only had once been rich in historical sites but had been one of the country’s most fertile areas, crucial to prewar agricultural production.
Trench warfare and millions of grenades and bombs had made this garden of France into a région dévastée of some six thousand square miles, a huge wasteland bare of all familiar landmarks, a poisonous moonscape of craters, trenches, tree trunks, and ruins, in which even locals could find their way only by compass through over a thousand razed villages. More than five hundred thousand houses had been destroyed, and the cities of Arras, Cambrai, Laon, Lille, Saint-Quentin, Soissons, Verdun, and Reims had been severely damaged. Even the great and historic cathedral of Reims, the sacred coronation place of French kings, had been gutted by shelling.