interwar vienna: culture between tradition and modernity

Interwar Vienna

Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

Interwar Vienna Culture between Tradition and Modernity

Edited by Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman

Rochester, New York

Copyright © 2009 by the Editors and Contributors

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 2009 by Camden House

Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA

www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited

PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-420-2 ISBN-10: 1-57113-420-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Interwar Vienna: culture between tradition and modernity / edited by Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman.

p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-420-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-57113-420-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Vienna (Austria) — Civilization — 20th century. 2. Vienna (Austria) — Intellectual life — 20th century. 3. Vienna (Austria) — History — 1918– 4. Austrian literature — 20th century — History and criticism. I. Holmes, Deborah, 1973– II. Silverman, Lisa, 1969– III. Title. IV. Series.

DB851.I425 2009 943.6'13051—dc22 2009018412

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Beyond the Coffeehouse. Vienna as a Cultural Center between the World Wars 1 Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman

Part I: Cultural and Political Parameters

1: Cultural Parameters between the Wars: A Reassessment of the Vienna Circles 21 Edward Timms

2: “weiße Strümpfe oder neue Kutten”: Cultural Decline in Vienna in the 1930s 32 John Warren

Part II: Jewishness, Race, and Politics

3: “Wiener Kreise”: Jewishness, Politics, and Culture in Interwar Vienna 59 Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lisa Silverman

4: A City Regenerated: Eugenics, Race, and Welfare in Interwar Vienna 81 Paul Weindling

Part III: Cultural Forms

5: Free Dance in Interwar Vienna 117 Andrea Amort

6: Hollywood on the Danube? Vienna and Austrian Silent Film of the 1920s 143 Alys X. George

vi ♦ CONTENTS

7: Between Tradition and a Longing for the Modern: Theater in Interwar Vienna 161 Birgit Peter

8: The Hegemony of German Music: Schoenberg’s Vienna as the Musical Center of the German-Speaking World 175 Therese Muxeneder

Part IV: Literary Case Studies

9: Anticipating Freud’s Pleasure Principle? A Reading of Ernst Weiss’s War Story “Franta Zlin” (1919) 193 Andrew Barker

10: Facts and Fiction: Rudolf Brunngraber, Otto Neurath, and Viennese Neue Sachlichkeit 206 Jon Hughes

11: The Viennese Legacy of Casanova: The Late Erotic Writings of Arthur Schnitzler and Franz Blei 224 Birgit Lang

12: An Englishman Abroad: Literature, Politics, and Sex in John Lehmann’s Writings on Vienna in the 1930s 246 Robert Vilain

Notes on the Contributors 267

Index 271

Acknowledgments

EVERAL OF THE ESSAYS in this volume grew out of papers given at the conference “Vienna between the Wars — the Forgotten City?” organized

in 2005 by John Warren and Lisa Silverman at St Peter’s College, Oxford with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum in London. John Warren was a driving force behind this book in many ways; the editors are very grate-ful for his encouragement. Welcome assistance was also received from Werner Hanak, Christian Stifter, and Judith Beniston.

We would like to thank Camden House, in particular Jim Walker and Jane Best, for all their help and advice. Duncan Forbes at the Scottish National Gallery was instrumental in securing us the cover photograph; funds for the publication were supplied by the Center for 21st Century Studies at the Uni-versity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and an anonymous donor.

S

Introduction: Beyond the Coffeehouse. Vienna as a Cultural Center between the World Wars

Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman

Urban Myths NYONE WHO WALKS ALONG Vienna’s Ringstrasse today cannot help but admire the grandiose architecture of the neo-Gothic Rathaus, the neo-

classical Parliament, and the neo-Renaissance Opera House and immediately understand the city’s reputation as a locus of former imperial glory. How-ever, both the historicist buildings of the Ringstrasse and the memories of the empire that they were built to evoke belie another aspect of the city’s history better represented by the four hundred equally imposing yet less cen-trally located blocks of council housing — the Wiener Gemeindebauten — found in districts beyond the Ring. The Karl-Marx-Hof and similar resi-dential projects initiated by the city’s Social Democrat administration during the years 1919–34 aimed to provide new, comprehensive living environ-ments for the city’s working class. Today they continue to stand as reminders of the fact that, during the years between the collapse of the Austro-Hun-garian Empire and Hitler’s Anschluss, Vienna was the site of lasting cultural changes in areas such as housing, education, and the arts — all designed to rethink, reshape, and revitalize the urban population and to create a city offering the promise of a better life for as many of its inhabitants as possible.

Yet many of those who concern themselves with Vienna continue to overlook these and other changes during the interwar period. Our view of the city is colored by a barrage of clichés that often conceal its complex history as an urban center: its legendary charm and Gemütlichkeit, the cof-feehouses and cakes, the notorious Schmäh (ironic wit) and Schlamperei (laissez-faire) of its population, not to mention their fascination with the aesthetics of death (as in the Viennese phrase “a schene Leich,” an attractive corpse). Alongside and not entirely unrelated to these popular city myths, another influential mythology has grown up among cultural historians of the Ringstrasse period and Vienna’s glamorous fin de siècle. This is almost invari-ably presented as a golden age of cosmopolitanism, when subcultures be-

A

2 ♦ DEBORAH HOLMES AND LISA SILVERMAN

came mainstream and the effects of Viennese innovations reverberated around the world. Most often evoked by the names and achievements of a series of great men (Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Klimt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler), this view of Vienna is not only an idealized version of the fin de siècle itself but has become so over-determined that it is fixed in our imaginations as the example par excellence of modern cultural intersections in Austria’s capital, eclipsing all others.1

As a testament to the enduring, widespread appeal of this image of the city, the architectural historian Peter Hall opened his seminal 1998 study of the world’s most noteworthy urban buildings with a quotation from Stefan Zweig’s nostalgic reflection on the Vienna of his fin-de-siècle childhood:

The old palaces of the court and the nobility spoke history in stone. Here Beethoven had played at the Lichnowskys’, at the Estherhazys’ Haydn had been a guest, there in the old University Haydn’s Creation had resounded for the first time, the Hofburg had seen generations of emperors, and Schönbrunn had seen Napoleon. In the Stefansdom the united lords of Christianity had knelt in prayers of thanksgiving for the salvation of Europe from the Turks; countless great lights of science had been within the walls of the University. In the midst of all this, the new architecture reared itself proudly and grandly with glittering ave-nues and sparkling shops.2

Notably both Zweig and Hall chose to stress the role of tradition in the im-pression given by fin-de-siècle Vienna, which is made to epitomize the way in which a city’s past can feed into its innovative present. More notable still, Hall insisted that Zweig’s Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday, 1943), written in exile in Brazil, is the most moving and perceptive de-scription of a “golden urban age” that resulted when the city’s population allowed the participation of Jews in its modern cultural achievements: “For the Viennese golden age in its ultimate florescence was peculiarly a creation of that Jewish society: a society of outsiders who, for all too brief a time, had become insiders.”3 That a contemporary history of world architecture opens with a reference to Jewish creativity in fin-de-siècle Vienna points to the unique resonance of this city myth. Its power is such that it either precludes interest in later, seemingly less glorious and more problematic periods or else they are somehow subsumed into the fin-de-siècle myth, according to which, from the 1880s right up to the Anschluss in 1938, Vienna is portrayed as a hotbed of avant-garde culture where everybody mixed regardless of back-ground, resulting in the creation of world-class music, art, science, and lite-rature. How else could Ronald Lauder — creator of the prestigious Neue Galerie Museum in New York City and the purchaser of Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer for a record sum of $135 million in 2006 on its behalf4 — describe Vienna as a “fabulous place” before the Nazis came to power and ruined everything?5

INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE COFFEEHOUSE ♦ 3

In many respects it is no surprise that research on the fin de siècle tends to eclipse the interwar period. Vienna between the wars has been an un-popular object of study for the same reasons that fin-de-siècle Vienna is popular: the fin de siècle, transfigured by nostalgia, represents Austria’s swan song under the monarchy, a prosperous, seemingly peaceful age char-acterized by a globally acclaimed boom in the arts, a time of cultural success and productivity.6 During the First Republic, by contrast, Vienna was rocked by financial crises; unemployment doubled between 1929 and 1933, and the suicide rate increased.7 Modernism became more and more problematic both politically and otherwise, and antisemitism took on a new and more threat-ening dynamic. The city maintained its picturesque exterior in many re-spects, but it was no longer possible to overlook the hardship and enmities beneath the surface. Nevertheless, interwar Vienna occupied such an un-forgettable place in the memories of those who lived there that author and eyewitness Gregor von Rezzori (1914–98) questioned whether anyone who had not experienced it would be able to fathom its unique and contradictory tensions:

Wer nicht gelebt hat im damaligen Paradoxon des Neben-, Mit- und Ineinanders von tiefer Skepsis und irrationalster Verheißung, von schwärzestem Pessimismus und stürmischem Willen zur Welter-neuerung, konservativstem Schönheitssinn und brutalem Ikonoklasmus, von Eleganz und Verlotterung, unbefangenstem Luxus und demütig hingenommener Armut — wer nicht die Spannung dieser Widersprü-che in sein Innenleben eingeatmet hat, der sollte imstande sein, es nachzuempfinden?8

[Anyone who has not lived through the paradoxes of that time, the coexistence, interaction and merging of deep skepticism and the most irrational hopes for the future, of the blackest pessimism and passionate commitment to world renewal, of the most conservative aesthetics and brutal iconoclasm, of elegance and impoverishment, of ostentatious luxury and humbly accepted destitution — how can anyone who has not absorbed the tension of these contradictions in their innermost being understand what they were like?]

For von Rezzori, who lived in Vienna from 1927 to 1938, understanding the city’s cultural climate requires sensitivity not only toward the violent social and political events of that time and place but also with respect to its peculiar and pervasive intellectual and aesthetic atmosphere.

It is undeniable that in the volatile years from 1918 to 1938 issues such as politics and labor often overshadowed the concerns of art, literature, and culture that had occupied such a dominant position in the period imme-diately preceding the First World War. However, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ensuing turmoil in no way resulted in an abandonment of art and culture, as has sometimes been assumed. Rather, it


led to new forms of expression and reflection in literature, theater, music, dance, scholarship, and many other areas. In other words, much that was culturally significant occurred in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. A closer examination of the city at this time presents us with a unique combination of persisting urban and artistic myths alongside intense social change. Post-1918 Vienna may not have been able to compete with its own Habsburg past either strategically or in terms of social glamour, but it nevertheless remained a major — if ultimately doomed — center of cultural innovation.

The perception of these years in Vienna’s history has been dogged by another recurring Viennese stereotype, namely, that the city never changes — or at least is peculiarly resistant to modernization. In Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, for example, Hermann Broch portrayed Vienna as inherently moribund, incapable of facing the challenges of a new century. He made a very unfavorable comparison between the British Empire under Queen Vic-toria and Emperor Franz Josef’s Austria:

Doch während England kraft seiner politisch-ökonomisch und kulturel-len Resistenzkraft die viktorianische Tradition weiter aufrecht hielt und offenbar imstande ist, sie evolutionistisch in die neue Zeit überzu-führen, fehlte in Österreich und besonders in Wien eine solche Resis-tenz: die Abschiedsstimmung, von der die Habsburgermonarchie seit Dezennien umfangen war, hatte sie den Tod vergessen lassen, und all die Menetekel, mit denen der Geist des 20. Jahrhunderts sich ange-kündigt hatte, waren unbeachtet geblieben; nirgendwo war man nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg dem Neuen weniger gewachsen als in Wien.9

[But whereas England, thanks to the political, economic, and cultural powers of resistance it had built up, was able to maintain the Victorian tradition and is now obviously capable of carrying it forward into a new period/era and evolving it further, this strength was lacking in Austria and particularly in Vienna. The valedictory mood that had enveloped the Habsburg monarchy for decades made it oblivious to death, and to all the writing on the wall that had proclaimed the spirit of the twen-tieth century; following the First World War there was nowhere less prepared for the new than Vienna.]

Broch’s insistence on Vienna’s inflexibility led him to reject as inherently “un-Viennese” the signs of artistic and cultural innovation that already were undeniably present in the city, such as the modernist buildings of Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos: “In einer schier mystischen Weise war diese Stadt [. . .] nicht mehr erneuerbar; was in ihr an Neuem errichtet wurde, gehörte nicht mehr zu ihr” (The way in which the city resisted renewal was positively mystical; anything new that was erected didn’t belong there anymore).10 Broch’s presentation of the city was, of course, tailored to his idiosyncratic analysis of Hofmannsthal and pessimistic view of the culture that had failed to protect him and his contemporaries from National Socialism. However,


an unwillingness to look for or even recognize cultural modernity in Vienna between the wars still persists up to the present day. This is particularly striking when, as is so often the case, Vienna is compared to Berlin, German-speaking culture’s other major capital. Vienna, so the stereotype goes, is content to “be,” to maintain and strengthen its traditional characteristics, whereas dynamic Berlin is in a constant state of “becoming.”11

In order to prove itself worthy of study, then, interwar Vienna not only has to face down the notion that anything of cultural significance occurred in the years preceding the First World War, but also that during the interwar years everything of cultural significance happened in Berlin. According to historian Marcus Gräser, the contrast of “old” and “new” became an in-dispensable mechanism in debating urban identity from the mid nineteenth century onward, soon followed by comparisons between individual cities along the same axis of past versus present. He presents these comparisons as a constitutive element of modern urban discourse.12 There can be no doubt, however, that their polarizing nature has cemented the stereotype of Vienna as a backwater, overshadowed after the catastrophe of the First World War by culturally innovative Berlin. There are, of course, many factors that seem to substantiate this view. Berlin in the 1920s was experiencing its heyday, with global cultural implications — as had Vienna twenty years earlier — and there was a huge creative exodus from the Austrian to the German capital.13 Vienna was reeling from the collapse of the monarchy, which marked the end of centuries of continuous court tradition. The loss of many Habsburg crown lands — Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Galicia, the Bukovina and so on — cut the city off from the creative and economic potential of its historical hinterland. Conversely, out of the ashes of imperial Vienna the Social Demo-cratic “Red Vienna” rose with amazing speed and efficiency from 1919 onward — a city of modern welfare and administrative reform, new housing projects, and exemplary sports, library, and adult education services.14 While it is true that in some respects Berlin did overshadow the Austrian capital, the fact that seminal periodicals such as Karl Kraus’s satirical periodical Die Fackel were published in Vienna between 1899 and 1936 proves that it continued to influence cultural life beyond the borders of the new Austrian republic. Kraus’s cultural critique and his lecture circuit remained centered on Vienna, although they both increasingly encompassed Berlin, Prague, and other European cities.15

The major exhibition Modernism, 1914–1939 held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London during the summer of 2006 contained additional proofs of Vienna’s contribution to the European modernist movement as a whole.16 Photographs of the Geroge-Washington-Hof and the Karl-Marx-Hof — with their communal laundry facilities, crèches, and kindergartens — demonstrated the positive achievements of Red Vienna, a model that was copied by local authorities all over Europe. From Austrians already working abroad there was Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s famous “Frankfurter Küche”


(Frankfurt kitchen), designed to offer maximum utility in a limited space, and a photograph of Richard Neutra’s Nesbitt House in Los Angeles. In the sec-tion “Technology and the Machine and Its Reflection in Art” scenes from Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis were shown, but it might equally have included Max Brandt’s opera Machinist Hopkins and Gertrud Bodenwieser’s dance “Dämon Maschine.” Excerpts from Berlin: Sinfonie einer Groβstadt were shown, a film based on an idea of the Austrian Carl Mayer, hailed in Ger-many as the foremost writer for the silent screen. Modernism in the theater was represented by Friedrich Kiesler’s “Raumbühne” (space stage), a key con-struct of the Vienna Music and Theater Festival of 1924, as well as by a pho-tograph from the Ausstellung internationaler Theatertechnik (Exhibition of Modern Theater Technology) that had also been part of the festival.17 The section “Health and Body Culture” could also have included many examples from Vienna in the 1920s and early 1930s, including swimming pools, the Prater stadium (built in 1931), and the mass gatherings devoted to physical exercise — all of which were captured for posterity by Vienna’s brilliant pho-tographers.18 Vienna in the 1920s was clearly not just the backward-looking, traumatized, conservative “Wasserkopf Wien” (city with water on the brain) of right-wing memory.

The present volume does not seek to prove that Vienna was either more or less innovative than Berlin — or, indeed, than any other European city during the interwar period. Vienna did not, of course, exist in isolation after the fall of the monarchy, and there are strong arguments for considering its cultural development within a Central European paradigm for the period in question.19 Nevertheless, in order to analyze and refute, to some extent, the various myths and stereotypes, the essays that follow concentrate on Vienna itself and consider its interwar development on its own merits.

Between the Wars: Problems of Periodization Hermann Broch’s pessimism toward Vienna in the twentieth century was also a result of his chosen periodization, which divided European culture accord-ing to a grand timeline. Seen as the tail end of a millennium of history, the interwar period was bound to appear insignificant and enervated.20 Although our chosen time span is minute by comparison, it is fraught with its own dif-ficulties and implications. By drawing attention to the years 1918 to 1938, we are following a tradition of dividing fields of inquiry into the past along major turning points that shaped the course of history in Central Europe and beyond. We do so with an awareness of the inherent limitations of such a traditional historiographical approach, which risks downplaying important continuities in the political, intellectual, and artistic culture that characterized European life both before and after the wars. Recently some innovative his-torians of Central Europe have begun to refocus their studies in favor of transcending traditional chronological boundaries. For example, in her re-


cent book Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marx-ism, 1918–1968,21 Marci Shore examines shifts in the political and artistic al-legiances of a generation of Polish intellectuals in Warsaw from the 1920s all the way up to 1968. In doing so she attempts to avoid viewing the Second World War as a period of “absolute discontinuity,” instead focusing on how the entire period combined ruptures in narrative histories with the matu-ration of intellectual and artistic ideas and trends. This is particularly relevant in her study of Central European refugees and emigrants, for whom shifts in Marxist ideology represented much more than patterns of political loyalty.

While we also view the effects of the world wars as crucial, yet not ab-solute, the specific political events that affected Vienna between the wars were not only closely linked to shifts in art, culture, and philosophy but formed much of the basis for their reshaping. Not only the end of the First World War and the onset of fascist ideology leading up to the Anschluss in 1938 but also Austria’s “failed revolution” in November 1918, the elections of 1919, the collapse of the Viennese stock market in 1924, the burning of the Palace of Justice in 1927, and the banning of the Social Democrats in 1934 are all vital for a proper understanding of why Vienna’s culture developed as it did in the 1920s and 1930s. As even this brief outline of events shows, the smal-lest of period divisions still contains within itself a plethora of other possible cutoff points that themselves can be misleading. For example, the Austro-fascist putsch of February 1934 may appear to represent a clear break in Vienna’s history, and it certainly precipitated a general cultural decline, as John Warren argues in the second essay of this volume. However, the putsch itself was merely the culmination of the ongoing conflict between the Sozial-demokratische Arbeiterpartei (Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria, or SDAPÖ), which reigned supreme in Vienna, and the conservative Christ-lich-Soziale Partei (Christian Social Party), which remained dominant in the provinces. The final crisis is prefigured in a strikingly visual manner in the pages of the Social Democrats’ official press organ, the Arbeiter-Zeitung, which for most of the interwar period contrived not only to be a party pub-lication but also Vienna’s most important intellectual daily, alongside the Neue Freie Presse.22 On 8 March 1933 the Arbeiter-Zeitung first reported on restric-tions of the press and right of assembly. On 19 March 1933 the newspaper’s entire front page was already empty, wiped cleaned by the censors. From 26 March 1933 onward the Arbeiter-Zeitung was placed under Vorzensur (pre-emptive censorship) and invariably appeared with large expanses of blank space. Thus, long before the events of February 1934 the Christian Social re-gime had already made serious inroads on the basic freedoms of Red Vienna.

Vienna between the wars offers a test case of how the intellectual and cultural life of a city responded to threatened and actual political destabili-zation. Although neither of the world wars represented events of absolute discontinuity in terms of culture, politics, or art, their effects lent a special character to the intervening two decades, between a time of perceived social


stability and burgeoning democracy, on the one hand, and growing political violence and imminent dictatorship, on the other. As the essays in this vol-ume reveal, an intense consciousness of being “in between,” of representing a provisional state of affairs, informed many of the creative and social products of the interwar period. Initially this sense of being in a state of transition could be positive, as it was for the Social Democrats, who believed they were moving one step closer to an ideal socialist society, or indeed for German nationalists, who felt Austria should now work toward becoming or joining a solely German nation. In some cases the uncertainty of the times triggered nostalgia for the predictability of the old Empire.23 It often also took the form of growing apprehension regarding the future of European society and politics. None of these possible responses remained mutually exclusive; it was perfectly possible to find optimism, nostalgia, and appre-hension in any single reaction from practically any political viewpoint.24 The entire First Austrian Republic itself was seen by representatives of various political camps as a rootless provisorium, artificially divorced from its true cultural context by the Entente’s refusal to permit Anschluss with Germany in 1919.25 Vienna was suddenly out of all proportion as a capital, a city of al-most two million inhabitants oddly placed at the far eastern edge of a new alpine republic whose total population numbered six million. The Viennese had become strangers in a strange land. Their new instability is indicated by the mixed metaphors they used to describe the feeling of, on the one hand, being restricted, tied down to a reduced geographical hinterland, and, on the other, of floundering, of being cut loose from the polyglot context that had shaped them. Although the Social Democrats stood to gain most from the new developments in several important respects, reactions in the Ar-beiter-Zeitung nevertheless encapsulate this general anxiety quite clearly, as in the following anonymous commentary published on 25 October 1918 and entitled “Inland und Ausland,” in which the psychological and physical problems of the time are inextricably linked:

Die Grenzpflöcke der Staaten knicken im Sturme des Weltkrieges und schwimmen hin und her in seiner Flut. Das Stück Polen scheint von Österreich schon weggeschwemmt zu sein, denn niemand bei uns wird mehr zweifeln, daß Krakau bereits Ausland ist; Und vorgestern ist’s Agram gewesen und auch Preßburg ist wirkliches Ausland. [. . .] Kra-kauer Würste [. . .] und Prager Schinken sind jetzt Auslandsware ge-worden und uns noch unzugänglicher als Südtiroler Aepfel und Weine, die auch schon ins Ausland wandern. Ueberhaupt schwimmt immer mehr Ware ins Ausland, denn ganz abgesehen vom Schleichhandel rücken uns ja die Auslandsgrenzen immer näher. Viele unserer lieben Wiener, die gute Inländer waren ihr Leben lang, sind über Nacht Aus-länder geworden und haben unsere Staatsbürgerschaft verloren; wohin man sieht, gibt es lauter “fremde” Gesichter. Hohe Staatsbeamte und selbst Minister sind nun überwiegend Auslandsmenschen geworden, ja


sogar in der Armee sind nun überwiegend Ausländer eingereiht. Es ist ein förmliches Wettrennen ins Ausland einzutreten, womit nicht etwa die hohen Persönlichkeiten gemeint sind und unterschiedliche Leute, die zum Beispiel in der Schweiz Zuflucht suchen in ihrer übereiligen Angst, sondern die Selbstbestimmer, die nun die Ausländer in Österreich ver-mehren. Das Ausländertum nimmt derzeit eine solche Ausdehnung an, daß man bald nicht weiß, ob man daheim Ausländer oder Inländer ist.26

[The storm of the world war has snapped state border posts and tosses them to and fro in its floods. The bit of Poland seems already to have been washed away from Austria, for none of us doubts anymore that Cracow is now part of another country; and yesterday it was Agram [Zagreb] and even Preßburg [Bratislava] has become truly foreign. [. . .] Cracow sausages [. . .] and Prague hams have now become foreign pro-duce and even less accessible to us than apples and wine from the South Tyrol [Alto Adige], which have also taken themselves off to foreign climes. More and more wares are being washed away to other countries, for, quite apart from the smuggling, the borders of other countries are moving closer and closer to us. Many of our dear Viennese, who had been worthy natives of this country their whole lives, have become fo-reigners overnight and have lost our citizenship; “foreign” faces wherever you look. The majority of high-up state officials and even ministers have become foreigners; indeed, even the ranks of the army are mostly full of foreigners. There is a positive race to get abroad, by which we don’t mean the high and mighty and various people who, for example, have sought refuge in Switzerland with unseemly haste and fear, but rather the self-determiners who increase the number of foreigners in Austria. At the moment, there is such an expansion of foreignness that soon we won’t know if we are foreigners at home or not].

In their study of Viennese feuilletonists working in Berlin, Christian Jäger and Erhard Schütz conclude that — at least from the outside — Vienna con-tinued to be perceived as a “Stadt der Fremden” (city of strangers or fo-reigners) throughout the 1920s, full of both rich tourists and poor mi-grants.27 The tourists came and went according to the vagaries of the cur-rency market, whereas the migrants remained a permanent feature. They quote from Emil Faktor’s article of 18 April 1924 entitled “Drei Tage Wien,” which was published in the Berliner Börsen Courier:

Die Physiognomie der Straße [. . .] ist von schleichenden und friedlos umherschweifenden Zufallsgestalten beherrscht, die der Osten oder Süden auf die Hinterlassenschaft glorreicher Vorkriegszeiten losließ. Der ewige Jude Ahasver oder Revenants aus dem Reich der Untoten?

[The physiognomy of the city [. . .] is dominated by random, creeping figures who restlessly wander around, come from the East or the South to prey on the legacy of glorious prewar times. The eternal Jew Ahasver or revenants from the realm of the undead?]


For better or worse, Vienna was the only place where elements of the former empire could continue to exist as such, a possible anchor for a multicultural Austrian identity cast adrift, with a marked identification of foreigners as Jews.

One final important factor of our chosen periodization remains to be mentioned, relevant both to its geographical limitation and to its potentially awkward brevity. The “in-between” nature of interwar Vienna is intensified by our retrospective knowledge of the National Socialist catastrophe: so many of the city’s protagonists were soon to flee or to be murdered. This knowledge should not be allowed to predetermine our analysis of their as-pirations, achievements, and failures with the sense of an inescapable nega-tive teleology. Nevertheless, the effects are undeniable at all levels, from the dispersal of archival material to the annihilation of eyewitnesses. This con-stitutes another major difference between research on fin-de-siècle Vienna and research on the interwar period, both in terms of the available sources and the psychological resonance of the periods in question. Although many of the gaps in Vienna’s cultural history left by National Socialism have grad-ually been filled in over the past two to three decades,28 almost every essay in this volume shows that many more still remain to be investigated, from Birgit Peter’s analysis of Vienna’s theater world during the interwar period to Paul Weindling’s consideration of eugenics and welfare. Scores of Vienna’s cultural figures died a double death during the interwar period, first in 1934 and then again in 1938–39; their legacies were destroyed and their pos-sessions scattered. Our aim is to revisit the vibrancy and diversity of the culture they worked in, without succumbing to a primarily memorializing approach.

By examining in detail a number of overlapping and contingent cultural products of the era, this volume brings to light important concerns in Aus-trian cultural history that have been underrepresented in existing studies. Research on the era has benefited greatly from the work of individual scho-lars, who have addressed the interwar period from a political (Anson Rabin-bach and Helmut Gruber), architectural (Eve Blau), and literary (Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler) perspective, to name only a few major areas of research.29 Rather than focusing on any single aspect, the contributors to this volume explore the interconnectedness of public events and personal lives — in-cluding the related political and social influences that shaped the cultural products of these years — in order to shed new light on the Viennese inter-war period as a distinct chronological and geographical entity.

City of Jews — City without Jews? Interwar Vienna saw a major shake-up of national, political, cultural, and religious identities. This activity formed a crucial backdrop not only for new cultural forms30 but also for new forms of older social problems, such as xenophobia, religious intolerance, and antisemitism. For Austria’s Jews, most


of whom lived in Vienna, the collapse of the Empire meant losing a secure system of identification. Before the First World War, historian Marsha Rozenblit claims, Jews were able to lead a tripartite existence as proud mem-bers of the German Kulturnation, loyal citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and also as Jews.31 After the war, however, they were confronted with a theoretically homogeneous nation-state that demanded a new kind of loyalty, a more exclusive identity as “Austrians,” to which Jews could not reconcile themselves so easily. While the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ensuing political and social changes profoundly affected all Austrians, Jews in Vienna were affected more than most as incidents of anti-semitism increased and Jews were treated as scapegoats for the loss of the war.32 Forced to renegotiate their previous identities, they responded in several different ways, including the previously mentioned nostalgic turn to the past and a longing for the Habsburg Empire. Their confusion also accounted for increased Zionist participation after the First World War, coupled with a new sense of ethnic pride that led many Jews to support Yid-dish culture.33 Still others, however, officially left the Jewish faith. Vienna’s Jewish conversion rate, which rose in the decades immediately before the First World War, was higher than in any other city in Europe.34

As so many of the essays in this volume show, Jewish reactions to the political and social crises in the years following the First World War encom-passed a wide spectrum, from a wholehearted embrace to total abnegation of Jewishness. Ironically, those with the least concern for overt Jewish identifi-cation often led the way in constructing a new, inclusive cultural and po-litical identity, thus reinforcing their affiliation to a secular, acculturated Jewish subculture. This was true, for example, of many of the Social Demo-crats who were instrumental in the creation of Red Vienna. To return to our architectural tour of the city, Eve Blau describes the Socialist housing blocks of the interwar period as embodiments of the spirit of the age, incorporating workers’ dwellings “with kindergartens, libraries, medical and dental clinics, laundries, workshops, theaters, cooperative stores, public gardens, sports facilities and a wide range of other public facilities.”35 They demonstrate in bricks and mortar the blending of culture and politics, public and private life, that characterized Red Vienna. Anson Rabinbach likewise emphasizes how attractive the cultural “public sphere” became for Social Democratic Party leaders in lieu of political power, as shown by the many party publications and hundreds of Vereine (clubs) for leisure activities, which strongly appealed to those shut out of the national government. As Rabinbach writes, “in lieu of political power in the Republic, the prospect of directing political and or-ganizational vigor into the construction of a model city in Vienna was ex-tremely attractive for the Socialist leadership.”36

Given the city’s location between eastern and western Europe, plus the transitory nature of the interwar period, the role of Jews as a cultural force in interwar Vienna provides a unique perspective on Jewish historical studies in


general and Jewish cultural history in Vienna in particular. As Wolfgang Ma-derthaner and Lisa Silverman’s essay shows, there is a need for more detailed study of some of the basic assumptions underlying previous research in this area. For example, why did so many Viennese Jews not only join but also lead the Social Democratic Party during the interwar period? Previous studies have emphasized the lack of alternative political affiliations open to Jews as the prime motivating factor.37 However, more recent studies indicate that their drive and passion for the party was also linked to their identities as secular Jews during the interwar period.38 How were new creative niches for Jews — and those perceived as Jews — opened and maintained during the interwar period? Jews were at the forefront of many new cultural developments of the time, whether aimed at the conservation of tradition (for example, Max Rein-hardt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s contribution to the founding of the Salzburg Festival), or at innovation (Schoenberg’s creation of twelve-tone music). Moreover, there was an increase in the presence of Jewish women in cultural and artistic professions. For example, photography became a surpris-ingly viable career option for numerous Viennese Jewish women during the interwar period, as Trude Fleischmann’s development of new visual and tech-nological opportunities shows. Free dance, as described in the essay by Andrea Amort, also offered a forum where women — and, in particular, Jewish wo-men — were able to fulfill their creative potential in Vienna’s public sphere.

Nevertheless, antisemitism also increased and must be considered along-side the development of innovative culture by Jews and non-Jews alike. The interwar period saw the publication of Hugo Bettauer’s novel Stadt ohne Juden (City without Jews, 1922), the film version of which is discussed in the essay by Alys George. Bettauer envisioned a fictional Vienna minus its Jewish population. When Jews are forced to leave the city and non-Jews take over the shops, restaurants, banks, and all other aspects of urban life, every-thing grinds to a halt and the city becomes a ghost of its former self, its population reduced to dressing in outmoded garb rather than the fashion-able clothing once provided by Jewish businesses. Bettauer’s work may have been intended as satire, but its narrative counters the giddy assumption that all “outsiders” were “insiders” in pre-Anschluss Vienna. His assassination in 1925 by a man supported by the National Socialists renders the persistence of antisemitism undeniable and foreshadows the violent forms it would take a little over a decade later.

Antisemitism, however, had been institutionalized under the First Re-public long before Hitler marched into Austria. Though later downplayed by his biographers, the antisemitic views of Jesuit priest Ignaz Seipel, leader of the conservative Christian Social Party for most of the interwar period and Austrian chancellor from 1926 to 1929, greatly influenced party politics.39 The rhetoric of his party frequently misused Austria’s majority religion of Catholicism for political purposes, pitting Catholic Christians against Jews.40 Jewish intellectuals from the capital were regularly forced to register aggres-


sion toward them often more evident in the conservative provinces than in the Social Democrat-run city.41 Unsurprisingly, this was most apparent when city people left home for the holidays. As early as 1921 an “Arierparagraph” (clause restricting membership to non-Jews) was inserted into the bylaws of the alpine hiking club Austria. The journalist Alice Schalek, a club member who came from an assimilated, bourgeois Jewish family of avid hikers, wrote an article defending the right of Jews to belong to such groups, claiming they were among the most loyal to the state — to no avail.42 As Therese Muxe-neder writes in her essay on Arnold Schoenberg, a holiday incident involving antisemitism in Mattsee in 1921 led the composer to question his conversion and reconsider his role as a Jewish innovator of German music.

An increasingly brutal form of antisemitism in the Austrian system is also illustrated by a case that became known as the Austrian Dreyfus affair. Philipp Halsmann, a young Jew from Lithuania, was unjustly incarcerated for over two years for the murder of his father following overtly antisemitic accusa-tions and insults during two trials. The events began in September 1928, when Halsmann and his father, Max, went on a hiking vacation in the Tyro-lean Alps near Innsbruck. After Max Halsmann suddenly collapsed, Philipp ran to a nearby inn for help. While he was gone, his father was murdered and robbed. After the burial — which, in keeping with Jewish tradition, took place as soon as possible — an innkeeper accused Halsmann of patricide, claiming he had disposed of the body quickly to avoid detection. As a result of these antisemitic accusations, as well as the media frenzy that developed soon thereafter, on 16 December 1928 Halsmann was found guilty of the crime by order of an Innsbruck court.43 Following a subsequent trial in 1929, Halsmann, who had been imprisoned since September, 1928, was sentenced to four years in jail. Although it occurred in the provinces, his trial mobilized such prominent Jewish intellectuals in Vienna as Jakob Wasserman, whose open letter to the president of Austria on Halsmann’s behalf appeared on the front page of the Neue Freie Presse on 27 October 1929, and Sigmund Freud, who publicly refuted the prosecution’s attempt to implicate Hals-mann in his father’s murder based on his theory of the Oedipus complex.44 It was only after their and others’ intervention that he was finally pardoned in 1930.45 According to Martin Ross, whose father’s articles on the case ap-peared regularly in the Neue Freie Presse, the Halsmann affair polarized the residents of Vienna, with Jews congregating at coffeehouses to discuss the topic among themselves until a Gentile approached their table.46 These inci-dents attest not only to rising tide of antisemitism in the interwar period but also to the ongoing distinctions made in Vienna, where, despite their full participation in Austrian culture, Jews were still considered different from non-Jewish Austrians.

As this brief overview has shown, the events and debates that shaped Vi-ennese culture between 1918 and 1938 were pervaded by paradoxes and


extremes, from neopositivism to cultural pessimism, reactionary Catholicism to Austro-Marxism, and late Enlightenment liberalism to rabid antisemitism. Despite Gregor von Rezzori’s doubts that interwar Vienna could only be adequately understood by those who had experienced the tensions inherent in these contradictions, this volume nevertheless aims to address them from the standpoint of tradition versus modernity. These terms, which can be understood in many different ways, underlie the cultural and political de-bates of the period.

Both essays in Part I further investigate issues already touched on in this introduction, namely, the problems of periodization and of defining the culture of complex urban networks articulated and informed by historical events. To this end, Edward Timms revisits his work on Karl Kraus’s Vienna, suggesting ways in which his approach might be extended to further illus-trate the interactions — financial, cultural, personal, and otherwise — which defined the city’s unique dynamic. John Warren takes an interdisciplinary approach to the effects of February 1934 on Viennese culture, comparing and contrasting its development under the Social Democrats and the Austro-fascists. Part II turns more specifically to the political climate of the interwar years and its intersections with developing theories about race and differ-ence, focusing on links between the city’s socialist cultural experiments and Jewishness (Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lisa Silverman), as well as con-nections between welfare and race theory (Paul Weindling). Part III features essays on the implications of change and innovation in four fields of cultural production: free dance (Andrea Amort), film (Alys George), theater (Birgit Peters), and music (Therese Muxeneder). Part IV provides detailed analyses of text-based cultural creativity, examining works by the authors Ernst Weiss (Andrew Barker), Rudolf Brunngraber (Jon Hughes), Arthur Schnitzler and Franz Blei (Birgit Lang), and John Lehmann (Robert Vilain). All these case studies shed new light both on the works and individuals in question and on the general cultural framework of interwar Vienna, whether it be Brunn-graber’s Viennese variant of Neue Sachlichkeit, the stylistic eclecticism of Gertrud Bodenwieser’s choreography, or the outsider view John Lehmann provides on the events of February 1934.

Although the exquisite aestheticism of the fin de siècle was a living memory for many of these individuals, it had been replaced by an inter-disciplinarity that often had more to do with financial necessity or political allegiance than choice. The fall of the Habsburg Monarchy had liberated Vienna in many respects, particularly as regards civil and political rights and the opening up of possibilities for social reform. These new freedoms pro-vided unprecedented scope for innovation — albeit for a limited time and only insofar as the economic and political pressures of the period allowed. In Karl Kraus’s typically disparaging view, the Viennese character was held in permanent stasis by a combination of passivity and irresponsibility.47 How-ever, as this volume demonstrates, during the years 1918–38 the Viennese


responded to the opposing forces buffeting their city not with inertness but with dynamism.

Notes

1 This is the case across a spectrum that ranges from academia to marketing the city to tourists. As Monika Sommer notes: “‘Wien um 1900’ ist mittlerweile alltäglich omnipresent und gilt oftmals als Qualitätsmerkmal, das eine scheinbare gelungene Verbindung zwischen Tradition und Moderne suggeriert.” “Imaging Vienna — Das Surplus von Wien: Stadterzählungen zwischen Ikonisierung und Pluralisierung,” in Imaging Vienna: Innensichten — außensichten — stadterzählungen, ed. Monika Som-mer, Marcus Gräser, and Ursula Prutsh (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2006), 9–19; here 15. For a summary of the fin-de-siècle Vienna boom in the 1980s as initiated by Schorske et al., see also, in the same volume, Heidemaria Uhl, “‘Wien um 1900’ — das making of eines Gedächtnisortes,” 47–70. 2 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (New York: Viking, 1943), 13–14, as cited in Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), 4. 3 Hall, Cities in Civilization, 5. 4 Carol Vogel, “Lauder Pays $135 Million, a Record, for a Klimt Portrait,” New York Times, 19 June 2006. 5 See Rebecca Mead, “An Acquiring Eye,” The New Yorker, 15 January 2007, 59–67; and Lisa Silverman’s letter to the editor, The New Yorker, 19 and 26 February 2007, 14. 6 Literature in Vienna at the Turn of the Centuries: Continuities and Discontinuities around 1900 and 2000, ed. Ernst Grabovszki and James Hardin (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 2. 7 Paul Hofmann, The Viennese: Splendor, Twilight, and Exile (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 207. 8 Gregor von Rezzori, introduction to Hans Schreiber, Trude Fleischmann: Fotografin in Wien, 1918–1938 (Vienna: Wirtschafts-Trend Zeitschriften Verlagsgesellschaft, 1990), 8–12; here 12. 9 Hermann Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 1947–48 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 134. 10 Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 143–44. Anything new in Vienna was presented by Broch either as an anomaly or — to strengthen his argument — as an exception that proved the rule. Take, for example, Schoenberg’s innovative compositions: “Daß just in der Stadt des Rosenkavaliers der Hauptbeitrag zur Entstehung der neuen Musik erstehen sollte, war einer jener Witze des Schicksals, mit denen es manchmal so etwas wie eine ausgleichende Gerechtigkeit etabliert” (That the main contribution to the creation of the new music should arise in the city of the Rosenkavalier, of all places, was one of those jokes with which destiny sometimes establishes something like a com-pensatory justice). 11 See Marcus Gräser, “Wienerzählungen im internationalen Kontext,” in Imaging Vienna, ed. Sommer, Gräser, and Prutsh, 189–201; here 191–92. As Karl Scheffler wrote in Berlin — ein Stadtschicksal (1910), Berlin is “dazu verdammt: immerfort zu


werden und niemals zu sein” (damned to be ever becoming and never to be). For an example of how emigration to Berlin and Berlin’s dynamism is privileged over Vienna in comparative studies, see Wien-Berlin: Mit einem Dossier zu Stefan Großmann, ed. Bernhard Fetz and Hermann Schlösser (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2001). 12 Gräser, “Wienerzählungen im internationalen Kontext,” 190. 13 In a similar fashion to fin-de-siècle Vienna, this image of Berlin during the Weimar Republic is both based on fact and results from literary representations and retro-spective nostalgia. See Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge: Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). See also the English-language accounts of life in Weimar Berlin by Auden, Spender, and Isherwood. 14 Nevertheless, it is also important to note that the new administration legislated for social changes that had often been foreshadowed by would-be reformers under the old system, further complicating the debate on what was to be regarded as old or new. This is especially true of education reform, adult education, and the new press laws. 15 Hanno Biber, “‘In Wien, in Prag und infolgedessen in Berlin’ — Ortskonstellationen in der Fackel,” in Berlin-Wien-Prag: Moderne, Minderheiten und Migration in der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. Susanne Marten-Finnis and Matthias Uecker (Bern: Peter Lang, 2001), 15–26. 16 Modernism, 1914–1939: Designing a New World (exhib. cat.), ed. Christoph Wilk (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2006). Our thanks to John Warren for this information. 17 See Barbara Lesák, Die Kulisse explodiert: Friedrich Kieslers Theaterexperimente und Architekturprojekte, 1923–25 (Vienna: Locker Verlag, 1988) and John Warren, “Fried-rich Kiesler and Theatrical Modernism in Vienna,” Austrian Studies 4: Theatre and Performance in Austria (1993): 81–92. For an account of the full extent of the festival, see John Warren, “David Josef Bach and the ‘Musik- und Theaterfest’ of 1924,” Austrian Studies 14: Culture and Politics in Red Vienna (2006): 119–42. 18 See Photographie in Wien, 1918–1938 (exhib. cat.), ed. Monika Faber (Vienna: Seemann and Lunzer, 1999). 19 See the introduction to Marten-Finnis and Uecker, Berlin-Wien-Prag, 9–12; here 9. 20 Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 148. 21 Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2007). 22 Peter Pelinka and Manfred Scheuch, Hundert Jahre Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1989). 23 Along with Stefan Zweig, a further striking example is Joseph Roth. See Ritchie Robertson’s entry entitled “The year of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire marks a crucial historical and symbolic change for Joseph Roth,” in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1997), 355–62. 24 On the left, see Otto Bauer’s editorials in the Arbeiter-Zeitung; for a more con-servative reaction, see Hofmannsthal, “Die österreichische Idee,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2 December 1917, third Sunday supplement: 1.


25 Those holding this view ranged from the Social Democrats on the left to the German nationalists. Others included intellectuals like Robert Musil, who can be seen as apolitical from a party point of view. See Musil’s essays from 1918 to 1919, in particular “Der Anschluß an Deutschland” (March 1919), in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8(Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 1033–42. 26 The vagaries of Josef Roth’s application for Austrian citizenship, which was not granted until 1921, are a concrete example of this. See Edward Timms, “Citizenship and ‘Heimatrecht’ after the Treaty of Saint-Germain,” Austrian Studies 5: The Habs-burg Legacy (1994): 158–68, esp. 161–62. 27 Christian Jäger and Erhard Schütz, Städtebilder zwischen Literatur und Journalismus: Wien, Berlin und das Feuilleton der Weimarer Republik (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 1999), 81–82. 28 For examples of the emergence of new opportunities for previously inactive or stifled voices during the interwar period, see the recent research on such women writers as Veza Canetti, Else Feldmann, and Lili Grün. 29 See Anson Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927–1934 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983); Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919–1934 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991); Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934 (Cambridge: MIT, 1999); Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Ohne Nostalgie: Zur österreichischen Literatur der Zwischenkriegszeit (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002). 30 One such venture was the establishment in 1920 of the Salzburg Festival, intended to rival Germany’s Bayreuth, driven in large part by Viennese cultural figures. Another was the creation of new forms of literature both adhering to and deviating from popular forms of Neue Sachlichkeit. 31 Marsha L. Rozenblit, “The Crisis of Identity in the Austrian Republic: Jewish Eth-nicity in a New Nation-State,” in In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933, ed. Michael Brenner and Derek Jonathan Penslar (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998), 134–53; here 135. 32 Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I (New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 133. 33 Rozenblit claims that it was the lack of Austrian national identity that facilitated Jewish ethnic identity even as it fostered economic and cultural integration. See Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 177 n. 34; and Rozenblit, “The Crisis of Identity in the Austrian Republic.” 34 Marsha L. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany: SUNY P, 1983), 132. 35 Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 2. 36 Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism, 27. 37 Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Jewish Politics in Vienna, 1918–1938 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991), 87; and Walter B. Simon, “The Jewish Vote in Austria,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 16 (1971): 97–121. Simon and Freidenreich emphasize that Jews in interwar Austria had no alternative to voting Social Democratic since that was the only party that did not ally itself with other antisemitic political parties. See also Robert S. Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews: The Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and


Austria-Hungary (East Brunswick, NJ: Associated UP, 1982); Jack Jacobs, “Austrian Social Democracy and the Jewish Question in the First Republic,” in The Austrian Socialist Experiment: Social Democracy and Austromarxism, 1918–1934, ed. Anson Rabinbach (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985), 157–68; Robert Schwarz, “Antisemitism and Socialism in Austria, 1918–1962,” in The Jews of Austria: Essays on Their Life, History and Destruction, ed. Josef Fraenkel (London: Vallentine, 1967), 445–66; A. Barkai, “The Austrian Social Democrats and the Jews,” Wiener Library Bulletin 24, no. 1, n.s. 18 (1970): 31–40; no. 2, n.s. 19 (1970): 16–21. 38 See Lisa Silverman, “The Transformation of Jewish Identity in Vienna, 1918–1938” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2004). 39 Anton Staudinger, “Katholischer Antisemitismus in der Ersten Republik,” in Eine Zerstörte Kultur: Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus in Wien seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, 2nd ed., ed. Gerhard Botz et al. (Vienna: Czernin, 2002), 261–82, esp. 266–68. 40 In contrast to France, where Catholic intellectuals participated in socialist projects, according to some scholars the Austrian church was “one of the least flexible, most reactionary, and ultramontanist in Europe” and thus completely at odds with projects such as Red Vienna; Gruber, Red Vienna, 28 and 196. Nevertheless, Catholic culture during the interwar period should not be dismissed as merely reactionary or conser-vative; its pomp and pageantry was both admired and harnessed by a number of Jewish and non-Jewish cultural innovators. For example, Julius Braunthal, a Jewish socialist leader living in Vienna, recalled in vivid detail the processional of Fronleichnahm (Corpus Christi), which celebrated the alliance between church and state. Julius Braunthal, In Search of the Millennium (London: Victor Gollancz, 1945), 50. 41 In the 1920s, antisemitism was very strong in Tyrol even though only a few hundred Jews resided there. See Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Antisemitism (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992), 98–99. 42 Alice Schalek, “Der Arierparagraph der Sektion Austria,” Neue Freie Presse, 22 February 1921. 43 Several witnesses reported that Josef Eder, innkeeper and star witness for the prosecution, made antisemitic statements directed at Halsmann even during the trial. See Martin Pollak, Anklage Vatermord: Der Fall Philipp Halsmann (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2002), 136. 44 Sigmund Freud, “Das Fakultätsgutachten im Prozeß Halsmann,” Neue Freie Presse, 14 December 1930. 45 Bertha Zuckerkandl, Österreich Intim: Erinnerungen, 1892–1942, ed. Reinhard Federmann (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1970), 180. 46 Martin H. Ross, Marrano (Boston: Branden, 1976), 17. 47 “Der Wiener Volkscharakter hat zwei Triebfedern des Stillstandes, die, scheinbar einander entgegenstrebend, schließlich doch eine Einheit ergeben: Der Schiebidennetean-Wille paart sich mit der Stehtenettafür-Skepsis und es entspringt die Lekmimoasch-Absage” (The two seemingly contradictory mainsprings of the Viennese popular character actually combine to form a single entity in the final instance: the “don’t push yourself forward will” copulates with the “don’t stand for anything skep-ticism” to create the “kiss my ass” refusal). Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 376 (1913): 24.

Part I

Cultural and Political Parameters

1: Cultural Parameters between the Wars: A Reassessment of the Vienna Circles

Edward Timms

HE AIM OF THIS ESSAY IS TO PROVIDE an overview of the field of cultural production in Vienna between the world wars based on a wide range of

historical documentation and scholarly research. In a celebrated study en-titled Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980) Carl Schorske high-lighted the “cohesiveness” of the Austrian intellectual and artistic elite at the turn of the twentieth century, while at the same time demonstrating that it was “alienated from political power.”1 Building on Schorske’s seminal insights, my own research on the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus explored the genera-tional shift that occurred around the time of the First World War, prompting leading artists and authors to become more politically engaged. To illustrate the resulting tensions between cultural cohesion and political commitment, I created a series of diagrams reflecting the dynamics of creativity.

The great strength of the “Viennese avant-garde,” according to the first volume of my Karl Kraus — Apocalyptic Satirist, “lay in its internal organ-ization.” By analogy with the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, the whole structure of avant-garde culture could be pictured as a “condensed system of micro-circuits.” This idea was illustrated by a diagram entitled “Creative Interactions in Vienna around 1910,” incorporating fifteen intersecting cir-cles, each of them centered on a dominant personality: from Victor Adler and Rosa Mayreder, through Freud, Kraus, and Adolf Loos, to Schoenberg, Mahler, and Klimt. Each was surrounded by a group of disciples, and the crucial feature was that the circles intersected, ensuring a rapid circulation of ideas. This model of creative cross-fertilization helped to explain that “con-tribution to twentieth-century civilization which has made the Vienna of Freud and Herzl, Schoenberg and Wittgenstein so renowned.”2

For all its oversimplification, this model of creativity was well received since it illustrated the interaction between different disciplines that was such a feature of late Habsburg Austria. Indeed, in his introduction to Reflexio-nen der Fackel (1994) Kurt Krolop suggested that a similar model might be constructed for the polycentric culture of Prague.3 A conference at Kassel en-titled “Die Wiener Jahrhundertwende” (The Viennese Turn of the Century) provided an opportunity to extend the initial diagram into further dimen-sions. My article “Die Wiener Kreise: Schöpferische Interaktionen in der

T

22 ♦ EDWARD TIMMS

Wiener Moderne” (The Vienna Circles: Creative Interactions of Viennese Modernity) suggested the addition of a cash-flow diagram since the creative ferment in Vienna around 1900 could never have been sustained without generous funding. Examples cited included individual patrons like the indus-trialist Karl Wittgenstein, who financed the construction of the Secession building, and Fritz Wärndorfer, the Jewish businessman who enabled Josef Hoffmann to found the Vienna Workshops. On occasion these innovative spirits also received public commissions. As Carl Schorske showed in his pioneering study, Klimt’s disturbing allegories won the support of Wilhelm von Hartel, the liberal minister of culture, while Otto Wagner was com-missioned to design the elegantly functional Post Office Savings Bank.4 More significant, however, was what I defined as “internal patronage,” the support received from figures intimately associated with the avant-garde.5 Many of Kokoschka’s sitters were fellow artists and authors, while it was Adolf Loos’s tailor, Leopold Goldman, who — after an inconclusive public competition — commissioned him as architect for the controversial House on the Michaelerplatz.

To define the structure of patronage more precisely, I cited observations by both Kokoschka and Loos about the ethnicity of their supporters. “Most of my sitters were Jews,” Kokoschka recalled. “They felt less secure than the rest of the Viennese Establishment, and were consequently more open to the new and more sensitive to the tensions and pressures that accompanied the decay of the old order in Austria.”6 The evidence suggested that it was above all members of the cultivated Jewish middle class that purchased the prod-ucts of the Vienna Workshops, attended Mahler’s and Schoenberg’s con-certs, and had their dreams analyzed by the best man in town.

A third dimension, less visible but even more inspirational, was the “Erotic Subculture.” Only one circle in the original diagram centered on a woman, the feminist Rosa Mayreder, despite the fact that the defining fea-ture of the Viennese avant-garde was the unabashed celebration of eroticism associated with figures like Gustav Klimt and Arthur Schnitzler. The first part of Karl Kraus — Apocalyptic Satirist contained a preliminary account of this “symbolic territory.”7 Since its publication we have become aware of infor-mal sources like Schnitzler’s diaries, the letters of Kraus, and the memoirs of Fritz Wittels, revealing the inspirational power of concealed erotic experi-ences. My article “The ‘Child-Woman’: Kraus, Freud, Wittels and Irma Kar-czewska” drew attention to one young woman who became the focus for an erotic cult. The article also illuminated the homosexual impulses underlying male bonding. “What was it,” I asked, “that held those intellectual circles together in the first place? Obviously, not ideas alone. Libidinal energies of attraction and rivalry played their part in that explosion of creativity in the coffeehouse culture of Vienna.”8

A full account of this phenomenon, as I concluded in “Die Wiener Kreise,” would require a three-dimensional model, with the circles of crea-

CULTURAL PARAMETERS BETWEEN THE WARS ♦ 23

tivity sustained by the structure of patronage and embedded in the erotic subculture.9 A brief concluding section in that article looked ahead to the early years of the First Austrian Republic, suggesting that a diagram of Viennese cultural life during the 1920s would require a more explicit po-litical focus to clarify the ideological polarizations. Although this second diagram remained rather tentative, it also suggested that more attention should be paid to the function of women within the cultural network, no-tably Eugenie Schwarzwald, Bertha Zuckerkandl, and Alma Mahler.10

A more comprehensive account of the connections between artistic in-novation and political impact required further research. An analysis of the early history of Zionism, which highlighted the achievements of Theodor Herzl, explored the paradoxical phenomenon of “empowered marginality.” The marginal status of ethnic minorities had frequently been discussed by social scientists, but the situation of the Jews of Vienna was exceptional. De-spite high levels of educational and professional achievement, this subgroup remained outsiders in a predominantly Catholic society. This placed leading Jewish figures in a position where they could ask critical questions or develop new initiatives from a detached perspective, while at the same time develop-ing resources that gave their innovative projects a firm institutional basis. Thus, Mahler became director of the Vienna Opera House, Freud created the Psychoanalytical Society, Kraus founded his magazine Die Fackel, and Schoenberg founded the Society for Private Musical Performances. Theodor Herzl provided the most compelling example of this “empowered margin-ality.” Representing the leading liberal newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, he was able to bring diplomatic contacts into play as he transformed Zionism from a utopian vision into a dynamic political movement that was to change the world.11

The view of Vienna as a locus of exceptional creativity has not gone un-challenged. In a celebrated polemic the émigré art historian Ernst Gombrich contested the extravagant claim that “most of the intellectual life of the twen-tieth century was invented in Vienna.” He also argued against what he saw as an overemphasis on the achievements of Jews. For Gombrich, it went against the grain to inquire whether specific artists “were Jews or of Jewish extrac-tion.” He preferred “to leave that enquiry to the Gestapo.”12 However, it seems perverse to downplay the role of acculturated Jews in Viennese public life. The magnitude of their achievements has been demonstrated by several generations of highly regarded historians, from Hans Tietze and Josef Fraen-kel, through Robert Wistrich and Steven Beller, to Marsha Rozenblit, Jacques Le Rider, Harriet Pass Freidenreich, and Leon Botstein. Moreover, further dimensions have been illuminated by a series of fine exhibitions at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, most notably one held in 2004 and entitled Wien, Stadt der Juden (Vienna, City of Jews).13

Gombrich was able to show that in the visual arts the Jewish contribu-tion was marginal. But by focusing on a single field in isolation he missed a

24 ♦ EDWARD TIMMS

more fundamental point. Once we construe Viennese culture as a system of microcircuits, we are able to recognize that the greatest originality arose not from self-contained art forms, such as easel painting, but from the cross-fertilization among different disciplines. If in my diagram Freud’s circle in-tersects with those of Schnitzler and Kraus, this is not simply because indi-vidual members of the Psychoanalytic Society, like Fritz Wittels and Theodor Reik, had literary interests. The whole project of psychoanalysis was inter-disciplinary. Freud was profoundly affected by the intellectual, artistic, and literary ferment around him, as is clear from the Minutes of the Vienna Psy-choanalytical Society. If my diagram could be made more elastic, space would be created for further overlaps between the psychoanalytic circle and those relating to the visual arts and the study of ancient history. Freud’s psychol-ogy evolved as a cathartic drama of the emotions and a multilayered ar-chaeology of memory. The interdisciplinary character of his imagination is reflected in the extraordinary range of his library and the richness of his collection of antiquities.14 An outline of the disparate cultures and disciplines with which he surrounded himself would exemplify, at an individual level, the principles of cross-fertilization expressed in the diagram.15

The case for seeing Vienna as a matrix for innovation becomes even stronger if we take a diachronic view, conflating the creative convulsions of the declining Habsburg Empire with the ideological dynamics of the interwar period explored in the present volume. It is the evolution of “Fin-de-Siècle Vienna” into “Red Vienna” that is so remarkable. My article “School for Socialism” argued that at every level there was a “dramatic radicaliza-tion”: the insights of Freud’s consulting room were mobilized by Wilhelm Reich’s sex-counseling clinics; Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy helped stimulate Otto Neurath’s International Picture Language; Renner’s Die soziale Funktion der Rechtsinstitute (The Social Function of the Legal Institutes) was succeeded by Georg Lukács’s Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein (History and Class Consciousness); and Mahler’s song cycle Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) was followed by Alban Berg’s opera Lulu.16

Austria was not only the scene of pioneering developments in child psychology but also of scientific breakthroughs, like the discovery of blood groups.17 Media criticism provided a further compelling concluding example, for it was the baleful influence of the Viennese press that inspired the two most radical critics of modern journalism, Karl Kraus and Friedrich Auster-litz. The thirty-year campaign against the press that Kraus conducted in the pages of Die Fackel has earned him the title of “guiding spirit for all sub-sequent theorists and practitioners of radical media criticism.”18 Austerlitz, too, surely deserves a full-length study.

The emphasis in the diagram for 1910 was on charismatic individual figures. In the second part of Karl Kraus — Apocalyptic Satirist the focus shifted to the Vienna of the 1920s, where institutional factors claimed great-er attention. An introductory chapter entitled “The Cultural Field” was con-

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structed around a more sophisticated version of my diagram entitled “Vienna Circles: The Field of Cultural Production,” which is reproduced here for ease of reference (fig. 1.1). The most innovative spirits, from Kraus and Schoenberg to Freud and Schnitzler, strove to maintain their independence, but they could not ignore the pioneering achievements of Red Vienna. The intellectual climate between the wars was radically different from that in the declining Habsburg Empire. During the former period cultural innovation had been confined to inward-looking circles, of which the Psychoanalytic Society was the most significant. Now, however, the psychoanalytic move-ment became politicized, splitting into several subgroups, the most com-mitted being led Alfred Adler, who set up counseling centers in the proletarian suburbs.

More formally constituted groups were required to register, according to the Law of Association, and no less than fifteen hundred such Vereine were linked to the Social Democratic Party, giving its members (as Joseph Buttinger recalls) a sense of collective purpose and cohesive identity.19 One by one the individualists emerged from their isolation, committing them-selves to social causes. Robert Musil advised on the reform of the army, while Adolf Loos drafted a programmatic statement entitled “Guidelines for an Arts Office,” to which Kraus and Schoenberg contributed. It was these discussions that led to the founding of the Social Democratic Kunststelle (Administration Office for the Arts) under the direction of David Josef Bach, which was to become such an influential agency for progressive cultural poli-tics. Viennese intellectuals could no longer stand aloof from the struggle be-tween Catholicism and socialism, communism and fascism, as the “field of cultural production” (to borrow Bourdieu’s terms) became inextricably bound up with the “field of power.”20

Thus, the philosophers who met in the Boltzmanngasse under the aegis of Moritz Schlick, internationally known as the Vienna Circle, began to make a public impact, most notably through the educational work of Otto Neu-rath. In 1925, with the support of the municipality of Vienna, he founded the Museum of Economy and Society, developing an innovative project of visual education. Even avant-garde musicians attempted to reach working-class audiences. The concerts organized by Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances may have been restricted to an elite, but his collabo-rator Anton Webern included avant-garde compositions in the programs of Workers’ Symphony Concerts and the Workers’ Choir.

In short, the postwar Vienna circles involved a wider public, creating a counterculture that challenged the reactionary values of Catholicism and German nationalism. Their members ceased to be outsiders, acquiring re-sources that enabled them to give their innovative projects a firm institu-tional basis. It was this that distinguished the Viennese avant-garde from the more esoteric cultural groupings of the 1920s, such as the Stefan George Circle, the Bloomsbury Group, or the Fugitive Poets.21 Even the individu-


alistic Karl Popper was a socialist for a time, working as a volunteer in Adler’s child-guidance clinics, as well as attending Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances and immersing himself in the ideas of the Vienna Circle.22

The predominance of male figures in my diagram invites a critique from a feminist perspective. Further research would surely lead to women being given greater prominence. During the 1920s women increasingly claimed the right to participate in the public sphere.23 There was a spate of publica-tions on both social and sexual themes by Austrian women authors, in-cluding Rosa Mayreder, Grete Meisel-Hess, Eugenie Schwarzwald, Therese Schlesinger, Helene Deutsch, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, Anna Freud, and Annie Reich. A new generation of imaginative writers that included Vicki Baum, Anna Gmeyner, Hermynia zur Mühlen, Martina Wied, Hertha Pauli, Hilde Spiel, Mela Hartwig, and Veza Canetti wrote fictional works from an explicitly female viewpoint.

In the sphere of sexual enlightenment the most radical issue was “How Women Experience Men,” or Wie die Frau den Mann erlebt, the title of a pioneering study by Sophie Lazarsfeld.24 Drawing on the work of marriage counseling clinics set up by Alfred Adler, she gave ordinary women a public voice, enabling them to express their difficulties with sexual adjustment while making allowances for the ways in which women’s emancipation generated insecurity in men. She certainly deserves as much credit as her celebrated son, Paul, for using opinion sampling to explore uncharted territory. These women were creative figures in their own right, in contrast to the more celebrated Alma Mahler, who facilitated innovation while allowing her own creative gifts to lie fallow. The discourses of sexuality and gender developed by woman writers certainly deserve closer attention, even though at the time they did not create such a furor as the writings of Hugo Bettauer and Wilhelm Reich. Space should also be found in an extended diagram for the significance of the homosexual subculture.

The success of the Social Democrats in mobilizing progressive intellec-tuals provoked a backlash, as the Christian Social Party strengthened its own institutions in order to resist the advance of socialism. There were over a thousand youth groups associated with the Imperial Federation of Catholic German Youth of Austria, an organization created by the antisemites Anton Orel and Leopold Kunschak.25 The Catholics were less effectively organized in Vienna than in the Austrian provinces, but their control of universities, state theaters, and radio enabled them to mobilize writers and thinkers on the conservative side. During the 1920s a number of notable figures aligned themselves with the conservative cause. These included Hofmannsthal and Reinhardt through their productions at the Salzburg Festival; Anton Wildgans as director of the Burgtheater; Franz Werfel, who gravitated toward Catho-licism under the influence of Alma Mahler; and Richard von Kralik through his Catholic Grail Fraternity.

28 ♦ EDWARD TIMMS

Kralik’s villa in Döbling became the scene of a regular Tuesday evening salon, attended by right-wing Catholics like Max Mell, Heinz Kindermann, Hermann Bahr, and Richard von Schaukal.26 The appointment of Richard Strauss as director of the Vienna Opera in 1919 gave a distinctly conservative flavor to state-subsidized musical culture. Moreover, the Catholic faction had its own Kunststelle, directed by Hans Brečka, cultural editor of the Reichs-post. Although initially less successful than its socialist rival, this Kunststelle für christliche Volksbildung (Arts Office for the Christian Education of the People) came into its own during the 1930s, when it first promoted the values of Christian Austria and then — still under Brečka’s leadership — those of Nazi Germany.27

The German nationalist camp had its own cultural organizations, repre-sented by best-selling authors like Rudolf Bartsch and Karl Hans Strobl. Such right-wingers made no secret of their antidemocratic and antisemitic aims, as can be seen from the statutes of the Deutschvölkische Schutz- und Trutz-bund (German People’s Protective Confederation). Announcing its program in the Deutschösterreichische Tageszeitung in January 1922, the Trutzbund proclaimed the ideal of German racial purity, insisting that its members avoided Jewish shops and never consulted a Jewish doctor. Nationalistic gymnastic clubs in Austria were even more determined than those in Ger-many to exclude Jews from membership since no “Jew” could truly be a “German.”28 These organizations, which at certain points overlapped with those of the Christian Social Party, provided the primary conduits for popu-lar antisemitism. According to a contemporary survey, no fewer than one thousand deutschvölkisch clubs and associations existed in Austria in 1933.29

The placing of these pressure groups on a left-right political axis in my diagram is surely valid as a means of representing the polarization of Austrian culture during the interwar period, yet on certain issues this schematization can be misleading. For example, the Social Democrats on the left and Ger-man Nationalists on the far right converged in their support for the Anschluss with Germany, whereas the Communists and the Christian Social Party members were opposed to the Anschluss, although for very different reasons. Moreover, such a diagram is ultimately too static. A more dynamic version utilizing electronic technologies to express an evolving timeline would be needed to indicate the dramatic shifts that took place in the early 1930s as authors who initially had socialist or liberal sympathies — such as Weinheber, Werfel, and Doderer — gravitated toward the far right.

A more comprehensive diagram would also be needed to incorporate the economic dimensions of cultural life. By contrast with the period around 1900, the political parties were now vital sources of patronage, especially the Social Democratic–led municipal government of Vienna. The Kunststellen of the various factions played a decisive role, as did the feuilleton editors of ideologically committed newspapers like the Arbeiter-Zeitung. But it would also be necessary to identify a new generation of individual paymasters. In


the cash-flow diagram for the 1920s new figures would emerge: wealthy patrons like Camillo Castiglioni, who financed the renovation of the Theater in der Josefstadt; supporters of the Salzburg Festival like Hofmannsthal’s banker friend Paul Hellmann; and the German industrialists who were se-cretly funding Rohan’s Kulturbund.

In the context of patronage, more prominence might also be given to the publishing scene. The thriving culture generated by the Vienna circles was sustained by a network of small publishers, some of which also posi-tioned themselves within the ideological spectrum. The most significant in-dependent publisher on the liberal left was the Anzengruber Verlag, whose list included reformist authors like Josef Popper-Lynkeus and Rosa Mayreder. The leading Austro-Catholic publisher was Verlagsanstalt Tyrolia, while the German nationalists were spearheaded by the Adolf Luser Verlag, publishers of the völkisch family magazine Der getreue Eckart and the poetry of Josef Weinheber. Economic constraints meant that Austrian publishers were no match for the German competition. Some were essentially cottage industries run from the backroom of a bookshop, such as the Verlag der Buchhand-lung Richard Lanyi (Publisher of the Bookstore Richard Lanyi), which pub-lished Karl Kraus’s adaptations of Shakespeare and Nestroy. The most en-terprising firms were Jewish-owned, but only two gained an international reputation: the music publisher Universal-Edition, which was responsible for Kraus’s Offenbach adaptations, and the Paul Zsolnay Verlag, publisher of best-selling authors like Franz Werfel.30 The Zsolnay Verlag holds a central position within the field of cultural production, not least because of its links with liberal organizations like the PEN Club. Thus, to place Zsolnay’s name in the circle of Alma Mahler hardly does justice to his sphere of influence.

My diagram ultimately fails to do justice to the complexity of the situa-tion. Mapping cultural life in terms of “circles” seems to imply that the most significant developments occurred in the semiprivate space of coffeehouses or seminar rooms. But account should also be taken of more public spaces like the Konzerthaus (concert house) — the stage on which the different fac-tions competed for cultural hegemony.31 Moreover, although the diagram is quite detailed, there are inevitably numerous omissions. Certain groups are difficult to place within a left-right ideological spectrum, such as the art his-torians in the circle of Hans Tietze or the mainstream musicologists, led by Guido Adler. The sheer complexity of cultural activity between the wars eludes schematization. A study of the Vienna Circle has identified a dozen other associated groups of differing ideological stripes, including historians (like Alfred Pribram and Friedrich Engel-Janosi), mathematicians (like Hans Hahn, Karl Menger, and Kurt Gödel), sociologists (like Rudolf Goldscheid), and philosophers of science (like Philipp Frank).32

In sum, although a diagram of this kind may serve as an economical means of defining the cultural parameters explored in a book on Vienna be-tween the wars, this mapping of the various Vienna circles should be seen not

30 ♦ EDWARD TIMMS

as some kind of definitive statement but as an incentive to undertake further research.

Notes

1 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), xxvii. 2 Edward Timms, Karl Kraus — Apocalyptic Satirist, Part 1: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1986), 7–10. 3 Kurt Krolop, Reflexionen der Fackel: Neue Studien über Karl Kraus (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1994), 11. 4 Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 237–45. 5 Edward Timms, “Die Wiener Kreise: Schöpferische Interaktionen in der Wiener Moderne,” in Die Wiener Jahrhundertwende, ed. Jürgen P. Nautz and Richard Vah-renkamp (Vienna: Böhlau, 1993), 128–43; see esp. the diagram on page 134. 6 Oskar Kokoschka, My Life, trans. David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 35. 7 Timms, Karl Kraus — Apocalyptic Satirist, Part 1, 28–29. 8 Edward Timms, “The ‘Child-Woman’: Kraus, Freud, Wittels and Irma Karczewska,” Austrian Studies 1: Vienna 1900: From Altenberg to Wittgenstein (1990): 87–107; here 105. 9 Timms, “Die Wiener Kreise: Schöpferische Interaktionen,” 137–39. 10 Timms, “Die Wiener Kreise: Schöpferische Interaktionen,” 139–43. 11 Edward Timms, “Ambassador Herzl and the Blueprint for a Modern State,” Aus-trian Studies 8: Theodor Herzl and the Origins of Zionism (1997): 12–26; here 13. 12 Ernst Gombrich, “The Visual Arts in Vienna c. 1900” and “Reflections on the Jewish Catastrophe,” Occasions 1 (Austrian Cultural Institute, London, 1997): 10–11 and 23–25. 13 See Wien, Stadt der Juden: Die Welt der Tante Jolesch, ed. Joachim Riedl (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2004). 14 See Freud’s Library: A Comprehensive Catalogue (book and CD), ed. J. Keith Davies and Gerhard Fichtner (London and Tübingen: Freud Museum and Edition Diskord, 2006); Janine Burke, The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection (Milsons Point, NSW: 2006). 15 See Edward Timms, “Sigmund Freud (1856–1938): Schöpferische Leseerfahrungen und symbolische Kerne” in “Wie würde ich ohne Bücher leben und arbeiten können?” Privatbibliotheken jüdischer Intellektueller im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Ines Sonder, Karin Bürger, and Ursula Wallmeier (Berlin: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2008), 135–57. 16 Edward Timms, “School for Socialism: Karl Seitz and the Cultural Politics of Vien-na,” Austrian Studies 14: Culture and Politics in Red Vienna (2006): 36–59; here 46. 17 For the achievements of Austrian scientists, including Karl Landsteiner, discoverer of blood groups, see Hugo Portisch, Österreich I: Die unterschätzte Republik (Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau, 1989), 260–70. On child development see Edward Timms, “New Approaches to Child Psychology: From Red Vienna to the Hampstead Nursery” in Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation: Refugees from National Socialism


in the English-Speaking World, ed. Edward Timms and Jon Hughes (Vienna: Springer, 2003), 219–39. 18 John Theobald, The Media and the Making of History (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004), 76. For a fuller account see Edward Timms, Karl Kraus — Apocalyptic Satirist, Part 2: The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005). 19 Under the authoritarian regime of Engelbert Dollfuss, all these Social Democratic associations were banned. See Joseph Buttinger, Am Beispiel Österreichs: Ein geschicht-licher Beitrag zur Krise der sozialistischen Bewegung (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1972), 29–30. 20 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 37–40. 21 Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2002); Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986). For the Fugitive Poets, who flourished at Vanderbilt University during the interwar period, see Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001), 68–113. 22 Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (London: Routledge, 1976), chaps. 8, 9, 11, and 16. 23 See Die Frauen der Wiener Moderne, ed. Lisa Fischer and Emil Brix (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1997). 24 Sofie Lazarsfeld, Wie die Frau den Mann erlebt: Fremde Bekenntnisse und eigene Betrachtungen (Vienna: Verlag für Sexualwissenschaft, 1931). 25 See Ludwig Reichold, “Die christlich inspirierten Jugendorganisationen in Öster-reich,” in Geistiges Leben im Österreich der Ersten Republik, ed. Isabella Ackerl and Rudolf Neck (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1986), 313–30. 26 See Judith Beniston, “Welttheater”: Hofmannsthal, Richard von Kralik, and the Re-vival of Catholic Drama in Austria, 1890–1934 (London: W. S. Maney, 1998), 195. 27 See Judith Beniston, “Cultural Politics in the First Republic: Hans Brečka and the ‘Kunststelle für christliche Volksbildung’” in Catholicism and Austrian Culture, ed. Ritchie Robertson and Judith Beniston (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999), 101–18. 28 Rudolf G. Ardelt, Zwischen Demokratie und Faschismus: Deutschnationales Gedan-kengut in Österreich, 1919–1930 (Vienna: Geyer Edition, 1972), 98–102. 29 Deutscher Geist in Österreich. Ein Handbuch des völkischen Lebens der Ostmark, ed. Karl Wache (Dornbirn, Austria: Verlag C. Burtin, 1933), 62. 30 See Murray G. Hall, Österreichische Verlagsgeschichte, 1918–1938, 2 vols. (Vienna: Böhlau, 1985). 31 See Friedrich C. Heller and Peter Revers, Das Wiener Konzerthaus: Geschichte und Bedeutung, 1913–1983 (Vienna: Wiener Konzerthausgesellschaft, 1983). 32 See Friedrich Stadler, Studien zum Wiener Kreis (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 627–39.

2: “weiße Strümpfe oder neue Kutten”: Cultural Decline in Vienna in the 1930s

John Warren

NE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL STUDIES on Austrian culture during the interwar years bears the title Aufbruch und Untergang (New Departure

and Decline), a juxtaposition that succinctly conveys the era’s combined leg-acy of great achievement and bitter disappointment.1 By concentrating on the second idea, that of decline, this essay will examine what happened to the burgeoning cultural and intellectual developments of the early period of the First Republic in Vienna following the calamitous political events of 1933–34. For many commentators it was the Anschluss of 1938 and the subsequent emigration of Jewish intellectuals, authors, and performers that marked the downfall of Viennese culture. However, Austria had already suffered major setbacks earlier in the 1930s for which there were three main causes: the blow to left-wing modernist culture caused by the abolition of Social Democracy and its many institutions and organizations in February 1934; the loss of talent brought about by those who chose to go into early exile; and the cultural policies of the Catholic, nationalist Ständestaat (corporate state) from 1934 to 1938. Before assessing these causes of decline, I begin with a brief recapitulation of the early achievements of the First Republic up to the fateful years 1933–34.

Viennese Culture under the First Republic to 1934 The political stepping-stones that mark the path toward the end of democracy in the First Republic have been well charted.2 Less well documented is the effect political destabilization had on cultural life. Despite the loss of confidence brought about by the trauma of the First World War, the intellectual and cultural legacy of fin-de-siècle Vienna initially remained strong. As Norbert Leser has pointed out, there were still many brilliant minds at work there.3 Any city that could host the premiere on 10 October 1919 of Richard Strauss’s opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow) remained very much among the leading cultural centers of the time.4 Subsequent events, such as the Wiener Musik- und Theaterfest (Vienna Music and Theater Festival) in the autumn of 1924, the

O

“WEIßE STRÜMPFE ODER NEUE KUTTEN” ♦ 33

Arbeitersinfonie Konzerte (Workers’ Symphony Concerts), and the music festival of 1932 also showed that vigor and artistic innovation still presided in the former Habsburg capital despite the loss to Berlin of so many performing artists and musicians.5 Philosophy continued to flourish in the activities of the Wiener Kreis (Vienna Circle), as did the sciences. Eight Nobel prizes were awarded between 1918 and 1938 and many more were handed out post-1945 to Viennese thinkers whose careers first peaked dur-ing the interwar period. Art had admittedly suffered a major setback with the deaths of Klimt, Schiele, and Koloman Moser in 1918. That flourishing of the fine arts forever associated with the fin-de-siècle Secessionists was over, partly because innate Viennese conservatism was not prepared to go the ex-tra mile and embrace non-figurative art in the 1920s, and partly because the necessary patrons were lacking in an economically weakened environment. Nevertheless, the Vienna Museum’s 2006 exhibition on the abstract art of Kinetismus in the early 1920s showed that Viennese variants of modernism were being developed even during this period, although the stars of this movement subsequently moved north to Berlin or the Scandinavian coun-tries, as did many other fine artists and architects.6

Viennese theater in the 1920s also suffered from an apparent lack of interest in avant-garde productions, which resulted in three major dramatists (Arnolt Bronnen, Ferdinand Bruckner, and Ödön von Horvath) finding more appreciative audiences in Berlin. However, thanks to the partial return of Max Reinhardt in 1924 and the work of Rudolf Beer (director of the Deutsches Volkstheater and the Raimundtheater), some innovation did take place, and there were even successful performances of several key revolutionary dramas in Vienna in the late 1920s. Friedrich Wolf’s Cyankali (Cyanide) and Die Matrosen von Cattaro (The Sailors of Cattaro), Peter Martin Lampel’s Revolte im Erziehungshaus (Revolt in the Reformatory), and Sergei Tretjakov’s ultrarevolutionary Brülle China (Roar China) were all staged in major theaters.7 Despite being held back by the tremendous capital costs involved and the lure of Berlin for its directors and screenwriters, Austrian film achieved several notable successes. Vienna also became a center of excellence for both modern dance and photography. On balance, one can argue that despite its economic problems, the city sustained a healthy dy-namism in all the arts. This was especially true of initiatives supported by the left, even though the primary concern of Vienna’s socialist administration was to improve the education, health, and general welfare of the working-class population.

To better understand the complexity of Viennese cultural policy during the interwar years, two aspects of 1920s Vienna need to be highlighted, the one artistic, the other political. The first was outlined by Robert Musil in an interview published in 1928 in the New Year’s Day edition of the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung. Despite claiming no interest in politics, he pointed out the paradoxical situation in Austria whereby the culture of the left (the Social

34 ♦ JOHN WARREN

Democrats) had taken over what had been the role of the liberal bourgeoisie, namely, the defense and furtherance of humanist ideals and freethinking.8 As was already noted, most avant-garde culture in Vienna at the time was supported by the left and was therefore closely intertwined with city politics. The second problem was that of Lagermentalität — the increasingly rigid division between left and right that obliterated any prospect of a democratic party of the center. By anyone’s standards the creators of “Red Vienna” were certainly Social Democrats rather than revolutionary Marxists. Nevertheless, the rise of the conservative Christian Social Party in the provinces, the impact of the Russian Revolution, and the socialists’ own radical rhetoric all contributed to their political isolation on a national level.9 Members of the bourgeoisie who were unwilling to support a supposedly Marxist party found themselves perhaps further to the right than they might have liked, and many — especially talented journalists — chose emigration to Weimar Germany.10 Emigration, as we shall see, was to prove a decisive factor in the weakening of Austria’s cultural life.

Initially the promotion of major cultural events in Vienna during the First Republic was shared between the Social Democratic city administration and the national government, with the Christian Social president always ready to open an exhibition or a new building (such as the great stadium in the Prater in 1931) even if these were socialist-inspired. Through the Ministry of Education the national government controlled both the opera and the Burgtheater (which, together with the Akademietheater, formed Austria’s “national” theater). As a result of this smooth cooperation between city and state, Vienna was able to launch a series of major festivals of music and drama — such as the Musik- und Theaterfest of 1924 — as well as to host events as diverse as the fourteenth international Zionist congress in 1925, the tenth Deutsche Sängerbundfest (German Festival of Choirs) in 1928, and the Second International Workers’ Olympics in 1931. But Aus-tria’s precarious economic state, its constant recourse to international loans, and the subsequent failures of major Austrian banks did not augur well, nor did the growth of right-wing political and paramilitary groupings such as the Christian Social Heimwehr (Home Guard). As the economic situation wors-ened, the Social Democratic Party rejected a proposal of coalition with the Christian Social Party. On 20 May 1932 the Christian Social leader Engel-bert Dollfuss became chancellor of Austria by a slim majority of just one vote, and after the Austrian parliament dissolved itself on 4 March 1933, he ruled by emergency decree. Urged on by Mussolini,11 he drove the Social Democrats to stage the uncoordinated uprising of 12–16 February 1934. The years 1932–34 saw a series of police attacks on Social Democratic or-ganizations, including a virtual siege of the Simmeringer Arbeiterheim (the party headquarters and recreational center in Vienna’s Simmering district). Full details were disclosed on 27 October 1932 in a two-page spread of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, together with photographic evidence. The police had


occupied the building for ten days, leaving behind a trail of devastation. Supposedly searching for illegal weapons, they smashed and destroyed everything in the building, including the bust of Victor Adler, the party’s revered founder. Events such as this, with their detailed accounting in the Social Democratic press, eventually culminated in the decision of party members in Linz to offer armed resistance to a similar raid there on 12 February 1934. This sparked a grassroots reaction across the country that the party leadership could or would not support. The provocation offered the Social Democrats was thoroughly planned and executed, as evidenced by Major Emil Fey’s radio broadcast on the evening of 11 February, in which he had announced to a gathering of the Heimwehr that Dollfuss was with them and that “wir werden morgen an die Arbeit gehen und wir werden ganze Arbeit leisten!” (we will set to work tomorrow and do the job thoroughly!).

Vienna after 1934 Although the uprising lasted only four days, the consequences for Austria and its cultural life were disastrous. The immediate aftermath was characterized by ruthless action against anyone and anything that could be associated with the Social Democratic movement. Karl Seitz, the sixty-five-year-old Viennese mayor, was dragged, protesting, from his office and imprisoned. Although he had retired two years earlier, Hugo Breitner, Vienna’s former treasurer, was also arrested, as was Robert Danneberg, who had taken over the city’s finances. Danneberg was to be imprisoned for extended periods after 1934 before being murdered in Auschwitz by the National Socialists in 1942. Otto Glöckel, leading light of the Stadtschulrat (City School Board), whose educational reforms were praised throughout Europe, was also arrested and died the following year.12 City councillor Julius Tandler, who had served the Viennese through his welfare and health reform programs, was likewise arrested following his return from an advisory visit to China.

More important than the effect on Social Democratic politicians and functionaries was the impact on the working class. Because Social Democracy had in effect functioned as a state within a state, Austria — and, in particular, Vienna — had a great deal to lose as a result of the events of February 1934, including its working-class cultural educational and welfare system. This aspect of Red Vienna had been the focus of worldwide attention in 1929 — especially by British politicians such as Herbert Morrison (later head of the London County Council) and Jennie Lee (later Minister for the Arts).13 Visitors from around the world had come to Vienna, among them such important German writers as Thomas Mann and Gerhart Hauptmann, both of whom were fulsome in their praise for Social Democratic achievements.14

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This aspect of Vienna’s history was eclipsed in the public sphere by sub-sequent events under National Socialism until a new generation of academics again took up the topic around the fiftieth anniversary of the February uprising. Two exhibitions held in Vienna in the 1980s displayed in graphic detail a number of the political and cultural losses of February 1934: the 1981 exhibition Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit: Arbeiterkultur in Österreich, 1918–1934 (The New Age Marches with Us: Working-Class Culture in Aus-tria, 1918–1934) and its 1984 successor Die Kälte des Februars (The Cold of February).15 The first outlined the total scope of Red Vienna’s provision of housing, welfare, culture, education, sports, and clubs of every type. The second outlined the bleak results of closing down every institution bearing the words “Social Democracy” and sequestering their funds. Former socialist chancellor Bruno Kreisky, who lived through those years, contributed to the catalogue of the second exhibition of socialist subculture. He described the Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle (Social Democratic Arts Office), with its provision of cheap theater and cinema tickets, the Workers’ Symphony con-certs, the hiking and nature club Naturfreunde, the gymnastics organization Arbeiterturner, and other sporting clubs. He argued that there was some-thing for everyone, with Esperanto groups, stamp clubs, adult education groups, and the Social Democratic Schutzbund (Republican Defense League) providing welcome relief from penury and misery thanks to their activities and weekend camps. As Kreisky put it, “Diese Arbeiterkulturbewegung hatte einen Platz im Leben der Menschen eingenommen, wie man sich das heute nicht mehr vorstellen kann” (This cultural movement for the working classes occupied a place in daily life such as one cannot imagine today). The destruction of the whole structure left a terrible vacuum into which the banned National Socialists and Communists were able to step. Kreisky ar-gued that youngsters were so turned against the corporate state that they became easy prey, particularly for National Socialism.16 Joseph Buttinger’s comments reinforce this belief:

Die Auflösung der Partei war für die gläubigen Mitglieder und Ver-trauensmänner der Sozialdemokratie, selbst wenn sie ihre wirtschaftliche Existenz unberührt ließ, ein brutaler Eingriff in ihr persönliches Leben. [. . .] Die Partei zu verlieren, bedeutete für sie nicht weniger als Heimat, Vaterland, Religion verlieren.17

[The dissolution of the party was a brutal incursion into the private life of those Social Democrats who believed in the party, even if their economic world was not troubled. [. . .] Losing the party was the equivalent of losing home, fatherland, and religion.]

More important in general terms than the sense of losing a political home and the loss of a plethora of leisure activities and evening classes was the effect February 1934 had on workers’ housing, educational reform, welfare, and even a relatively small thing such as the Arbeiterbüchereien (free public


library system): seventy-two libraries were closed and only fifty-two reopened and then only after they had been “cleansed” of “Marxist” literature, which for the new regime included works by Jack London, Anton Kuh, Walter Mehring, and Kurt Tucholsky. Also on the banned list were authors such as Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Bertha von Suttner, and Hugo Bettauer.18 Equally important was the loss of the Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle, with its support of concerts, choirs, drama productions, modern dance, and lec-tures, which took place both in mainstream venues and in workers’ halls and meeting places throughout Vienna. Another major blow was the closing down of two culturally important newspapers — the Arbeiter-Zeitung and the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung — plus the many journals of the socialist press.19 Not only did this deprive their readership of information and entertainment but it also meant that an essential source of income for left-wing and inde-pendent writers had effectively dried up.20

What did Vienna and the Viennese receive in return from the new re-gime? More churches, several new centers for the homeless, the building of the Hohenstrasse road through the Vienna woods, and a welfare committee headed by the wives of the politicians Miklas, Dollfuß, Schuschnigg, and Fey.

Emigration before 1938 On 11 November 1918 Sigmund Freud noted that the Austro-Hungarian Empire no longer existed, but that he did not consider emigration a pos-sibility in his case: “Ich werde mit dem Torso weiterleben und mir einbilden, daß es das Ganze ist” (I will live on with the torso and persuade myself that it is the whole). There have always been those Viennese who rejected the idea of emigration even under duress — Grillparzer comes to mind as a notable example — but few countries have suffered as Austria did from the hemorrhaging of intellectual and artistic talent experienced during the interwar years. Most of what has been written on this topic naturally deals with the major exodus of Jewish and other Austrians after Hitler’s annexa-tion of Austria in March 1938.21 However, cultural losses due to emigration began well before the First World War, picking up in intensity during the 1920s, increasing as a result of events occurring in 1934, and reaching their peak in 1938. Friedrich Stadler has outlined the major facets of the problem, arguing very cogently that Austria — and Vienna in particular — were never really able to recover from the loss of so much talent over the twenty years of the First Republic’s existence.22

In November 1918 Stefan Großmann, one of the many Viennese jour-nalists working in Berlin, called a meeting of fellow Austrians to discuss the fate of the rump state of “Deutsch-Österreich” (German Austria) with a view to founding a “Deutsch-Österreichischer Arbeitsausschuß” (German Aus-trian Working Committee). He was surprised to discover that about a third of those working in the performing arts in the German capital were, in fact,

38 ♦ JOHN WARREN

Austrians.23 This gives some indication of Vienna’s losses prior to the First Republic, but many more were to follow throughout the 1920s: composers (Schreker, Schoenberg, Eisler, Brandt, Wilhelm Grosz); conductors (Kleiber); directors (Viertel, Lindtberg); actors (too many to name); filmmakers (Lang, Pabst, Oswald, Thiele, May, Zelnik); and innumerable journalists (Kisch and Roth, to name only the most famous). Even that most Viennese of genres, the operetta, was to move its epicenter from the Danube to the Spree. Ralph Benatzky and Robert Stolz moved to the German capital, where their works were premiered alongside those of Franz Lehár, rather than in Vienna, as had been the custom.24 If moving northward for some was purely a matter of career opportunities, others left because of antisemitism. For example, the gifted director and filmmaker Max Ophüls emigrated in 1927 after just one season at the Burgtheater in 1925–26. Conservatism in the visual arts led the avant-gardist Friedrich Kiesler to leave for Paris and the United States after completing his work for the 1924 Music and Theater Festival, while talented artist, illustrator, and stage designer Harry Täuber (the nearest Vienna had to Berlin’s George Grosz) left for Germany in 1926, never to return. The young star painters of the Franz Cižek circle (Erika Klien, Elisabeth Karlin-sky, and My Ullmann) all moved away.25 In the area of philosophy and the sciences, however, one can see that Vienna held on — at least for the mo-ment — to that band of brilliant individuals to whom Norbert Leser has drawn attention, though there were odd, significant losses: Alfred Adler to the United States in 1926; Ludwig Wittgenstein to Cambridge in 1929; and the physicist Lise Meitner to Berlin to work with Otto Hahn, the pioneer of atomic physics. The man described as the greatest constitutional lawyer of the century, Hans Kelsen, reaped the consequences of the right-wing reform of the Austrian constitution he had drawn up in 1919–20 and left in 1929.26

However, it is the years 1933 and 1934 that must engage our attention. In 1933 Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor and the rise to power of the National Socialists meant that Austrian Jews resident in Germany had to rethink their futures. Vienna might have hoped for a return of its exiles — one might recall Karl Kraus’s unkind words “Die Ratten betreten das sin-kende Schiff” (The rats are boarding the sinking ship)27 — and many did re-turn. Many others, however — particularly those who were already successful artists and understood that Austria was indeed sinking — chose to go to Paris, often as a way station to the United States. Among the most notable were Arnold Schoenberg, Fritz Lang, Ferdinand Bruckner (Theodor Tagger), Joseph Roth, Hanns Eisler, Tilla Durieux, Fritz Kortner, Vicki Baum, Lotte Lenya, and Helene Weigel. There were, of course, also Austrians in Germany not recognized at home, such as the dramatist Anna Gmeyner, who had only just begun to make her mark with two plays on the boards in Berlin, and who chose not to return for career reasons.28

Hard on the heels of Germany’s move to fascism came the abortive uprising of the Social Democrats in February 1934 and the subsequent es-


tablishment on 1 May of the Austrian corporate state, best described as a clerical-fascist government along the lines of Mussolini’s Italy. The imme-diate result was the loss of several of Austria’s most progressive figures: polymath Otto Neurath;29 Marxist critic and writer Ernst Fischer; writer Stefan Zweig, who left for England; and Julius Tandler, the pioneer of Vi-enna’s welfare and health reforms, who emigrated first to China and then Russia, where he died in 1936. They were followed by many more indi-viduals who did not find the clerical, illiberal climate conducive to creative work. Robert Neumann, the novelist and parodist whose works the Nazis burned in Germany, also left for England in 1934. Composers Egon Wellesz and Erich Wolfgang Korngold left for Oxford and Hollywood, respectively; Vienna’s left-wing pioneering sociologists Paul and Sophie Lazarsfeld and Marie Jahoda realized there would be little scope for their work under the new regime and went into exile in the United States and England, respec-tively. Paul Lazarsfeld had been awarded a Rockefeller fellowship in 1933 on the strength of his pioneering study Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal (The Unemployed of Marienthal), which dealt with the effects of long-term un-employment,30 and moved to New York. As he himself admitted, the Dollfuss regime was almost certainly right in thinking that the Viennese institute for Wirtschaftssoziologie (economic sociology) he and his colleagues had founded was antigovernment in orientation.31 In fact, Marie Jahoda was imprisoned and was only released following the intercession of English academics. She left for England in 1936, with her colleague Hans Zeisel following her abroad in 1938. Much original work had been carried out in the new science of so-ciology in the early years of the First Republic, particularly in the areas of unemployment and women’s issues. Käthe Leichter, whose works Handbuch der Frauen-Arbeit (Handbook of Women’s Work) and So leben wir (This is How We Live) represent landmarks in the development of sociology, went into hiding in 1934, worked for the illegal Socialist Party, and refused to leave Vienna because of her elderly mother. In 1940 the Nazis sent her to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died in 1942.32

And what of the fate of that distinguished body of philosophers who formed the Vienna Circle? Friedrich Stadler suggests that the exodus began after the closing down of the Verein Ernst Mach (Ernst Mach Association) in the aftermath of February 1934 and increased apace following the murder of Moritz Schlick on 22 June 1936.33 Karl Popper, the father of critical ra-tionalism, who was also associated with the Vienna Circle, took his leave of Austria in 1937. As might be expected, psychoanalysts also began to leave Vienna; after the Anschluss only three of the fifty members of the Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (Viennese Psychoanalytical Federation) re-mained.34 As the preceding illustrates, it was predominantly Jews who, dis-heartened or directly affected by the antisemitism of the corporate state, tended to leave Vienna even before March 1938. In addition to those al-ready mentioned, art historian Ernst Gombrich, writers Elias Canetti and

40 ♦ JOHN WARREN

Manès Sperber, architect Joseph Frank, dancer Gertrud Kraus, and many others joined the “brain drain” that so depleted Austrian cultural and intel-lectual life. Kraus was politically engaged and actively interested in the Zionist movement. She left Vienna for what was then Palestine, where she intro-duced modern dance. Though the number of those who left Vienna before 1938 pales in comparison to those exiled and killed following the Anschluss, these examples indicate to what extent Vienna’s losses of creative and intel-lectual talent actually preceded the Nazi takeover, a phenomenon that re-mained unique among small European states.35

Viennese Culture under the Corporate State The years of the authoritarian corporate state proved to be a complicated and unhappy period of Viennese cultural history. Many writers demonstrated enthusiasm for the German National Socialist cause,36 whereas the govern-ment strove to encourage literature that was Christian (which meant Catho-lic) and “healthy” (which meant from the country as opposed to the city). A mention of the Mae West film Lady Lou by Hans Brecka, the drama critic of the official newspaper Reichspost, gives a good idea of the new critical cli-mate. He calls it a “Schandfilm” (disgraceful film) which mustn’t survive the premiere, “wenn das wieder christlich gewordene Wien dieser Namen mit Recht tragen will. Die Behörden haben das Wort!” (if the reborn Christian Vienna wants to bear that name by right. It is up to the authorities!).37 Official religion was extremely important for the corporate state. On 11 September 1933, in a speech to his massed supporters, known as the Vater-ländische Front (Fatherland Front), Dollfuss described the Pope’s most recent utterances as ideal political instruments in Austria’s reorganization:

Wir brauchen uns nur an die letzten Enzykliken des Heiligen Vaters zu halten; sie sind uns Wegweiser für die Gestaltung des Staatswesens in unserer Heimat. [. . .] Wir haben den Ehrgeiz, das erste Land zu sein, das dem Ruf dieser herrlichen Enzyklika im Staatsleben Folge leistet.38

[We need only to follow the latest encyclicals of the Holy Father: they show us the way in creating the form of government for our homeland. [. . .] It is our ambition to be the first country to follow the call of these magnificent encyclicals in the life of our state.]

At this point Dollfuss was already ruling by emergency decree without a par-liament. On 23 September orders were given for the construction of the first internment camp in Austria at Wöllersdorf. It is also worth noting that under the rule of the corporate state the Austrian president, both chancellors, thirteen ministers of state, and many others (including 70 percent of the provincial councillors) were all members of the Cartell Verband, an elite Catholic fraternity.39 The attitude of the clergy vis à vis the corporate state can best be summed up in the words of Rudolf Blüml (former secretary to


Chancellor Seipel), who in 1935 urged Austrians: “‘Hinein in die himm-lisch- vaterländische Front,’ die den Einbruch der satanischen Weltarmee ins Reich Gottes abwehren will! Heraus aus der Defensive in die Offensive! Heraus aus der katholischen Reaktion in die katholische Aktion!” (“Join the heavenly fatherland front,” which will defend us from the satanic armies of the world invading the kingdom of God. Leave the defensive and go onto the offensive! From Catholic reaction to Catholic action!).40

Accustomed as they were to the annual May Day parade around the Ring by Social Democratic and workers’ groups, the citizens of Vienna needed no further instruction on the regime’s politics in May 1934 as they witnessed a revue depicting the fight of Western, Germanic Austria against the “bolshe-vist” East, written by Rudolf Henz, one of the key figures directing the new cultural policies.41 The regime’s uncompromising attitude to left-wing poli-tics, plus the strong, ever-present antisemitism of the ruling clerical caste, precluded any fair evaluation or appreciation of Vienna’s existing literary scene. In his younger days Dollfuss himself had been a spokesperson for the Antisemitenbund (Association of Antisemites). Julius Raab (then leader of the Lower Austrian Heimwehr) called Otto Bauer “ein Saujud” (dirty Jew) and Bishop Gföllner’s antisemitic comments were widely reported.42 Franz Theodor Csokor captured the all-pervasive antisemitism of the age in his play 3 November 1918 when, in the second act, the racist Carinthian officer Ludoltz turns on the Jewish regimental doctor Grün with the words “auf Geist dieser Art wird verzichtet — und auf euren Geist ganz besonders! Wind aus der Wüste” (we will do without ideas of that kind, without your ideas in par-ticular. Nothing but wind from the desert).43 Insult was added to injury, as it were, when Burgtheater director Hermann Röbbeling cut the doctor’s line “Erde aus Österreich” (Austrian earth) at Colonel Radosin’s funeral because he feared demonstrations. Röbbeling was not prepared to give voice to the idea that a Jewish mourner could represent the whole of the multinational empire under the name of Austria when placing earth on the protagonist’s grave.

Not only was antisemitism on the increase, but the relatively free de-velopment and advancement of women in society also came to an abrupt halt. Women had been elected to parliament in the 1920s (winning as many as ten seats, nine of them Social Democratic) and optimism was so high that in 1929 the Österreichische Frauenpartei (Austrian Women’s Party) was founded, one of whose aims was to bridge the Lagermentalität (two- camp mentality) and heal the country’s political divide. It elected Marianne Hainisch, a veteran of the moderate women’s movement, as its president. However, nothing came of this and under Dollfuss’s authoritarian regime women disappeared completely from the political scene.44

The years 1934 through 1938 have been well covered by literary and cultural historians, but since most of the studies of the period have been wri-tten by those hostile to the ideology of the ruling regime, it is worth focus-

42 ♦ JOHN WARREN

ing on two eyewitnesses who stood outside the political battle to a certain extent: Franz Theodor Csokor and Robert Musil. The latter’s somewhat jaundiced comments on the corporate state can be read in his diary entries, where one senses the biased feelings of a great writer suffering from a lack of recognition and support.45 Csokor was an entirely different case. The col-lection of letters published under the title Zeuge einer Zeit (Witness to an Era) in 1964 provide an insight into a “third world” in Vienna where, as he put it, “Man muß sich eben entscheiden: Gutes Geschäft oder gutes Ge-wissen? Ich bin für das zweite — auf jede Gefahr hin, selbst auf die Emigra-tion, falls der braune Zauber auch bei uns einmal Fuß fassen sollte!” (One has to decide: good business or a clear conscience? I am for the latter — in the face of any danger, even that of emigration, should the “brown magic” [i.e., National Socialism] ever take hold in this country as well!).46 Csokor supported the Austrian writers’ resolution at the 1934 PEN Club meeting condemning the Nazi book burnings of 10 May 1933, meaning that his work was banned in Germany.47 He did indeed choose to go into voluntary exile in March 1938, although there was no pressure on him to do so. His letters bear witness to the gentle irony with which he resisted invitations to reconcile himself with the National Socialist regime. They should be read by anyone interested in 1930s Vienna for their sane and independent view of events and their awareness that men such as himself and Horváth — and he might have added Musil and Broch — were already living in a kind of “exile.”48

Given this atmosphere of political repression, it is not surprising that regression can be seen in almost all areas of cultural and intellectual life in Vienna under the corporate state. Starting with the literary scene, one has only to read Horst Jarka’s essay on the theater and literary politics of the time to understand how the cultural policies of the corporate state affected writers.49 When one sees who was nominated for state literary prizes and whom the right-wing juries ignored, one can understand his conclusion: “Die völkisch-katholische Literaturideologie bestimmte die ästhetische Wertung, garantierte die allgemein-verständliche Mittelmäßigkeit” (A Catholic, racist ideology of literature determined the aesthetic evaluation and guaranteed a mediocrity of the lowest common denominator).50 None of the prizewinners or those nominated for prizes were on the National Socialist list of forbidden authors and none were Jews. Ernst Scheibelreiter was awarded the poetry prize, while Theodor Kramer and Ernst Waldinger were not even con-sidered. Similarly, Hermann Broch and Elias Canetti were ignored in favor of such minor novelists as Friedrich Perkonig and Karl Heinrich Waggerl. In light of this discrimination, Csokor’s remarks about writers already being exiles in their own land and Musil’s bitter diary entries seem entirely justified.

Turning to the theater, the case of Maria Gutmann shows how things had changed. A talented actress, she had become the first woman to direct plays at a major theater in Vienna. Unfortunately for her, she was a fourfold


suspect in the eyes of the corporate state: a keen socialist, a producer of revo-lutionary drama, a woman, and a Jew.51 However, thanks to the appointment in 1932 of the experienced German theater practitioner Hermann Röbbeling as director, the state-run Burgtheater and Akademietheater were able to maintain a successful repertoire while paying attention to the requirements of the corporate state. The two cycles Stimmen der Völker im Drama (Voices of the People in Drama) and Österreichische Meisterwerke (Austrian Master-works) were particularly impressive, the former helping to strengthen rela-tionships with neighboring states and the latter reinforcing the concept of Austria.52 However, political interference can be seen affecting the theater as early as 22 April 1933 with the premiere of the Mussolini/Forzano “Na-poleon play” Hundert Tage (One Hundred Days), the fourth play in Röbbel-ing’s cycle Stimmen der Völker im Drama — and not just as an attempt to help cement the Mussolini alliance. Dollfuss having abolished parliamentary democracy a few weeks earlier, Hans Sassmann now adapted the original German translation of the play, stressing the need for a dictatorship and inserting the following words: “Ich könnte die Verfassung beseitigen, denn eine Verfassung hat sich selbst widerlegt, wenn sie die Handlungen der Regierenden stört” (I could set aside the constitution, for a constitution has already revoked itself if it interferes with the acts of those in government).53 “Patriotic” Grillparzer productions were staged both at the Theater in der Josefstadt and the Burgtheater, while the play chosen to represent Austria at the Paris World Exhibition of 1937 was Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Das Salz-burger große Welttheater in a new production by Raoul Aslan that was per-formed on 30 May 1937. No play could have presented the ideals of the new Austrian government more suitably. Through the use of Baroque Catholic imagery, it preaches medieval hierarchy as a response to the threat of bol-shevism. Arthur Schnitzler, the one Viennese dramatist whom the French might have recognized, was not even present among the writers listed in the Austrian pavilion in Paris.54

Political intervention in the theater was institutionalized in the form of Hans Brecka’s Österreichische Kunststelle (Austrian Arts Office), to which all plays had to be submitted for approval if they expected government sup-port. There was a plethora of historical dramas and plays of the Bilderbogen type (constructed without a central conflict and consisting of a series of loosely related scenes). These had begun with Richard Duschinsky’s incredi-bly successful Kaiser Franz Josef der Erste von Österreich (Emperor Franz Josef the First of Austria) and continued with Hans Naderer’s Lueger,55 which celebrated the antisemitic mayor of Vienna from before the First World War. In keeping with the general nostalgia for the “good old days,” this genre culminated in Georg Rendl’s play Elisabeth Kaiserin von Österreich (Elisa-beth, Empress of Austria) starring the beautiful Sybille Binder, which played first at the Deutsches Volkstheater and then at the Scala right up to 3 March 1938. It provided a final escapist evening as a backdrop to the buildup

44 ♦ JOHN WARREN

of political events that were to end in Anschluss and the loss of Austrian independence.

While historical drama and light comedy continued to dominate the stage, there was a notable absence of any drama of even remotely left-wing political persuasion or of modernist tendency. This spelled the end for dramatists such as Bruckner and Horváth. Csokor himself, author of a revolutionary play on Georg Büchner and his circle entitled Gesellschaft der Menschenrechte (Society of Human Rights), which had been staged at the Burgtheater in 1931, eventually managed to get his mystery play Thüringer Spiel von den zehn Jungfrauen (The Thuringian Play of the Ten Virgins) staged — albeit without the German reference to Thuringia in the title. He also translated Zygmunt Krasinski’s play Die ungöttliche Komödie (The Ungodly Comedy) from the Polish for a performance in the cycle Stimmen der Völker im Drama. This earned him a medal from the Poles and provided an opportunity to leave Austria in 1938. His play on the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire entitled 3 November 1918 was only staged on 10 March 1937 after much in-trigue. A fascinating document of its time, it was somehow able to please most factions of a divided community.56

Thanks to a tradition of excellence that had reached its apex under the directorship of Gustav Mahler, and assisted by the number of fine singers associated with the house, the Vienna Opera had continued to flourish throughout the 1920s. The name was changed from the k. k. Hof-Opern-theater (Imperial Royal Court Opera Theater) to the simpler Operntheater (Opera Theater) on 4 December 1918. Richard Strauss, the most famous German operatic composer of the time, served as its codirector from 16 August 1919 until 31 October 1924, five years that helped boost the house’s prestige.57 Interestingly, despite economic retrenchment and a general lack of commitment to avant-garde art, the repertoire was open to contemporary work. Admittedly it took Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, the modernist opera par excellence, five years to reach Vienna following its triumphant premiere in Berlin in 1925 under the Viennese conductor Erich Kleiber. Nevertheless, the Operntheater staged new operas by Strauss, Franz Schreker, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hans Pfitzner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Igor Stravinsky, Egon Wellesz, Paul Hindemith, Franz Schmidt, and Ernst Krenek. Schoen-berg’s work was performed at the Volksoper and the Viennese also had the chance to experience both Brecht/Weill “operas.” However, this relatively open approach to new opera ceased in 1934. Although new work was per-formed, it was work not likely to offend either the traditionalists or the ruling caste. One finds both operettas (e.g., Franz Lehár’s Giuditta [Judith] and Das Land des Lächelns [The Land of Smiles]) and colorful, innocuous ballet productions (e.g., Margarete Wallmann’s Fanny Elβler, Österreichische Bauernhochzeit [Austrian Country Wedding] and Der liebe Augustin [Dear Old Augustin]) appearing in the house where Mahler had transformed operatic production. Because of the modernity of the score and suggestions


of left-wing influences, not even Ernst Krenek’s opera on the Habsburg emperor Charles V was acceptable — something which, due to its theme, might otherwise have been welcomed by the Ministry of Education.58 In a realm where international cooperation is the norm for directors, conductors, and singers, one story is worth telling that links opera to the theme of emigration. Clemens Krauss, director since 1929, chose to accept the post of opera director in Berlin a few months after the murder of Dollfuss in July 1934. When he conducted Verdi’s Falstaff at the Vienna Operntheater in December of the same year, there were vociferous protests in the house — despite the presence of more police in the gallery than usual — and Krauss was advised to leave the city immediately, which he did, taking many leading singers to Berlin with him.59

Modern dance, by which is meant freier Tanz (free dance) and Aus-druckstanz (expressive dance), had firmly established itself in Vienna in the 1920s.60 It was, however, quickly proscribed by the corporate state. Begin-ning in May 1934 there was a shift of emphasis that resulted in the early emigration of several key figures. Margarete Wallmann, who had returned to Vienna from Berlin in 1933, was forced to toe the line.61 As was already men-tioned, Gertrud Kraus, one of Vienna’s leading exponents of modern dance, emigrated in 1935 as a result of the political situation and overt antisemitism.

Although dance had been the surprising success story of the 1920s, Austria was never destined to be among the major film-producing countries despite its many important silent films. The capital investment was not there and the power of Babelsberg and other German studios meant that Austrian film producers flocked northward during the 1920s. Among the most nota-ble were Fritz Lang, Georg Wilhem Pabst, Richard Oswald, Gustav Ucicky, Walter Reisch, Robert Wiene, Paul Czinner, Carl Mayer, and Emeric Press-burger. Although some returned briefly to Vienna, the majority made their way directly to London or the United States. Still others had already headed straight for Hollywood, including Michael Kertesz (Curtiz) and then Otto Preminger.62 Following a period of cooperation between Berlin and Vienna at the beginning of the 1930s, resulting in the production of several inter-esting talkies, the situation changed in 1933. If the minuscule Austrian film industry was to survive, it had to continue to export its films to Germany.63 The problem was much the same as with Austrian Jewish writers: there was to be no market in National Socialist Germany, the authorities having ruled that there should be no Jewish personnel employed in any German-speaking film imported into the Third Reich. Ekstase (Ecstasy, 1933) and Mysterium des Geschlechts (The Mystery of Sex, 1933) were both banned in Germany and the distribution of three films that had already been sold to the Germans was blocked.64 Independent producers looked to the government for sup-port. On 27 March 1934 Richard Oswald wrote from London to Fritz Stockinger, the trade minister, complaining about Austrian film policy and pointing out that the Germans were quite happy to import American, Eng-

46 ♦ JOHN WARREN

lish, or French films without worrying about the race of the participants, cit-ing as examples Henry VIII, Grand Hotel, and Dinner at Eight. Given the increasingly antisemitic environment, the letter made him few friends in Austria.65 The fate of the Austrian film industry in those unhappy years was perhaps best summed up by Graham Greene (then writing film reviews): “Austrian films are born dead: horrible bright fakes from a ruined country, libelous laughter.”66

As far as music was concerned, it was clear that in spite of Vienna’s position as the home of modern music (epitomized by Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School), the struggle to maintain a secure place on the Viennese concert scene had been hard and unremitting for Vienna’s contemporary com-posers. But progress had been made. The last truly successful gathering of contemporary musicians in Vienna was to take place in June 1932 at the Tenth International Music Festival of the International Society for New Music, within the framework of the Vienna Festival.67 One of the special events of the festival was a performance in the Akademietheater of Goethe’s rarely performed Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (The Triumph of Sensibility) with music by Ernst Krenek.68 Another high point was a workers’ symphonic concert conducted by Anton Webern that included music by Mahler, Schoenberg, and Alban Berg.69 This series of concerts, which had given so much pleasure to working-class audiences, was closed down in the aftermath of February 1934.70 During the week of the festival works by many con-temporary composers were performed: in addition to the Austrians Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Krenek (whose song cycle Durch die Nacht [Through the Night], a setting of Karl Kraus’s poems, was featured), and Josef Hauer, there were works by Nikolai Lopatnikoff, Miroslav Ponc, Karel Habai, Claude Delvincourt, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Fidelio Funke, Boleslav Wojtowicz, Josef Mendic, Norbert von Hanneheim, Hans Jellinek, and Arthur Bliss. This festival was to mark the final flourish of musical modernism in Vienna. The events of 1933–34 meant that Vienna was to gain no input from Austrian composers returning from Berlin. Schoenberg left for Paris on his way to the United States, and although Hanns Eisler did return for a short while at the invitation of Anton Webern, he found no prospects in the Austrian capital and moved on.71 The situation deteriorated even further un-der the corporate state, leading to the emigration of Egon Wellesz and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

During the 1920s Austrian radio, based almost entirely in Vienna, had shown considerable inventiveness. The Österreichische Radio-Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft, or RAVAG (Austrian Radio Traffic Corporation), was cre-ated in 1924 with an obligation to uphold political neutrality.72 However, already in March 1933 the Christian Social government began to interfere with its independence. A series of talks to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Karl Marx was struck from the schedules, while names such as Fer-dinand Hanusch (the founder of Austrian social policy) and Sigmund Freud


were also removed from radio talks.73 Ewald G. Binder charts the experi-mental and social drama performed on Austrian radio between 1928 and 1933, noting that after 1934 there was a return to purely literary texts. He argues that “das rundfunkeigene Hörspiel” (plays created for radio) disap-peared almost completely and that what was heard on air reflected how “die zunehmende Verbauerung des kulturellen Lebens in Österreich nach 1934 auch in allen Programmsformen des Rundfunks zutage trat” (the increasing “countrification” of cultural life in Austria after 1934 was also revealed in all forms of broadcasting).74 Occasional high points, such as Shakespearean pro-ductions, still stood out, but experimental pieces or those dealing with con-temporary urban problems had disappeared from radio programming.

Turning to architecture, in view of the tremendous building programs of the Social Democratic administration, it is obvious that Vienna had no dearth of talented architects during the interwar period. They included Adolf Loos, Oscar Strnad, Ernst Lichtblau, Clemens Holzmeister, Josef Frank, and Ernst Plischke, to name but a few. That their achievements — the public housing and buildings of Red Vienna aside — never matched what happened in Berlin was largely due to Austria’s financial state and lack of wealthy patrons. In a book on modern Austrian architecture Ottokar Uhl produced a survey of interesting buildings, which nevertheless shows that architectural modernism seemed to die out after 1933–34. Its final flourish (albeit in small format) was the Internationale Werkbund Siedlung (an international housing settlement for designers and craftspeople) of 1932. This still stands today, and its design and construction was supported by the city of Vienna. Two Austrian architects already working abroad, Richard Neutra and Josef Frank, drew up the list of invitations for this international project. There were no invitations for Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, or Mies van der Rohe (presumably because the theme was small dwellings). In addition to Austrian architects already established abroad, such as Arthur Grünberger (from the United States) and Margarete Schütte-Lihotsky (from Moscow), Hugo Häring was invited from Germany, Gerrit Rietveld from Holland, and Gab-riel Guevrekian and André Lurçat from France. Following this cooperative effort, there was little of architectural interest built under the corporate state apart from Clemens Holzmeister’s Seipel-Dollfuss church, begun in 1933 and consecrated after Dollfuss’s murder in 1934.75

A footnote to the architecture of this period is provided by an exhibition held in Vienna in 1999–2000 devoted to buildings planned but never built.76 It is interesting to compare pre-1934 projects with those of the corporate state. Eric Leischner’s 1928 plans for extending the sports facilities in the Prater reflect the positive approach of Red Vienna, while the modernist vision of Ernst Plischke, epitomized by his skyscraper “Zeho” (1926), would have been an exciting addition to Vienna’s small-scale skyline.77 Rudolf Perco’s 1933 plans for a church in memory of Ignaz Seipel and his “Reunions-gedächtnisdomanlage ‘Die Zelte Davids’” (reunion memorial cathedral com-

48 ♦ JOHN WARREN

plex “David’s Tents”) of 1934 clearly show the influence of contemporary Italian fascist architecture,78 while Leopold Bauer’s skyscraper project “Frei-heit dem Vaterland” (freedom for the fatherland), a vast building crowned with a gigantic cross, which was to have dominated the Karlsplatz, was thank-fully never built. Also in 1934 Leopold Bauer created plans for a Dollfuss square containing a memorial to Emperor Franz Josef, thus combining two reactionary political statements in a single project.79 The difference between the aspirations of Red Vienna and those of the Dollfuss/Schuschnigg regime under the corporate state could not be more clearly articulated than in the catalogue of this exhibition.

To balance this tale of regression, a paradoxical note of innovation is to be found in the post-1934 Viennese cultural scene in the development of political cabaret. The political comment central to much Berlin cabaret dur-ing the 1920s had been absent from Vienna, and politics had only begun to feature the cabaret performances of the Social Democratic cabaret group toward the end of the decade.80 Thanks to a loophole in the law whereby theaters with fewer than fifty seats were not subject to censorship, beginning in 1934 there was a flourishing of cabaret activity at Kellerbühne (small the-aters housed in cellars), a fact that has been well documented in a number of studies. Der liebe Augustin, Literatur am Naschmarkt, Die Stachelbeere, and Das ABC were the most famous of these small cabarets.81 They produced a large number of witty political commentators and parodists, many of whom were lost in the horrors of the Holocaust, although some returned to enliven Vienna’s cultural life in the post-1945 era (among them Stella Kadmon, who returned from Palestine to found the lively small theatre Die Courage). Most famous of this talented generation was Jura Soyfer (who died in Buchen-wald), whose creation of the Mittelstück (a short, witty drama of socio-poli-tical content performed between the two breaks for the sale of refreshments) has been preserved thanks to the devoted work of Horst Jarka.82 Although Soyfer’s political poetry and chansons are of a very high standard, he lacked a talented composer as partner. Had Hanns Eisler remained in Vienna in 1933 and teamed up with Jura Soyfer, they could have rivaled the Tucholsky/ Eisler partnership in Berlin.

In a state where, despite the pressures of unemployment and economic instability, Vienna could fairly claim to be a world leader in the realm of philosophy and sociology, as well as many areas of science and medicine; where modern music, opera, and theater were becoming accepted; where many interesting buildings were constructed in the modernist idiom; and where the great majority of working-class inhabitants were better housed and cared for than in any other city in Europe, the years 1933–34 brought the loss of democracy, the closure of cultural institutions, and ideological censorship, which transformed Vienna into the “sunken city” of Soyfer’s Mittelstück entitled Vineta.83 As one reads recent publications praising the


corporate state for its efforts to resist Hitler’s Germany, it is hard not to ques-tion whether their authors realize what Austria’s first loss had really been.84

As Edward Timms has stated, “The cardinal weakness of Austrian poli-tics was a preponderance of dogma. Both the Marxists and the Christian Socials were committed to doctrines of political redemption which left little scope for compromise.”85 The last word on that unhappy gulf between left and right can be left to an article published in the popular middle-class mag-azine Die Bühne (The Stage), which was not devoted, as one might suppose, to the theater but rather to the whole gamut of upper-middle-class social life and interests, including fashion, sports, travel, and motor cars. In the December 1930 issue one finds the illustrated article “Das unbekannte neue Wien” (Unknown New Vienna) devoted, somewhat surprisingly, to the so-cialist building program. Pictures of the Karl-Marx-Hof (a residential com-plex) are followed by others — a new schoolroom, a kindergarten — and accompanied by a text that must have been anathema to some of its read-ership. The author (E.H.) points out that “Der Parteien Hass und Gunst ließ den Wienern nicht zum Bewußtsein kommen, daß sie Zeitgenossen einer kulturgeschichtlichen Periode ihrer Stadt sind, die sicher einst zu den glanz-vollsten gezählt wird, und deren bleibende Werte zu späteren Jahrhunderten sprechen werden” (The hatred and favoritism of the political parties prevents the Viennese from realizing that culturally they are living in a period of historical significance, one that surely will be counted among the most splen-did and whose values will speak to future centuries). The article goes on to suggest that Viennese who walked round their city with visitors must be as-tounded at what had been achieved. The journalist admonishes his or her readers not to let “die Parteibrille” (party spectacles) blind them to the fact that much that is great and beautiful had been created in Vienna, things that the city’s controversial administration will be thanked for in the future. Just over three years after this article was published, many of these buildings were shelled during the February uprising, yet they still stand today as a monu-ment to Red Vienna and a former tragically divided nation.86

Notes The quotation in the chapter title is taken from Robert Musil, Tagebücher, vol. 1, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976), 893. Musil was commenting on his contemporaries under the corporate state, where it seemed that one was either National Socialist (wearing white stockings) or “clerical” (wearing cowls).

1 Aufbruch und Untergang: Österreichische Kultur zwischen 1918 und 1938, ed. Franz Kadrnoska (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1981). 2 See the recent two-volume history . . . der Rest ist Österreich: Das Werden der Ersten Republik, ed. Helmut Konrad and Wolfgang Maderthaner (Vienna: Carl Gerolds Sohn, 2008); see also Österreich im 20. Jahrhundert: Von der Monarchie bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Rolf Steininger and Michael Gehler (Vienna: Böhlau, 1997).

50 ♦ JOHN WARREN

3 Norbert Leser, “Das geistige Leben Wiens in der Zwischenkriegszeit” in Genius Austriacus: Beiträge zur politischen Geschichte und Geistesgeschichte Österreichs (Vienna: Böhlau, 1986), 243. 4 The opera, with stage sets by Alfred Roller, was conducted by the composer, and starred Maria Jeritza, Lotte Lehmann, and Richard Mayr. The librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal was in the audience. 5 See my article “David Josef Bach and the ‘Musik- und Theaterfest’ of 1924” in Austrian Studies 14: Culture and Politics in Red Vienna (2006): 119–42. 6 Kinetismus: Wien entdeckt die Avantgarde (exhib. cat.), ed. Wolfgang Kos, Monika Platzer, and Ursula Storch (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2006). 7 See Elisabeth Epp, Erinnerungen: Aufzeichnungen eines Theaterlebens (Vienna: Holz-hausen, 2000), 54. Following its premiere at the Neues Wiener Schauspielhaus, the production of Brülle China ran for a month at various adult education centers for the Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle (Social Democrat Arts Office), organized by David Josef Bach. 8 Musil claimed that “die Verteidigung und Weiterbildung des freigeistigen, humanen, ursprünglich bürgerlichen Ideenkreises heute von der Sozialdemokratie — vielfach gegen den Widerstand der Bürgerlichen — besorgt wird” (the defense and develop-ment of the free-thinking, humane, originally middle-class sphere of ideas is carried out today by the Social Democrats — often with the opposition of the middle class). Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 January 1928; see Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Adolf Frisé, vol. 9 (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 1719. 9 For the way in which the Christian Socials exploited middle-class fear of the “red terror,” see John W. Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995). 10 Friedrich Achberger, “Lehrstück Weimar? Österreichische Perspektiven auf den Untergang der Deutschen Republik,” in Weimars Ende, ed. Thomas Koebner (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 400–420. 11 See “Der Führer bin ich selbst,” in Engelbert Dollfuβ — Benito Mussolini: Briefwechsel, ed. Wolfgang Maderthaner and Michaela Maier (Vienna: Löcker, 2004). 12 See Ernst Glaser, Im Umfeld des Austro-Marxismus (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1981), 301–47. The chapter “Pädagogik” provides a good introduction to socialist school reform, workers’ education, and adult education. 13 See Friedrich Scheu, Österreichs Schicksalskurve, 1929–1938 (Vienna: Fritz Molden, 1972), 45–47. 14 Their comments were made the most of in the Arbeiter-Zeitung; see, e.g., the front page for 23 April 1932, which cited Hauptmann’s praise for Vienna as “die Stadt der wahren Sozialreform” (the city of true social reform). On 22 October 1932 Thomas Mann gave a talk on culture and socialism, materialism, democracy and nationalism at the Ottakring Volksheim. This was followed the next day by a front-page article entitled “Thomas Mann und der Sozialismus.” For further details, see Deborah Holmes, “Politisierung eines Unpolitischen? Thomas Mann and Socialism, 1918–1933,” Oxford German Studies 34, no. 2 (2005): 189–96. 15 See the following exhibition catalogues: Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit: Arbeiterkultur in Österreich, 1918–1934, ed. Helene Maimann et al. (Vienna: Habarta und Habarta,


1981); and Die Kälte des Februars, ed. Helene Maimann and Siegfried Mattl (Vienna: Junius Verlag, 1984). 16 Die Kälte des Februars, ed. Maimann and Mattl, 131. 17 Das Ende einer Massenpartei, quoted in Alfred Pfoser, Literatur und Austromarxis-mus (Vienna: Löcker, 1980), 52. 18 Pfoser, Literatur und Austromarxismus, 207–43. 19 Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919–1934 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), 87–91. 20 For the role of the party press in supporting (would-be) writers, see Deborah Holmes, “The Feuilleton of the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung, 1918–1934: Production Parameters and Personality Problems” in Austrian Studies 14: Culture and Politics in Red Vienna (2006): 99–117; see esp. 114–15. 21 See, e.g., Vertreibung der Vernunft: The Cultural Exodus from Austria, ed. Peter Weiberl and Friedrich Stadler (Vienna: Löcker, 1993), 394 and 172; Austrian Studies 6: Austrian Exodus: Creative Achievements of Refugees from National Socialism (1995), in particular Ritchie Robertson’s review article “The Exodus from Austria,” 149–58; Die Vertreibung des Geistigen aus Österreich, ed. Gabrielle Koller and Gloria Withalm (Vienna: Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, 1985); and Egon Schwarz, “Mass Emigration and Intellectual Exile from National Socialism: The Austrian Case,” Austrian History Yearbook 27 (1996): 1–20. 22 Friedrich Stadler, “Die andere Kulturgeschichte: Am Beispiel von Emigration und Exil der österreichischen Intellektuellen 1930–1940,” in Österreich im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Steininger and Gehler, 499–588. 23 Stefan Großmann, Ich war begeistert (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1930), 286. 24 See Norbert Tschulik, Musiktheater in Österreich: Die Oper im 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1984), 243–46. 25 The biographical section (200–207) of the catalogue Kinetismus (see n. 6) gives a clear idea of the losses to the fine arts in Vienna as a result of emigration. 26 Leser, “Hans Kelsen (1881–1973)” in Genius Austriacus, 176–86. 27 Edward Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005), 495. 28 Heer ohne Helden was performed at the Wallner-Theater on 26 January 1930 and Automatenbuffet at the Schiffbauerdamm on 29 December 1932. The latter play was finally premiered in Vienna in 2005. 29 For an account of his life and some of his achievements, see Nancy Cartwright et al., Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996). 30 The book was written with Marie Jahoda and Hans Zeisel and published in 1933 by S. Hirzel in Leipzig. 31 Cited in Glaser, Im Umfeld des Austro-Marxismus, 361. This book, subtitled “Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte des österreichischen Sozialismus” (A Contribution to the Intellectual History of Austrian Socialism), contains a massive amount of material on all the major intellectual achievements of Vienna and its foremost figures. 32 See Herbert Steiner, Käthe Leichter: Leben und Werk (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1973).

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33 Stadler “Die andere Kulturgeschichte,” 518; see also Kurt Rudolf Fischer, “The Death of ‘Austrian Philosophy,’” in Austria in the Thirties: Culture and Politics, ed. Kenneth Segar and John Warren (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1991), 292–308. 34 See Elke Mühlleitner, Biographisches Lexikon der Psychoanalyse: Die Mitglieder der Psychologischen Mittwoch-Gesellschaft und der Wiener Psychoanalytiker Vereinigung, 1902–1938 (Tübingen: Reichmayer, 1992). 35 See, e.g., the (incomplete) list of writers who left provided by Donald Daviau in Austrian Writers and the Anschluss (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1991), xix; see also the figures given for losses to the medical faculty in Stadler, “Die andere Kulturgeschichte,” 499–558; here 526–27. 36 Klaus Amann, Der Anschluß österreichischer Schriftsteller an das Dritte Reich (Frank-furt am Main: Athenänum, 1988). This study has an excellent bibliography. 37 Reichspost, 10 March 1934, 8. 38 See Maximilian Liebmann, “Die geistige Konzeption der österreichischen Katho-likentage in der ersten Republik,” in Geistiges Leben im Österreich der ersten Republik, ed. Isabella Ackerl and Rudolf Neck (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1986), 125–75. 39 Peter Krause “CV und Politik in Österreich, 1918–1938,” in Geistiges Leben, ed. Ackerl and Neck, 104–16. 40 Ackerl and Neck, eds., Geistiges Leben, 175. The ideology of the new government has been clearly evaluated by Anton Staudinger in “‘Austria’: The Ideology of Austro-fascism,” in Austria in the Thirties, ed. Segar and Warren, 1–24. See 21 n. 1 for details of Staudinger’s German-language publications on the topic. 41 Henz was the guiding spirit in the establishment of the Vaterländisches Frontwerk “Neues Leben” (Fatherland Front Foundation “New Life”), a cultural and recreational organization modeled on fascist Italy’s Opera Nazionale Dopolavaro, founded 1 July 1936. 42 See Thomas Albrich, “Vom Vorurteil zum Pogrom: Antisemitismus von Schönerer bis Hitler,” in Österreich im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Steininger and Gehler, 309–66; see esp. 331–38 on the corporate state. 43 Franz Theodor Csokor, 3 November 1918 (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 1936), 66. 44 See Brigitte Bader-Zaar, “Women in Austrian Politics, 1890–1934,” in Austrian Wo-men in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. David F. Good, Margarete Grand-ner, and Mary Jo Maynes (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996), 59–85. 45 Robert Musil wrote in his diary: “Ich habe 1931 Wien verlassen, weil Rot und Schwarz darin einig gewesen sind, in Wildgans einen großen österreichischen Dichter verloren zu haben” (I left Vienna in 1931 because the Socialists and the Conservatives had both come to the conclusion that Wildgans was a great Austrian poet). Tagebücher, vol. 1 (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976), 924. 46 Franz Theodor Csokor, letter to Theodor Tagger dated 19 June 1933, in Zeuge einer Zeit: Briefe aus dem Exil (Munich: Albert Langen, 1964), 24. 47 The meeting was held 25–28 May in Ragusa, Italy. See Klaus Amann, P.E.N. Politik, Emigration, Nationalsozialismus: Ein österreichischer Schriftsteller Club (Vienna: Böhlau, 1984), 23–38. 48 As early as December 1933 Csokor observes: “Denn hier lebt man seelisch bereits im Exil” (For here in spirit one is already living in exile). Zeuge einer Zeit, 45.


49 Horst Jarka, “Zur Literatur- und Theaterpolitik im ‘Ständestaat,’” in Kadrnoska, Aufbruch und Untergang, 499–538; see also Friedbert Aspetsberger, Literarisches Leben im Austrofaschismus (Königstein: Hain, 1980). 50 Jarka, “Zur Literatur- und Theaterpolitik im ‘Ständestaat,’” 522. 51 See John Warren, “Women and the Performing Arts in Vienna between the Wars: Maria Gutmann, a Case for Investigation?,” http://www.users.ox.ac.uk/~oaces/ warren.html. 52 See Margret Dietrich, “Burgtheater und Öffentlichkeit in der Ersten Republik,” in Das Burgtheater und sein Publikum, ed. Margret Dietrich (Vienna: Bundesverlag, 1976), 687–88; and John Warren, “Austrian Theatre and the Corporate State,” in Austria in the Thirties, ed. Segar and Warren, 267–91. 53 Dietrich, “Burgtheater und Öffentlichkeit in der Ersten Republik,” 687. 54 Csokor, letter dated 23 October 1937, Zeuge einer Zeit, 151. 55 Warren,“Austrian Theatre and the Corporate State,” 267–91. 56 Warren,“Austrian Theatre and the Corporate State,” 283. 57 A very thorough assessment of opera in the interwar years in Vienna may be found in Susanne Rode-Breymann, Die Wiener Staatsoper in den Zwischenkriegsjahren (Tutzing, Germany: Hans Schneider, 1994). 58 See Claudia Maurer Zenck, Ernst Krenek — ein Komponist im Exil (Vienna: Lafite, 1980), 43–101; and Ivanka Stoianova, “Subjekt–Objekt. Erläuterungen zur epischen Dramaturgie in Karl V von Ernst Krenek,” in Ernst Krenek, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna: Hochschule für Musik, 1982), 125–32. 59 See Marcel Prawy, Die Wiener Oper: Geschichte und Geschichten (Vienna: Fritz Molden, 1969), 148. 60 The development of modern dance in Vienna can most easily be followed in the profusely illustrated volume Österreich Tanzt: Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Andrea Amort and Mimi Wunderer-Gosch (Vienna: Böhlau, 2001). For Austrian dance in a larger context, see Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997). 61 Amort and Wunderer-Gosch, eds., Österreich Tanzt, 83. 62 Rudolf Ulrich, Österreicher in Hollywood: Ihr Beitrag zur Entwicklung des amerikanischen Films (Vienna: Edition S, 1993). 63 Gerhard Renner, “The Anschluss of the Film Industry after 1934,” in Austria in the Thirties, ed. Segar and Warren, 253–66. 64 The three films were Abenteuer in Lido (R. Oswald), Frühlingstraum (R. Fejo), and Wenn Du Jung Bist, Gehört Dir die Welt (R. Oswald). Details are given in Armin Loacker und Martin Prucher, eds., Unerwünschtes Kino: Der deutschsprachige Emi-grantenfilm, 1934–1937 (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2000), 11–20. 65 Loacker and Prucher, eds., Unerwünschtes Kino; see esp. “Die Übernahme des Arierparagraphes in die österreichischen Filmproduktion,” 21–26. 66 Graham Greene, The Pleasure Dome: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935–40, ed. John Russell Taylor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980), 174. This is quoted from a review of Tales from the Vienna Woods (not based on the play by Horváth) dated 14 October 1937.

54 ♦ JOHN WARREN

67 Gabriele Johanna Eder, Wiener Musikfeste zwischen 1918 und 1938: Ein Beitrag zur Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Vienna: Geyer, 1991), 284–320. 68 The performance was reviewed in the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, 21 June 1932, 6. The reviewer commented that it had strong echoes of the glacier scene in Krenek’s popular opera Jonny Spielt Auf. 69 Eder, Wiener Musikfeste zwischen 1918 und 1938, 310–14. 70 In a review by Paul A. Pisk of a concert given within the framework of the 1924 Music and Theater Festival, the reviewer noted the tremendous enthusiasm of the working-class audience, which cheered long after the lights were put out. Arbeiter-Zeitung, 30 September 1924, 8. 71 Albrecht Betz, Hanns Eisler: Political Musician (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), 123–24. 72 Gruber, Red Vienna, 135–41. 73 See Ernst Glaser, “Die Kulturleistung des Hörfunks in der Ersten Republik,” in Geistiges Leben, ed. Ackerl and Neck, 38–39. 74 Ewald G. Binder, “Programmgestaltung und Regie des Hörspiels bei Radio Wien in den Jahren 1924–59” (PhD diss., 1960), 60–61. 75 See Ottokar Uhl, Moderne Architektur in Wien von Wagner bis heute (Vienna: Schrollverlag, 1966), 73–74, 47–48, plus illustrations facing page 69. This well-illustrated book serves as a guide to modern architecture in Vienna, including suggested walks in various districts. 76 Vienna City Museum, 10 December 1999–20 February 2000. 77 Christian Benedik and Renata Kassal-Mikula, eds., Das ungebaute Wien: Projekte für die Metropole 1800 bis 2000 (Vienna: Eigenverlag der Museen der Stadt Wien, 1999), 304, 293. 78 Benedik and Kassal-Mikula, eds., Das ungebaute Wien, 314–15. 79 Benedik and Kassal-Mikula, eds., Das ungebaute Wien, 333–34. 80 See Friedrich Scheu, Humor als Waffe: Politisches Kabarett in der Ersten Republik (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1977). Although this useful book concentrates on the programs up to February 1934, it also provides a brief overview of the influence of Social Democratic cabaret on the subculture during the period 1934–38. 81 Hans Veigel, Lachen im Keller von den Budapestern zum Wiener Werkl: Kabarett und Kleinkunst in Wien (Vienna: Löcker, 1986); see esp.“Rote Spieler, Blaue Blusen: Politisches Kabarett in der Ersten Republik,” 167–74. Also useful are: Rudolf Weys, Cabaret und Kabarett in Wien (Vienna: Jugend und Volk, 1970), 25–63; Henriette Mandl, Cabaret und Courage: Stella Kadmon: Eine Biographie (Vienna: Universitäts-verlag, 1993); and Ingeborg Reisner, Kabarett als Werkstatt des Theaters: Literarische Kleinkunst in Wien vor der zweiten Weltkrieg (Vienna: Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft, 2004), which contains many excerpts from cabaret sketches. 82 See Jura Soyfer, Das Gesamtwerk, ed. Horst Jarka (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1980). For a good account of these short dramas for cabaret and Soyfer’s role in the Viennese subculture, see Horst Jarka, Jura Soyfer: Leben, Werk, Zeit (Vienna: Löcker, 1987), 177–362.


83 Vineta (Die versunkene Stadt), in Jura Soyfer, Szenen und Stücke, ed. Horst Jarka (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1984), 151–70. 84 See, e.g., Gottfried-Karl Kindermann, Österreich gegen Hitler: Europas erste Abwehr-front, 1933–1938 (Munich: Langen Müller, 2003); see also the review article “Reading the Dollfuss Years” in Austrian Studies 14: Culture and Politics in Red Vienna (2006): 337–48. 85 Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist, 331. 86 Die Bühne 7, vol. 293 (December 1930): 36–40.

Part II

Jewishness, Race, and Politics

3: “Wiener Kreise”: Jewishness, Politics, and Culture in Interwar Vienna

Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lisa Silverman

Moritz Schlick and the Boundaries of Jewishness N THE MORNING OF 22 JUNE 1936 Moritz Schlick ascended the stair-case of the department of philosophy at the University of Vienna on

his way to his last lecture of the semester. As usual, room 41 was overflowing with students eager to hear the words of the distinguished professor. Sud-denly, without warning, thirty-three-year-old Hans Nelböck, a former stu-dent of Schlick’s with a recent history of mental illness, pulled a gun and fired four shots, killing him instantly.1 Following his arrest, Nelböck was declared fit to stand trial, although his case was not heard until 24 May 1937 — almost a year after the assassination. Ironically, his testimony came across as anything but deranged. He referred to a strain of thought that had be-come increasingly popular in both academic and government circles during the interwar years. He claimed that Schlick’s empirical critique of transcen-dental knowledge and rejection of metaphysics had caused him to lose all moral grounding and existential coherence. On an even more personal level, Nelböck maintained that Schlick had “ruined” his love life, alluding to an apparently failed, or unrequited, relationship with another of Schlick’s students. Nelböck also claimed — significantly, only much later, following the Anschluss — to have carried out the murder because he believed that Schlick was Jewish.2 Although the court found him guilty and sentenced him to ten years in prison, he was released the following year when the National Socialists came to power in Austria.3

Schlick’s career, his murder, and the public reaction to it reveal much about the role abstract notions of Jewishness played in violent acts of anti-semitism in interwar Vienna. Although Schlick was not Jewish, the fact that he was perceived as Jewish persisted long after his death. Schlick was not only known for his own innovative academic work but also for popularizing that of Albert Einstein and serving as Wittgenstein’s confidant. As head of the Ernst-Mach-Gesellschaft (Ernst Mach Society), later called Der Wiener Kreis der wissenschaftlichen Weltanschauung (The Vienna Circle for the Advancement of a Scientific Worldview), he led a movement in philosophy

O

60 ♦ WOLFGANG MADERTHANER AND LISA SILVERMAN

opposed to all forms of irrational dogmatism. Its mission, according to member Otto Neurath, was to create an atmosphere free of metaphysics that would foster research in all fields grounded in logical analysis.4 Its stance against metaphysics brought the group into close contact with the ideals, goals, and key players of Red Vienna, such as Neurath himself, who was instrumental in workers’ education projects. On 23 February 1934 the Vienna Circle was disbanded by the Ständestaat (corporate state) because of its alleged involvement with the Social Democratic Party. In response, Schlick lodged an unsuccessful appeal against the decision, stressing the apolitical character of the group in general and his distaste for the Social Democrats in particular.5

Schlick’s intellectual preoccupations and the company he kept were enough for him to be branded not only a leftist but also Jewish, and for his death to be reenvisioned in the popular imagination as an act of antisemitic rage. The fact that eight of the Vienna Circle’s fourteen members had Jewish backgrounds — as did Charlotte Bühler, the wife of non-Jewish member Karl Bühler — meant that the entire group was perceived as Jewish. When Schlick was under consideration for the chair of natural philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1922, the committee inquired whether he was of Jewish descent before making their decision.6 For the members of the uni-versity committee adherence to certain philosophical principles was enough to raise suspicions that he was a Jew.

One reaction to Schlick’s murder that appeared in the influential Cath-olic weekly Schönere Zukunft (A Better Future) under the pseudonym “Prof. Dr. Austriacus” placed the ultimate blame for Schlick’s murder squarely on perceived divisions between science, metaphysics, and faith dating from Vienna’s liberalist era. Since liberalism had long been equated with antise-mitic fantasies of Jewish hegemony, the author’s claim that Jewish circles never tired of celebrating Schlick as the “most important thinker” of the time should come as no surprise:

Wir verstehen das sehr wohl. Denn der Jude ist der geborene Ameta-physiker, er liebt in der Philosophie den Logizismus, den Mathematizis-mus, den Formalismus und Positivismus, also lauter Eigenschaften, die Schlick in höchstem Maße in sich vereinigte. Wir möchten aber doch daran erinnern, dass wir Christen in einem christlich-deutschen Staate leben und dass wir zu bestimmen haben, welche Philosophie gut und passend ist.7

[This is something we can really understand. The Jew, after all, is a born ametaphysicist: in philosophy he loves logicality, mathematicality, formal-ism, and positivism — in other words, all the characteristics that Schlick embodied to the highest degree. We would like to point out, however, that we Christians live in a Christian German state, and that it is up to us to determine which philosophy is good and appropriate.]

“WIENER KREISE”: JEWISHNESS, POLITICS, AND CULTURE ♦ 61

Although Schlick was descended from a long line of Prussian and Austrian nobility, he is nevertheless identified in this article as a Jew. The author makes it clear that Schlick’s association with “Jewish” intellectual ideas is enough to include him in that category. Since philosophical notions matter most here for Jewish identification, “Prof. Dr. Austriacus” was able to antici-pate in Schlick’s assassination — and the subsequent demise of his ideas — the possibility of a “wirklich befriedigende Lösung der Judenfrage” (ge-nuinely satisfactory solution to the Jewish question).

By recognizing what is Jewish to be an ideal with borders so permeable that non-Jews might fall within their range, “Prof. Dr. Austriacus” also employed another motif central to modern antisemitism, namely, that of Jews as destroyers of organic, “authentic” culture, whose success in doing so included the erasure of the very boundaries that distinguished Jews from others. Modern antisemites had long considered Jews the bearers of unde-sired progress, representatives of an urban, bourgeois, industrial condition. They were seen as proponents of individualism and abstract rights thought detrimental to the “healthy” nation-state. According to some of the most powerful antisemitic stereotypes, Jews were linked to the dangerous threats of modernity, no matter how paradoxical and illogical such ideas may have appeared. Jews were associated with both liberalism and socialism, with ca-pitalism and communism, with the evils of finance as well as those of intel-lectualism.8 Jews ultimately came to be seen as exponents of circulation, reflecting a distorted image of the incomprehensible, the intangible, and the ambiguously foreign.9

Though antisemitism certainly existed in Vienna well before the interwar period, both its potency and potential for physical violence increased during this time, most notably at the university. By 1922 a group of professors had already lodged complaints with the university administration about the nu-merous riots against Jewish students and socialists.10 Only a few months before his murder, Schlick had spoken out against the dismissal of his Jewish librarian friend Friedrich Waismann.11 After Schlick’s murder, most news-papers either spread propaganda against both the “Austro-Marxist” professor and “Jewish logical positivism” or labeled him a Jew outright, as in the earlier example.12 The author Hilde Spiel, whose essay on Schlick appeared in the Neue Freie Press in June 1936, was actually among the first to praise and eulogize her beloved former professor. She later noted that his murder and the public’s positive reaction to this violent act speeded up her own plans to emigrate.13

Given the predominance of Jews at the forefront of cultural and intel-lectual movements in Vienna around 1900, scholars have debated the question of whether there was a “Jewish” aspect to Austrian modernity. Research indicates that both Jews and non-Jews were aware that these ide-ologies were often perceived as “Jewish,” as opposed to “Austrian.”14 How-ever, Schlick’s murder and its reception also indicate that during the interwar


years the participation of non-Jews in these movements could also result in their being identified as “Jewish.” In order to better understand how the terms “Jewish” and “Austrian” functioned in interwar Vienna, one can con-sider Jewishness as a critical category of analysis similar to gender. “Gender” — in its designation of the relationship between cultural ideals stemming from but not equivalent to biological attributes of the “masculine” and the “feminine” — avoids the universalization of narratives and characteristics. Similarly, “Jewishness” can also be used as a critical tool or lens through which one can avoid reducing individuals to any set of constitutive, essential “Jewish” or “non-Jewish” qualities since, according to its terms, what is “Jewish” stems from but is not equivalent to any one particular notion of Jewish religion or culture. As a critical tool, Jewishness can help us avoid the essentialization of either category by reformulating the question “What was Jewish about modern Austrian culture?” as “To what extent did modern Austrian culture reflect an engagement with Jewishness?”15

Using Jewishness as a critical lens permits us to revisit past experiences, events, and texts in modern Viennese culture and to include individuals — such as Schlick — whose narrative histories reveal an engagement with “Jew-ishness” regardless of their own degree of Jewish self-identification. The circumstances and aftermath of Schlick’s murder illuminate how conceptions of Jewishness encompassed a broadening of its boundaries while, at the same time, some antisemites worked to promote its racial definitions. In other words, the interwar period did not just witness an increased reliance on bio-logy and race for definitions of Jews. The growing power of abstract associations also significantly shaped Viennese ideas about Jewishness during this period.16 In that sense, it can also serve as the basis for an analysis of a phenomenon in need of further attention — Jewish antisemitism — which Paul Reitter recently referred to as “an ugly yet trenchant mode of self-representation that remains to be integrated into our map of German cul-ture.”17 For better or worse, all Viennese understood the coding of the categories “Jewish” and “non-Jewish,” although “membership” in either could differ widely depending upon one’s point of view. Using Jewishness as a critical category of analysis highlights how an engagement with its criteria influenced not only the public interpretation of violent acts, such as the mur-der of Schlick, but also the creation of modern culture in interwar Vienna, as reflected in the works of such individuals as Jakob Wassermann, Sigmund Freud, Franz Bienenfeld, Otto Bauer, and Karl Popper.

Beyond Jewish Self-Hatred In 1898 German Jewish novelist and journalist Jakob Wassermann accepted a position as theater correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung in Vienna, where he befriended such well known Jewish literary talents as Richard Beer-Hofmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Arthur Schnitzler.18 Wassermann


considered himself a devout Jew and a good German. However, as he wrote in his 1921 autobiography Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (My Life as German and Jew), his experiences as a Jew in Vienna stretched the limits of his understanding of Jews beyond anything he had known previously. For example, Wassermann claimed that the demise of the autochthonous bour-geoisie in the city left responsibility for defining the city’s character to the court, the petit bourgeoisie, and the Jews. Soon after his arrival, he noted that the entire public sphere in Vienna was dominated by Jews, including banks, the press, the theater, the literary establishment, as well as all major social events. He expressed his astonishment at the legions of “jüdischen Ärzten, Advokaten, Klubmitgliedern, Snobs, Dandys, Proletariern, Schau-spielern, Zeitungsleuten und Dichtern” (Jewish doctors, lawyers, snobs, dandies, proletarians, actors, reporters, and poets) and duly reported his dis-may at what he saw as their poor manners and uncivil behavior:

Diese Scham steigerte sich manchmal bis zur Verzweiflung und bis zum Ekel. [. . .] Es ging ein Zug von Rationalismus durch all diese Juden, der jede innigere Beziehung trübte. Bei den Niedrigen äußerte es sich und wirkte im Niedrigen, Anbetung des Erfolgs und des Reichtums, Vorteils- und Gewinnsucht, Machtgier und gesellschaftlichem Oppor-tunismus; bei den Höheren war es das Unvermögen zur Idee und Intuition. Die Wissenschaft war ein Götze; der Geist war unum-schränkter Herr; was sich der Errechnung versagte, war untergeordnete Kategorie; errechnet werden konnte auch das Schicksal, zerfasert die heimlichsten, dunkelsten Gebiete der Seele. Es war überhaupt in ihnen ein Wille und Entschluß zur Entgeheimnissung der Welt, und sie wagten sich darin so weit, daß in vielen Fällen, für mich wenigstens, Schamlosigkeit von Forschertrieb nicht zu unterscheiden war.19

[My shame sometimes intensified to desperation and disgust. [. . .] There was a streak of rationalism in all these Jews that muddied every heartfelt relationship. It expressed itself in the lower classes as baseness, adoration of wealth and success, addiction to privilege and profit, thirst for power, and social opportunism; in the upper classes it was the in-capacity for ideas and for intuition. Science was idolized; the mind was absolute master; whatever eluded mathematical calculation was made a subordinate category. Even fate could be calculated, and the darkest, most mysterious regions of the soul could be plumbed. They had the desire and determination to demystify the world, and they ventured so far toward that end that in many cases, it seemed to me, shamelessness became indistinguishable from the quest for knowledge.]

Wassermann’s provincial view of a modern, urban, secularized Viennese Jewry undoubtedly reflected the universality of antisemitic stereotypes, including the Jews’ lack of deep emotion and love of rationality, super-ficiality, and wealth. As a Jew, Wassermann’s acceptance of these views in-dicates the extent to which antisemitism had not only become an acceptable


part of polite discourse, irrespective of political affiliation, but also a means of linking its supporters in the wider society.20 In fact, there are indications that an engagement with this universal antisemitic discourse was necessary for full participation in Viennese society during the interwar years — and not just for Wassermann but also for many other Jews. Even Eugenie Schwarz-wald, who supported a number of Jews in her role as an influential Jewish salon hostess with a track record of pioneering pedagogical innovations and extensive social welfare establishments in Vienna, identified herself as an antisemite as a way of positioning herself in society:

Was mich, die ich ehrlich antisemitisch bin, am meisten ärgert, ist die Tatsache, daß ein Jude, auch wenn er kein Talent und keinen Charakter hätte, wohl aber die Fehler und die Schmiegsamkeit seiner Rasse, un-bedingt zum Ziel gelangt. Die Judenfrage ist deshalb unlösbar, weil die Gastvölker nur schlechte Juden haben wollen.21

[What bothers me most — and I am honestly antisemitic — is the fact that a Jew, even when he has no talent or character yet still possesses the errors and pliancy of his race, will always succeed. This is why the Jewish question is unsolvable, because the host people only want to have bad Jews.]

By understanding Jewishness as a critical category, and therefore as part of a larger, universal form of societal discourse, one can better understand how both Wassermann and Schwarzwald could support such a negative charac-terization of Jewish difference while continuing to identify themselves as Jews — beyond merely labeling their behavior as “Jewish self-hatred.”22

Wasserman’s and Schwarzwald’s observations reflect a notable crisis of assimilation among Viennese Jews that coincided with the crisis of liberalism and thus helped further their participation in a unique flowering of elite cul-ture and intellectualism for several generations.23 Carl Schorske views this crisis of liberalism as the point of departure for his seminal analyses of the cultural and intellectual achievements of the Viennese fin de siècle. Although he does not point directly to Jewish assimilation, it is clear he is referring to a milieu largely shaped by Vienna’s assimilated Jews.24 His refusal to identify Jews as the centrifugal driving force behind this crisis is indicative of a more widespread reluctance following the Holocaust to pinpoint certain social, political, and cultural trends as being of particular significance to Jews out of concern that such identification mimicked the antisemitic project of the National Socialists.25

Although scholars agree that members of the Jewish bourgeoisie domi-nated the various intellectual circles of fin-de-siècle Vienna — whether in the field of psychoanalysis and psychology, literature (Jung Wien), or politics (Austro-Marxism) — controversy still surrounds the question to what extent and in what respect their Jewish backgrounds mattered. It is no coincidence that debates on Jewish particularism, marginality, and the participation of


nonreligious Jews in innovative movements has its roots in interwar Vienna, indicating how the city had become a locus for reconceptions of Jewishness. In an exchange of letters dating from 1918, Sigmund Freud discussed with his friend Pastor Oskar Pfister why it took a “godless” Jew to create psy-choanalysis. In an address to a B’nai B’rith group in May 1926 Freud ex-plicitly linked his self-identification as a Jew with his proposal of oppositional views.26 Peter Gay argues that if Freud had been religious, he would not have developed psychoanalysis. However, he insists just as strongly that Freud’s conscious identity as a secular Jew had nothing to do with the founding of the science, suggesting Darwin’s Origin of Species as a counterexample prov-ing that not all subversive theories were put forth by Jews: “Hence it does not follow that only a marginal man, and in particular a marginal Jew, could have done Freud’s life work.”27

Other scholars more open to a conception of Jewishness not based solely on marginality tend to uphold a belief in its significance for Freud’s work. Michael Steinberg, for example, claims that Freud’s subversive invention was influenced by an “assimilation anxiety to which his increasingly anti-Semitic surroundings did not permit him to be totally immune.”28 Sander Gilman rejects the idea that Freud’s secular Judaism was an empty label devoid of content, noting that in psychoanalysis “many of the claims against the Jew (such as the special, sexualized nature of the Jew) are sanitized and made in-to universal claims for human nature.”29

In addition to Freud, other Austrian Jews actively explored these issues in the interwar years, albeit according to different terminology. Franz Rudolf Bienenfeld — a Jewish human rights lawyer in Vienna who emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1938 and later participated in drafting the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948 — directly addressed the issue in a lecture entitled “Die Religion der Religionslosen Juden” (The Religion of the Non-Religious Jews), which he delivered to the Gesellschaft für Sozio-logie und Anthropologie der Juden in Wien (Sociological and Anthro-pological Society of the Jews of Vienna) on 10 November 1937. Bienenfeld argued that individuals of Jewish descent who did not practice Jewish rituals or espouse religious beliefs, whom he termed “nonreligious Jews,” never-theless remained greatly influenced, even if unconsciously, by principles de-riving from the Jewish religion in their spiritual and mental mind-sets — so much so, in fact, that they continued to form a distinct group.30 Sensitive to the status of Jews in Germany since 1933 and strongly opposed to the Nazis’ racial theories, Bienenfeld also insisted on an identifiable yet abstract com-ponent to Jewish identity that remained separate from ritual and belief:

Since neither national nor racial characteristics, nor manners, nor cus-toms, identify the non-religious Jews against the background of their surroundings, the question remains as to how they are practically always recognized as Jews, nevertheless, and why they therefore fall into such a


clearly defined group. It is my opinion that they are distinguished on the strength of their basic spiritual make-up [. . .] and in their whole mental attitude. It is not a question of physical or anatomical characteristics. [. . .] Most of them, and especially their intelligentsia, present to the world a common countenance since the foundations of their spiritual life are identical.31

Bienenfeld’s description illustrates the persistence of the notion among Jews themselves that “nonreligious” or secular Jews continued to form a distinct group in Vienna in the 1930s. His speech was undoubtedly a defensive mea-sure in the face of increasingly violent manifestations of antisemitism during the interwar years. However, the fact that he chose to combat the problem by affirming rather than avoiding or denying the existence of secular Jews as a particular subculture is significant in its engagement with abstract notions of Jewishness in interwar Vienna.

The Bauers, the Poppers, and Interwar Politics Supranational, cosmopolitan, and unswervingly devoted to the Habsburg dynasty — characteristics they shared with the majority of Jews throughout the empire — Viennese Jews are often referred to as having been the most loyal citizens of the monarchy. As Malachi Hacohen has noted: “Well into the final days of WorId War I, when the empire already lay in ruins, Viennese Jewish papers insisted that, federally reorganized, the multinational empire was viable. Later, in their exile, Jewish émigrés portrayed Central Europe under the Habsburgs as a vanished cosmopolitan dream.”32 This dream was not least one of complete acculturation into a nation that epitomized prog-ress and cultural development, into an ideal of Deutschtum (Germanness). According to this way of thinking, enlightenment, emancipation, culture, and German identity were fused into one indistinguishable entity. When Victor Adler, founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, converted from Judaism to Protestantism, his self-confessed aim was to ac-quire for himself and his children an “Entréebillet zur europäischen Kultur” (entrance ticket to European culture), echoing the words of German Jewish poet Heinreich Heine nearly a century earlier. For Adler belief in Social Democratic ideals was not enough to transform himself into a true Euro-pean. He considered it self-evident that he would have to leave Judaism be-hind fully to enter German culture, the most highly developed in Europe.33 In such cases cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and belief in Germanness (which often took the form of downright Germanophilia) were in no way contradictory since the latter was understood as the adoption of the values and beliefs of the German Enlightenment.

Beginning in 1848, Vienna became a magnet for Jews from all areas of the Habsburg monarchy. New professions and residential neighborhoods were opened to them and they were granted rights and duties equal to other


Austrian citizens (although full Jewish emancipation would not be made of-ficial until 1867). Bohemian and Moravian Jews were the first to move to the imperial capital, followed by Hungarian Jews; beginning in the late 1860s a steady stream of Galician Jews also headed for Vienna. By 1900 Vienna had become the city with the third largest Jewish population in Europe, after Warsaw and Budapest, although 80 percent of the Jews living in Vienna had not been born there.34 By 1910 over 175,000 Jews lived in the city. Since the 1860s the Jewish population had grown twenty-eight times its original size, compared to a mere fourfold increase in the overall population during the same period. Despite Jews’ representing only 10 per-cent of the city’s population, Jewish boys made up a third of all Gymnasium students, while Jewish girls made up 50 percent or more of students in private girls’ schools.35 Overrepresented in the press, the free professions, salon and coffeehouse culture, as well as in the upper middle classes, their influence on the economic and intellectual life of the city was considerable and undeniable.36

Over 90 percent of Austrian Jewry lived in the capital during the inter-war period, where they constituted the largest religious minority within an 80 percent Catholic population.37 Though most Jewish migrants gradually left their Orthodox religious traditions and ties behind, they nevertheless retained the knowledge that others identified them as Jews and thus main-tained an awareness of their position as outsiders in the larger society. Fol-lowing the end of the First World War and the collapse of the empire — with inflation, unemployment, and a housing crisis reaching epic proportions as old political and social structures crumbled — all Austrians faced anxieties and uncertainties about the immediate present. Austrian Jews in particular were compelled to come to terms with new challenges that would determine their future in the Austrian republic. Jews often served as scapegoats for the loss of the war, which in itself resulted in the displacement of thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe, who came to Vienna in search of shelter.38 Since many Jews already residing in Vienna were themselves immigrants, or the children of immigrants, from other areas of the dual monarchy, many re-sented the high visibility of less acculturated and impoverished refugees streaming into the city, increasing the awareness of and anxieties about their own place in Viennese society. Their fears were not unfounded, for incidents of violent antisemitism became more prevalent and acceptable after the end of the war.

Austrian Jews also faced new conflicts as they attempted to come to terms with their national and religious status in the new nation. Within the realm of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its numerous different constituent nationalities and wide variety of religious affiliations, most Aus-trian Jews had felt comfortable identifying themselves as loyal citizens of the empire and its emperor, Franz Josef, as well as proud members of the Ger-man Kulturnation and the Jewish faith, even if they were no longer par-


ticularly observant.39 After the war, however, Jews were destabilized from this secure position by the prospect of life in a theoretically homogeneous, Catholic nation-state, which would bring with it a new definition of what it meant to be “Austrian,” along with new political, social, and cultural affili-ations. Strong feelings of loss and concern about their status in the new Austrian republic accompanied the collapse of the old order, and Jews were among those who had the most to lose in the project of national redefinition.

These destabilizations, however, did not always lead to negative results. The collapse of long-standing bureaucratic, aristocratic, and political struc-tures also opened up new areas for Jewish participation in the political and cultural life of the nation — in some cases areas from which they had pre-viously been excluded. One response was increased participation in Zionism (Jewish nationalism) following the war, which contributed to a new sense of ethnic Jewish pride.40 Yet even Jewish self-identification and nationality was no easy matter since, amid the heyday of nationalism and ethnic self-determination of the immediate postwar years, most ethnic groups were concerned with sovereignty and autonomy. For Jews, perhaps more than for almost any other minority, ideals of political self-determination remained ambiguous since there was no clear agreement — even among Jews them-selves — about whether they consituted a nation, an ethnic group, a reli-gious community, or a combination of some or all of these.41

These developments determined the profile and direction of their engage-ment with “Jewishness” as a constant struggle with characteristics unique to Vienna’s Jewish population. This struggle was the motor that drove their disproportionate participation in transforming Vienna into an intensely pro-ductive and creative milieu from the late nineteenth century onward, which intensified during the political, social, and economic turbulence of the in-terwar years.

One of Freud’s first big cases, which began in 1900,and which he pub-lished in 1905, provides a unique insight into the intellectual, emotional, and material world of upper-middle-class Viennese Jews of the time. “Dora” was Freud’s pseudonym for Ida Bauer, the eighteen-year-old daughter of textile manufacturer Philipp Bauer, whose family Freud also treated in his role as general practitioner. Philipp Bauer, who persuaded Freud to treat his daughter for what was believed to be adolescent hysteria, came from a poor family from Iglau, Bohemia, before becoming a wealthy businessman and moving to Vienna, where he was Freud’s neighbor. Bauer belonged to the first generation of canny Jewish entrepreneurs in Vienna. He was ambitious and full of initiative, sparing neither his workers nor his family nor his work ethic. As a classic liberal of the second half of the nineteenth century, he sup-ported the constitutional state, freedom of speech and the press, the sepa-ration of church and state, and wider electoral suffrage, albeit with the exclusion of women and the lower classes. To his way of thinking, the state


should avoid all forms of regulation and intervention unless these served business interests. Intellectually active and demanding, charming in private, self-confident and articulate, he represented — not least as a member of a Masonic lodge whose charity section he led — new, progressive ideals and concepts of Bürgerlichkeit (bourgeois civic mindedness). Julius Braunthal compared his appearance and ways to those of the non-Jewish intellectuals who filled the higher echelons of the civil service.42

It is significant that Bauer’s strivings were closely coupled with processes of Jewish acculturation and assimilation. These, together with his decision to send Dora to Freud for treatment, indicate his level of engagement with Jewishness in the interwar period. In contrast to the Bauer family’s dynamic public presence, their internal family relationships were managed in a rigid, constricting manner, subject to strict moral codes as well as hierarchies of age and gender — that is, very much in accordance with the norms and cus-toms of the times. The private scenario into which Freud shone his analytical torch was one of positively Victorian repression, under which all concerned suffered without exception.43 Ida/Dora rebelled against this repressive at-mosphere psychically. Her brother, Otto, who became Austro-Marxism’s leading theoretician and de facto party leader during the interwar years, sub-limated his frustration in a more outward manner. He blazed a trail through the party ranks under the wing of his mentor, Victor Adler, and became part of the theoretical vanguard of the international Social Democratic move-ment. All three family members were reacting in no small part to concep-tions of Jewishness as they functioned in fin-de-siècle and interwar Vienna.

Simon Carl Siegmund Popper, father of Karl Popper, another symp-tomatic product of the interwar period, shared with Philipp Bauer liberal ideals of property, rule of law, and culture, making them the guiding prin-ciples of his life and work. Likewise a Jewish immigrant from Bohemia, Simon Popper progressed rapidly up the social ladder, aided not least by his marriage into one of the leading upper-middle-class Jewish families in Vi-enna. His wife, Jenny, was the daughter of the “Kaiserlichen Ratsherr” (im-perial councillor) Max Schiff, who had earned a fortune in textiles. Her brother, Walter Schiff, was an agriculture specialist and professor of eco-nomics and statistics at the University of Vienna.44 Simon Popper became the business partner of Raimund Grübl, the last liberal mayor of Vienna, and continued to run their law firm after the latter’s death in 1898, moving with his family into a patrician apartment on the Graben, very close to Saint Stephen’s Cathedral, in the very heart of the city.

Simon Popper and his wife both converted to Protestantism in 1900. In 1904 he became master of the Masonic Lodge “Humanitas” and was later even ennobled by the emperor in recognition of his charitable work — which, ironically, he had carried out under the auspices of Freemasonry, which was officially illegal at the time. Nevertheless, Karl Popper remem-bered his father as a “radical liberal” in the tradition of John Stuart Mill. Karl


Popper grew up in a free-thinking, cosmopolitan milieu, under the decisive influence of his uncle, Walter Schiff, who was a close friend of the socialist economist Anton Menger. Essential aspects of the progressive, intellectual — and assimilated Jewish — Vienna of the turn of the century and the interwar years were to be reflected in Popper’s later academic output (e.g., his pas-sionate plea in favor of the Enlightenment and an open society; his rigorous rejection of any kind of metaphysics or nationalism, including Zionism).45

The Bauers and the Poppers are representative of Vienna’s upper-middle-class, assimilated Jews: highly sensitive, extremely self-aware, productive, effective, and yet constantly under threat in terms of minority status and self-perception. Otto Bauer revealed how and why this milieu was convinced of the historical necessity of assimilation in his 1907 study Die Nationalitä-tenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (The Nationalities Question and Social Democracy), which was reprinted in 1924. This six-hundred-page tour de force of political theory was one of the most important contributions to the nationalities debate typical of early-twentieth-century Austrian and Viennese culture.46 According to Bauer, capitalist modernization had enabled “nations without history” to develop into nations with history thanks to the emer-gence of the middle class, with its own cultural production. In his view the Jews represented the only exception to this situation. In their case, the vari-ous stages of modernization entailed assimilation as a causal necessity. Bauer argued that Jewish emancipation required comprehensive processes of social and economic change that not only led to industrial, capitalist modernism but also transformed Jews into necessary social agents of this modernism. The phenomenon of assimilation, he concluded, was a direct product of this process of transformation.

According to Bauer, the Jewish nation belonged to the premodern era, when the Jews were representatives of a monetary economy in a world whose primary mode of exchange was barter. When capitalist modernism destroyed the barter economy and, through the manufacture of factory goods, made a monetary economy the dominant mode of exchange, Christians took on the role of Jews and vice versa. As soon as Jews and Christians had become or-gans of one and the same economic order, this shared position created an extremely close Verkehrsgemeinschaft (community of exchange), making it im-possible to maintain “kultureller Sonderart” (cultural anomalies):

Dass die längst assimilierten oder doch schon vom Flusse des Assimila-tionsprozesses mitgerissenen Juden Westösterreichs auf die Kulturge-meinschaft mit den Nationen, in deren Mitte sie leben, nicht verzichten werden, ist selbstverständlich. Für sie ist das Jüdische längst eine fremde Sprache, die Gesittung der Juden des Ostens eine fremde Kultur, an der sie keinen Teil haben.47

[It is self-evident that the long-assimilated Jews of western Austria, or those who are already being borne along by the current of the assimila-


tion process, will not want to pass up the opportunity to live in cultural community with the nations in whose midst they reside. What is Jewish has long been a foreign language to them, and the customs and beliefs of the Eastern Jews a foreign culture in which they play no part.]

To Bauer this “fremde Kultur” (foreign culture) of the Eastern Jews was that of a nation without history, a culture outside the canon of European civilization, which depended on an anachronistic tradition of “längst erstor-bener Gedanken, Wünsche, Sitten” (long dead thoughts, desires, customs), the “Psychologie einer toten Wirtschaftsverfassung” (psychology of dead economic forms), and the habits of the “jüdischen Branntweinschenkers, der mitten zwischen naturalwirtschaftlichen Bauern lebte” (Jewish schnaps seller, who lived in the midst of farmers accustomed only to bartering). According to Bauer, fragments of the Jewish nation only survived in places where the process of modernization had not yet begun, or had only just begun, such as the provinces of Galicia and the Bukovina, home to nine tenths of Austrian Jews at the time he wrote his treatise. Nevertheless, although Bauer — like Eugenie Schwarzwald — was not immune from using antisemitic language in his own writings or from harboring prejudices against Eastern Jews, he always remained a member of the Jewish community.48

In his analysis of the so-called Jewish question, Bauer followed his men-tor Victor Adler, who saw national assimilation as a precondition of social emancipation and the disappearance of the Jews’ (historical) identity as a precondition for their liberation as individuals.49 Yet when viewed within the broader context of Vienna’s Jewish bourgeoisie it becomes clear how Bauer theorized the social and cultural positions of his own family alongside his point of view as a Social Democrat. As such, he was paradigmatic of large numbers of other upper-middle-class second- and third-generation Viennese Jews who became loyal Social Democrats, members of the only political movement in the city at the time that programmatically rejected every form of racism.50

The coding of interwar Vienna’s Social Democratic government — Red Vienna — as Jewish by antisemites renders it difficult to ask whether the fact that so many of its leaders were Jews made a difference to the kinds of poli-cies they pursued. Yet there are strong indications that many Viennese Jews’ associations with socialism was linked to Jewishness. Writer Manès Sperber, whose family fled Galicia for Vienna in 1916, insisted that his Jewish identity was strongly linked to his belief in socialist theory and practice, claiming that he owed his ability to overcome his childhood difficulties both to socialism and to his membership in the radical Jewish youth organization Hashomer Hatzair (Youth Guard).51 More common, however, were secular Jews for whom socialism represented a way to distance themselves from their Jewish backgrounds.52


Using Jewishness as an analytical framework permits us to understand how the rise in both racial and cultural antisemitism based on more abstract notions of Jewishness disclosed important common ground between the workers’ movement and the Jews. Following the failure of liberalism as a political ideology, its humanitarian objectives and agenda were appropriated by the Social Democrats, who developed these into a utopia of equality in Red Vienna’s project of urban modernization, one of the most unusual and creative communal experiments in modern European history. Essentially a pedagogical experiment, the project aimed to sanitize, civilize, and educate the masses through a general improvement of their living conditions, social status, and, above all, their cultural standards.53 It was precisely because of its cultural-political dimension that the appeal of this experiment extended far beyond the pragmatic nature of its original communal model, which had been inspired by social policy factors and the notion of the welfare state. As a post-Enlightenment venture with exemplary force, municipal developments in Red Vienna can be seen as a parallel to psychoanalysis. Both ideologies sought to transform mass objects — proletarian as well as middle class — into self-aware individuals and subjects.54 It is precisely in this sense that Red Vienna’s Jewish leaders can be seen as engaging with Jewishness.

Whether it was the possibility for inclusion in a new, Austrian, “non-Jewish” identity better suited to a revolutionized, modern way of life or the desire for liberation from a collective Jewish identity seen as backward, pre-modern, and reactionary, the methods of integration into the new Austrian republic remained abstract and indefinite. Into what sort of entity were Vienna’s Jews supposed to assimilate? The aim of assimilating into an ideal-ized German culture embodying the principles of the Enlightenment, eman-cipation, progress, and equality before the law was, in fact, a shared fantasy. At the same time, substantial sectors of the German nationalist movement were making antisemitism the basis of their program. Vienna’s secular Jews were therefore seeking to integrate into an imaginary community, into their own projections of a population in which race, ethnicity, and “Jewishness” did not matter. Given their high level of visibility in society and their strong desire to assimilate, they produced a distinct, separate culture far beyond any mere hybrid. Theirs was an independent sociocultural formation, one that created its own variant of German Jewish culture and played a vital role in the eruptive clustering of intellectual creativity in Vienna from 1900 through the interwar period.55

The Wiener Kreis and Vienna’s Other Circles A consideration of Jewishness therefore adds another dimension to Vienna’s ability to remain the center of a modern, elite culture — albeit in a different, fractured form — despite its decrease in international importance following the First World War. Significantly, it remained the city of a circle of phi-


losophers of logical empiricism named after Ernst Mach, a professor of experimental physics originally from Prague who in 1895 was appointed to the newly established chair of philosophy at the University of Vienna. Al-though his reputation is based on remarkable scientific experiments — on the propagation velocity of sound and explosion waves and on supersonic phenomena and sensory physiology — he was still very much a part of broader Viennese cultural circles. Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Hermann Broch attended his lectures. He was friends with Arthur Schnitzler. Robert Musil wrote his dissertation on Mach’s important contribution to the debate on the foundational crises within the sciences. Lastly, Fritz Adler recognized in “Machism” a conception of nature that corresponded to the Marxist con-ception of history. Primarily through Fritz Mauthner’s work Mach influ-enced Sprachtheorie (language theory) and Sprachkritik (language criticism). Thanks to Lenin’s 1904 critique of Mach’s empirical criticism, he had a lasting influence on the factional disputes in Russian Social Democracy. Per-sonally the radical humanist and democrat was close to the Vienna Fabians. He was engaged in adult education and supported the Arbeiter-Zeitung, be-queathing a major part of his estate to the newspaper.56

Mach’s destruction of classical, Newtonian mechanics transformed him into an authority figure for an entire generation of revolutionary intellec-tuals, many of whom influenced the course of cultural and social reform in Red Vienna. He developed a principle of relativity based on experience of the sensual world that served as a model for the contemporaries of Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud and others.57 By integrating critical accounts of the historical development of the various branches of physics with psycho-physical investigations, Mach created a meta-theoretical concept character-ized by a pronounced empiricism. Nothing else can be stated about the reality of the outer world, and metaphysical perception of extrasensory reality is not possible. Mach opposed every idealist tradition in philosophy, in particular Kantian philosophy, and rejected a priori synthetic judgments, traditional notions of causal laws, and metaphysical speculation.58

Under the influence of Mach, Moritz Schlick and the neopositivist Wiener Kreis, whose philosophy had taken a linguistic turn under Wittgenstein’s in-fluence, advanced this ideology. Members of the circle included the radical and systematic logician Rudolf Carnap, the physicist Philipp Frank (who was Einstein’s successor in Prague), the mathematician Hans Hahn, and the political economist and multitalented Austro-Marxist Otto Neurath. The mathematicians Karl Menger and Kurt Gödel as well as the philosopher Karl Popper were also fringe members of the circle. Their “wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung” (scientific worldview), expounded in the group’s 1929 ma-nifesto, combined philosophical awareness with mathematics and the exact sciences. It held that as empirical statements synthetic judgments are only valid and meaningful a posteriori. Metaphysical concepts were considered irrelevant or not open to solutions. The task of “positive” science was to


provide the most complete and exact description possible using empirical concepts. Its goal was the unity of the sciences, understood as the unity of methods, and a scientific language that was still to be created.59 Wittgen-stein’s work assumed a central role in the thought and discourse of the circle, although Wittgenstein himself remained ambivalent and always kept his distance from the neopositivist logicians — and was even rejected out-right by Neurath as a “metaphysicist.” In fact, the members of the Vienna Circle saw Wittgenstein exclusively as anti-Kantian and mathematically logi-cal. They rejected Wittgenstein’s intention to show or to signify “das Unsag-bare” (the unsayable) through the clear delineation of “das Sagbare” (the sayable) as a mystical delusion incompatible with logical analysis.60

The Vienna Circle also aimed to establish a pragmatic foundation for in-tellectual activity in everyday life, thus fostering strong popular and peda-gogical tendencies. In all these respects the group fit into an almost perfect post-Enlightenment paradigm, bearing a close affinity to the civilizing inten-tions underlying Red Vienna’s municipal socialism — however much Schlick tried to distance himself from the Social Democrats in the face of the Austrofascist takeover. To quote Rudolf Carnap:

Was gibt uns trotzdem die Zuversicht, mit unserem Ruf nach Klarheit, nach metaphysikfreier Wissenschaft durchzudringen? Das ist die Einsicht, oder, um es vorsichtiger zu sagen, der Glaube, daß jene entgegenste-henden Mächte der Vergangenheit angehören. Wir spüren eine innere Verwandtschaft der Haltung, die unserer philosophischen Arbeit zu-grundeliegt, mit der geistigen Haltung, die sich gegenwärtig auf ganz anderen Lebensgebieten auswirkt; wir spüren diese Haltung in Strömun-gen der Kunst, besonders der Architektur, und in den Bewegungen, die sich um eine sinnvolle Gestaltung des menschlichen Lebens bemühen: des persönlichen und gemeinschaftlichen Lebens, der Erziehung, der äußeren Ordnungen im Großen. Hier überall spüren wir dieselbe Grund-haltung, denselben Stil des Denkens und Schaffens. Es ist die Gesinnung, die überall auf Klarheit geht und doch dabei die nie ganz durchschaubare Verflechtung des Lebens anerkennt, die [. . .] auf Verbundenheit der Menschen (geht) und zugleich auf freie Entfaltung des Einzelnen. Der Glaube, dass dieser Gesinnung die Zukunft gehört, trägt unsere Arbeit.61

[What gives us the confidence to persist in our call for clarity, for science free of metaphysics? It is the insight or, to put it more cautiously, the belief that all opposing tendencies belong to the past. We see parallels between the attitude that underlies all our philosophical endeavors and the attitude that is currently influential in many other areas of life. We sense this attitude in the arts, especially architecture, and in the move-ments that are striving toward a meaningful configuration of human life: individual and community life, education, and public organization in general. Everywhere we feel this same basic attitude, this same style of thought and creativity. It is an ethos that strives for clarity and yet


acknowledges that the complexities of life can never be wholly trans-parent, that strives for [. . .] solidarity among people and the free de-velopment of the individual. Our endeavors are sustained by the belief that this is the attitude of the future.]

In 1936 Otto Neurath reflected retrospectively on why an anti-meta-physics based on logic had developed in Vienna, of all places, and why it had been able to develop there on a broad basis and under relatively favorable conditions. In addition to the city’s generally liberal atmosphere at the time, he named two main factors: the predominance of an empirical and logical philosophical tradition based mainly on the English model62 and, echoing Robert Musil’s novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), the city’s status as a locus of unique cultural ferment:63

Der natürliche Boden für die Entwicklung [. . .] ist eigentlich das politische und gesellschaftliche Durcheinander, das in der ehemaligen Monarchie herrscht und das zuweilen schwer mit einem Blick zu erfassen ist. Unaufhörlich stößt man auf ein eigenartiges Hin und Her zwischen der alten Tradition und dem modernsten Versuchen, zwischen einer methodischen Unterdrückung und einer unerwarteten Toleranz.64

[The natural breeding ground for this development [. . .] is actually the political and social confusion that prevailed during the monarchy and that is sometimes difficult to grasp at first glance. One is ceaselessly confronted with a peculiar vacillation between tradition and the most modern aspirations, between systematic repression and an unexpected tolerance.]

Neurath’s remark identifies the coexistent qualities of backwardness and ra-dical innovation that best characterize Viennese culture during the interwar period. Although a combination of philosophical, social, and political ideas originating in the fin de siècle still persisted during this era, their constant interplay with further developments in politics and intellectual culture show how Vienna continued to be a locus of innovation. Ideas about Jews and Jewishness overlapped in significant ways with interwar trends in philosophy, social policy, and culture as assimilated Jews faced new challenges following the collapse of the empire. This interlocking and overlapping of “circles” of philosophy, socialism, and Jewishness characterized Red Vienna in all its complexity.

Notes

1 Schlick had served as adviser for Nelböck’s doctoral dissertation, “Die Bedeutung der Logik im Empirismus und Positivismus” (The Meaning of Logic in Empiricism and Positivism); soon after receiving his degree in 1931, Nelböck began harassing the world-renowned philosophy professor. Increasingly concerned about his student’s erratic behavior, Schlick reported Nelböck to the police on two separate occasions. As a


result, he was diagnosed with acute paranoia and spent a brief period in a mental institution. For more details, see Peter Malina, “Tatort: Philosophenstiege: Zur Ermordung von Moritz Schlick am 22. Juni 1936,” in Bewußtsein, Sprache und die Kunst. Metamorphosen der Wahrheit, ed. Michael Benedikt and Rudolf Burger (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1988), 231–53. 2 See Hans-Joachim Dahms, “The Emigration of the Vienna Circle,” in Vertreibung der Vernunft: The Cultural Exodus from Austria, ed. Friedrich Stadler and Peter Weibel (Vienna: Springer, 1995), 57–79; here 61. 3 Manfred Geier, Der Wiener Kreis (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1998), 8. 4 Otto Neurath, “Soziologie im Physiksalismus” in Gesammelte philosophische und me-thodologische Schriften, vol. 2, ed. Rudolf Haller and Heiner Rutte (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1981), 533–62; here 533. 5 Geier, Der Wiener Kreis, 90. As evidence of his distance from leftist ideals, Schlick subsequently became a member of the Vaterländische Front (Fatherland Front), a po-litical organization all state employees had to join if they wished to advance their careers under the Austrofascists. 6 Friedrich Stadler, “The Vienna Circle and the University of Vienna,” in Vertreibung der Vernunft, ed. Stadler and Weibel, 44–55; here 48. The committee asked Emil Reich, who taught practical philosophy, and Richard von Wettstein, a botanist. Stadler implies that they did not want Schlick in any event and had been searching for an excuse not to appoint him but were unable to find one. Schlick was ultimately ap-pointed despite opposition. 7 The full article is reprinted in Fritz Stadler, Studien zum Wiener Kreis: Ursprung, Entwicklung und Wirkung des logischen Empirismus im Kontext (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 924–29. The pseudonym “Austriacus” is that of Johann Sauter, a member of the circle around the Austrofascist philosopher and political economist Othmar Spann. 8 For a discussion of antisemitic stereotypes in a specifically Viennese context, see Sander L. Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993). 9 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1998), 181, 184. 10 These included Hans Hahn, leader of the Vereinigung sozialistischer Hochschul-lehrer and ordinarius in mathematics since 1921, and Ludo M. Hartmann; see Stadler, “The Vienna Circle and the University of Vienna,” 53. Hahn, who was of Jewish descent, opposed racial discrimination against university students and was active in the Stadtschulrat (Vienna School Supervisory Board). As a result, he was blacklisted along with other Jewish and Marxist professors. Hahn died in February 1924. See Dahms, “The Emigration of the Vienna Circle,” 60–61. 11 Waismann had only been hired by the university in 1929 as a concession to Schlick for his refusal of a position at the University of Bonn. He had worked gratis for Schlick’s institute for some time before this. Both he and Herbert Feigel, Schlick’s favorite students, were Jewish. See Stadler, “The Vienna Circle and the University of Vienna,” 54–55. 12 Stadler, “The Vienna Circle and the University of Vienna,” 51.


13 Waltraud Strickhausen, Die Erzählerin Hilde Spiel oder “Der weite Wurf in die Finsternis” (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 50. 14 Steven Beller, “Is There a Jewish Aspect to Modern Austrian Identity?,” in Österreich-Konzeptionen und jüdisches Selbstverständnis: Identitäts-Transfigurationen um 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hanni Mittelmann and Armin Wallas (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001), 43–52; here 45. See also Ernst Gombrich, The Visual Arts in Vienna Circa 1900: Reflections on the Jewish Catastrophe (London: Austrian Cultural Institute, 1996). 15 See also Lisa Silverman, “Reconsidering the Margins: Jewishness as an Analytical Framework,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8:1 (2009): 103–20. 16 See the essay by Paul Weindling in this volume. 17 Paul Reitter, The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008), 72. 18 Hans Otto Horch, “Jakob Wassermann,” in Metzler Lexikon der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur, ed. Andreas B. Kilcher (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), 594–99. 19 Jakob Wassermann, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (Munich: Deutscher Taschen-verlag, 1994), 103–4. 20 According to Peter Pulzer, “In becoming part of a general political attitude it had sacrificed most of its dynamic; from being stigmatized as a form of social and political subversion it was becoming almost de rigueur in polite circles.” The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988), 211. 21 Letter from Eugenie Schwarzwald to Hans Deichmann dated 3 November 1931, in Hans Deichmann, Leben mit provisorischer Genehmigung: Leben, Werk und Exil von Dr. Eugenie Schwarzwald, 1872–1940 (Berlin: Guthmann-Peterson, 1988), 54. 22 Although the phrase “Jewish self-hatred” has been identified as useful and necessary for the identification of Jewish participation in antisemitic discourse, its use as a critical category is limited. See Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985); and Ritchie Robertson, “The Problem of ‘Jewish Self-Hatred’ in Herzl, Kraus and Kafka,” Oxford German Studies 16 (1985): 81–108. 23 Hans Tietze, Die Juden Wiens: Geschichte — Wirtschaft — Kultur (Vienna: Edition Atelier, 1987), 258. 24 See Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1980). 25 See especially Gombrich, The Visual Arts in Vienna Circa 1900. 26 Letter from Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister dated 9 October 1918, cited in Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1987), 37. 27 Gay, A Godless Jew, 147. See also Michael Pollak, “Intellektuelle Außenseiterstellung und Arbeiterbewegung: Das Verhältnis der Psychoanalyse zur Sozialdemokratie in Österreich zu Beginn des Jahrhunderts,” in Bewegung und Klasse: Studien zur öster-reichischen Arbeitergeschichte, ed. Gerhard Botz, Hans Hautmann, and Helmut Konrad (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1979), 429–48. 28 Michael P. Steinberg, Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000), 183.


29 Sander L. Gilman, “Freud’s Jewish Identity,” review of A Godless Jew and Freud: A Life for Our Time, by Peter Gay, Austrian Studies 1: Vienna 1900: From Altenberg to Wittgenstein (1990), 174–77; here 175. See also John M. Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 30 Franz R. Bienenfeld, The Religion of the Non-Religious Jews, lecture delivered at the Sociological Society of Vienna on 10 November 1937 (London: Museum Press, 1944), 9–10. 31 Bienenfeld, The Religion of the Non-Religious Jews, 9. 32 Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper — The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 48. 33 See Heinz Fischer and Wolfgang Maderthaner, “Jüdische Identität und öster-reichische Sozialdemokratie,” Das jüdische Echo: Europäisches Forum für Kultur und Politik 18 (October 1999): 294–301. 34 Marsha L. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany: SUNY P, 1983), 18. 35 Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002), 6. 36 See Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). 37 Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Jewish Politics in Vienna, 1918–1938 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991), 13. 38 For more general studies of Jews in Austria during the First World War, see Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I (New York: Oxford UP, 2001); and David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (London: Littman, 2001). 39 Marsha L. Rozenblit, “The Crisis of Identity in the Austrian Republic: Jewish Ethnicity in a New Nation-State,” in In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933, ed. Michael Brenner and Derek Jonathan Penslar (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998), 134–53; here 135. 40 Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 177 n. 34; and Rozenblit, “The Crisis of Identity in the Austrian Republic.” 41 Rechter, The Jews of Vienna, 9. 42 Julius Braunthal, Otto Bauer: Eine Auswahl aus seinem Lebenswerk (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1961), 9. 43 Hannah S. Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna (New York: Free Press, 1992), 41–42. 44 Hacohen, Karl Popper, 39–40. 45 Hacohen, Karl Popper, 25, 40. 46 Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie, 2nd ed. (1907; Vienna: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung Ignaz Brand, 1924), 366–81. For a short but concise outline of Bauer’s work and life, see Richard Saage, “Otto Bauer,” in Klassiker des Sozialismus, vol. 2, ed. Walter Euchner (Munich: Beck, 1991), 166–80. For his theoretical positions on “Die Nationalitätenfrage,” see Ephraim J. Nimni, Marxism and Nationalism: Theoretical Origins of a Political Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 1991), 143–50.


47 Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage, 377. 48 In a 1923 tract, e.g., Bauer refers to “jüdische Schieber” (Jewish profiteers) who happily support bourgeois parties in order to protect themselves against high taxes. Otto Bauer, Die österreichische Revolution (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1923), 207. 49 Fischer and Maderthaner, “Jüdische Identität,” 295–96. 50 There were, in fact, no other political alternatives for Viennese Jews. During the interwar period three quarters of them voted for the Social Democrats. See Walter B. Simon, “The Jewish Vote in Austria,” Leo Baeck Yearbook 16 (1971): 97–128; see also Jack Jacobs, Sozialisten und die “Jüdische Frage” nach Marx (Mainz: Decaton, 1994), 109. 51 “Und auch das ist mein Judaïsmus: Solidarität mit allen, denen unrecht getan wird. Das ist seit jeher mein Sozialismus gewesen” (And that is also my Judaism: solidarity with everyone who has been treated unjustly. That has also been the basis of my socialism). Manès Sperber, “Mein Judesein,” in Anpassung und Widerstand: Über den Unvernünftigen und Vernünftigen Gebrauch der Vernunft, ed. Wilhelm von Sternburg (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1994), 48. See also Manès Sperber, All das Vergangene (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1993), 54. 52 Social Democratic leaders with Jewish backgrounds include Otto Bauer, Victor Adler, Hugo Breitner, Robert Danneberg, Julius Tandler, Friedrich Austerlitz (editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung), Wilhelm Ellenbogen, Friedrich Adler, Max Adler, and such prominent socialist intellectuals as Heinrich Braun, Friedrich Stampfer, Rudolf Hilferding, and Gustav Eckstein, all of whom made their careers within the German labor movement. Those who remained in Austria included Oskar Pollak, Julius Braunthal, Therese Schlesinger, Helene Bauer, Sigmund Kaff, Benno Karpeles, and Julius Deutsch. See Robert S. Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews: The Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and Austria-Hungary (East Brunswick, NJ: Associated UP, 1982), 333. Wistrich characterizes socialism as an escape for most Jewish leaders from their backgrounds, for whom “origins were of little consequence, however much non-Jews or anti-Semites were preoccupied with the subject. [. . .] Social Democracy attracted them as a charismatic idea which had replaced the faith of their fathers. They found in the labor movement not only a new political home but an escape from the ghetto, from their Jewish background and social marginality” (333). 53 See Wolfgang Maderthaner, “Austromarxism: Mass Culture and Anticipatory Socialism,” Austrian Studies 14: Culture and Politics in Red Vienna (2006): 21–36. See also Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York: Oxford UP, 1991); and The Austrian Socialist Experiment: Social Democ-racy and Austromarxism, 1918–1934, ed. Anson Rabinbach (Boulder: Westview, 1985). 54 See Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner, “Wiener Beiträge zur historischen Metropolenforschung,” Historische Anthropologie 10, no. 3 (2002): 436–48; here 443. 55 See Wolfgang Maderthaner, “Das andere Wien des Fin de Siècle: Drei Studien,” in Wolfgang Maderthaner, Kultur Macht Geschichte: Studien zur Wiener Stadtkultur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2005), 53–69. 56 Hacohen, Karl Popper, 57; See also Siegfried Mattl, “Wiener Paradoxien: Fordistische Stadt,” in Metropole Wien: Texturen der Moderne, vol. 1, ed. Roman Horak et al. (Vienna: WUV-Univ.-Verlag, 2000), 22–96; here 68–69.


57 See Stadler, Studien zum Wiener Kreis. 58 Geier, Der Wiener Kreis, 64–68. 59 For a detailed program of the Viennese logical empiricists, see Stadler, Studien zum Wiener Kreis, 370–77. 60 Geier, Der Wiener Kreis, 74–75. 61 Rudolf Carnap, Der logische Aufbau der Welt (Berlin: Weltkreis-Verlag, 1928). 62 Kurt Rudolf Fischer, “Österreichische Philosophie oder Philosophie aus Österreich?,” in Philosophie aus Wien: Aufsätze zur analytischen und österreichischen Philosophie, zu den Weltanschauungen des Wiener Fin de Siècle und Biographisches aus Berkeley, Shanghai und Wien (Vienna: Geyer-Ed., 1991), 104–12. 63 Otto Neurath, “Die Entwicklung des Wiener Kreises und die Zukunft des logischen Empirismus,” in Gesammelte philosophische und methodologische Schriften, vol. 2, 673–702; here 673. 64 Neurath, “Die Entwicklung des Wiener Kreises,” 676–77.

4: A City Regenerated: Eugenics, Race, and Welfare in Interwar Vienna

Paul Weindling

IENNESE EUGENICS HAS YET TO FIND its position within an appropriate sociopolitical or cultural frame. Austria’s eugenicists, who were concen-

trated in Vienna, have generally been seen through a German lens as a mere peripheral context for the German Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene (Racial Hygiene Society), driven by its founder, Alfred Ploetz (who coined the term Rassenhygiene [racial hygiene]) in 1895, and the psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin. However, this fixation on German developments, including an emphasis on right-wing racial ideology and demands for sterilization and euthanasia, not only marginalizes the important role Vienna played in the formation of the Austrian eugenics movement during the interwar years but also ignores the significance of eugenicists from Vienna in the broader “Greater German” movement as a whole. Although an alternative view locates Austrian eugen-ics within a general model of “biopolitics” and permits investigation of med-ical and public health networks, it ignores cultural specificities and the role of crucial linkages to centers beyond Austrian borders, such as Berlin, Munich, Brno/Brünn, and Budapest — and even London and New York.1

This essay argues that a more multifaceted Central European perspective reveals how Austrian racial hygiene bridged the gap between Hitler’s leaving Vienna in 1913 and the increasing racialization of medicine with the An-schluss in 1938.2 This perspective illuminates the role of eugenics as a means of establishing coalition and consensus among those concerned with public health in Red Vienna long before it became a tool of German Nationalists. As surprising as it may seem, eugenics actually developed in a number of div-ergent directions, some of which formed the basis of Viennese public health and welfare developments and gained the support of individuals — including Jews, who later became victims of its misuse.

The first question that must be asked is whether Viennese eugenics can be understood in terms of its own distinctive cultural and sociopolitical factors, which revealed unique but divergent regenerative visions. If so, then in these varied senses eugenics indeed marks interwar Vienna’s “forgotten” status. Out of an intense turn-of-the-century debate on racial theories there crystallized in Vienna a number of innovative measures dealing with the social dimensions of health, sexuality, and the family life of the city’s bur-

V

82 ♦ PAUL WEINDLING

geoning, multiethnic, socially disparate population. While some nationalists saw themselves as part of a “Greater German” racial movement, others sup-ported a fledgling Österreichideologie (Austrian ideology). An examination of eugenics in interwar Vienna on its own terms therefore reveals a plurality of eugenic schemes, organizations, racial surveys, and outreach activities.

The theme of rejuvenation, which touched not only the sciences but also literature, the arts, and psychology, is one appropriate and useful lens through which one might begin to examine the distinctiveness of eugenics and racial ideology in interwar Vienna. In the 1930 Social Democratic propaganda film Das Notizbuch des Mr. Pim (Mr. Pim’s Trip to Europe, 1930), directed by Franz Rossak, an accident-prone American experiences the welfare system in Red Vienna when an idealistic young socialist offers his blood to the portly Mr. Pim, a scene symbolizing the hope of injecting new vitality and vigor into the city.

Eugenics flourished in a hothouse atmosphere that encompassed a brave new model of civic health administration as part of the infant Austrian re-public. Enthusiastic over the possibilities of new social welfare programs in the socialist city, scientists at the Prater Vivarium in Vienna’s second district and the Naturhistorisches Kabinett (Center for Natural History), located beyond the bounds of the Ringstrasse at the Volksheim in Ottakring, ex-amined the biology of sexual reproduction and evolution. Radical reformers looked to biology for answers to long-standing problems of poverty, disease, and delinquency. The remarkable and oft-cited interwar Viennese experi-ments in municipal housing reform— examples of which still stand today — were actually built with the added intent to improve the biological fabric of the population. To that end, in 1922 Karl Kautsky Jr. (1892–1978) opened the first municipal Eheberatungsstelle (marriage counseling clinic) to screen for inherited and sexually transmitted diseases prior to marriage. The zoolo-gist Eugen Steinach (1861–1944) offered the hope of prolonging human life through testicular transplantation and hormone therapy.3 In interwar Vienna not only scientists but also others interested in the development of regener-ative social welfare projects in the city believed that biology could offer effective techniques to improve health and personal welfare, while the city’s massive efforts in the area of social reconstruction likewise resulted in im-portant biological and medical breakthroughs.

In the wake of the devastating hunger and destruction of the First World War and the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, such projects for the rejuvenation of the social fabric of the city as a whole gained particular currency. Eugenics as a field stood at the intersection of a debate on social reconstruction by forces on both the left and the right. Eugenicists discussed “positive” measures based on social welfare to improve the biological status of beneficiaries, as opposed to “negative” measures, such as birth control, sterilization, castration, and institutional custody to prevent procreation. While those on the left tended to be more inclusive of social groups and saw

A CITY REGNERATED: EUGENICS, RACE, AND WELFARE ♦ 83

the potential of the provision of “positive” social welfare, those on the right stressed the need for a revival of a primal Germanic racial vigor. Catholic welfare experts, who straddled the left and the right, also saw the potential for welfare reforms that would revive the institution of the family and secure the future of a clerical Austria. Consequently, eugenics projects aimed at the rejuvenation of the local population flourished, albeit in a fragmented fashion. Many of those involved in the development of policies and programs based on eugenics believed that mind and body, the erotic senses, and gender were all malleable qualities in an immanent sense, and remained confident in how these could be remade, revived, and reinvigorated. Just as Vienna took the lead in the advancement of avant-garde ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis, it remained at the forefront of theory dealing with immutable psychological and innate biological qualities. Public health experts throughout Europe held that modern culture, with its plethora of degenerative “racial poisons,” dam-aged both reproductive health and the family. Eugenicists made much of Vienna’s birthrate as one of the lowest in Europe, raising concerns that unless family welfare measures were undertaken Vienna would become a dying city.

Some historians have argued that strong continuities of ideas about race characterized social and sexual politics between 1918 and 1938, with the result that developments about eugenics in Austria kept in step with those in Germany. This argument is based on the claim that studies conducted under the Habsburgs of the “primitive” racial types in the empire’s eastern terri-tories paved the way for the racial imperialism of Nazi Germany.4 In this sense, as Brigitte Fuchs and others argue, Viennese anthropology and eugen-ics represented an offshoot of aspirations for a “Greater German” race and nation. Any separate identity served only to conform nominally to the post-Versailles legal requirement of nonunion with Germany, whereas in reality the “Vienna school” of racial studies marched to a German beat and had organized illegal Nazi cells by the early 1930s. One collection of essays even raises the question of whether this development amounted to Vienna’s eu-genics movement actually becoming a doom-laden “Vorreiter der Vernich-tung” (forerunner of destruction).5

Although it is true that this right-wing branch of eugenics policies in Vienna did overlap with certain developments in German eugenics, these his-torians’ assertions must be qualified with the knowledge that those racial schemes did not amount to the totality of biologically based plans for social regeneration. Another important viewpoint holds that since hygiene was a bourgeois value, some concerns of Austrian eugenicists do not fit the proto-Nazi model.6 I wish to argue that the development of eugenics during the interwar period, considered on its own terms, constitutes a separate response to certain distinctive characteristics of Austrian and Viennese culture and politics. Politics in Red Vienna — a locus open to a variety of international crosscurrents — metamorphosed into a distinctive “Austrofascism,” ulti-


mately resulting in the trauma of the Anschluss, which opened the way to racial sifting, exclusion, and extermination. While it cannot be denied that both eugenics and social welfare policies often contained substantial authori-tarian, expert-directed components, these also retained populist dimensions in the efforts of their leaders to mobilize support from the broader Viennese population as well as competing socialist, Catholic, and right-wing elements.7

A major problem with historical interpretations couched in terms of racial continuities is that they tend to overlook prescient criticisms of racial agendas, as well as alternative cultural formations that were not as long-lived as the more successful right-wing agendas. Viennese eugenics and racial welfare policies present a complex tangle of polarities, discontinuities, and reconfigurations rather than a coherent, unified ideology. Neither an institu-tional nor an intellectual continuity existed in terms of a major journal or series of publications, nor did Austrian eugenicists found a consolidated national institution of racial studies. Sources are sparse and incomplete, and membership details of the various racial organizations are fragmentary. At the level of personal and intellectual networks, collaborative ventures came together for a time, only to fracture later. As a result, historians have been uncertain as to how to frame eugenics in Vienna. One approach has been to examine municipal welfare in isolation, while another reconstructs biologists’ and medical networks in a Viennese context. Still others have examined dis-tinct agendas in anthropology, demography, and medicine. Some see the Viennese context as self-contained, while others place it within a broader Austrian national framework. Here the question arises whether we are deal-ing with the consolidation of a new sociopolitical entity or a temporarily detached constituent of a “Greater German” whole. Viennese eugenicists were divided over whether their metropolis should remain the cultural center of the lands that had comprised the multi-ethnic empire, whether they should transfer their allegiance to a “Greater German” context, or whether they should focus on welfare within the borders of the new Austrian republic. Vi-ennese eugenics in the interwar period constantly shifted among these agendas despite warnings from Vienna-based critics of racial ideas.

Imperial Prelude It is impossible to understand the dynamics of interwar racial hygiene in Vienna without considering how racial groupings first coalesced. One finds a strongly imperial Austrian and anthropological component within early “Ger-man” institutions of racial hygiene. Since the fin de siècle there had been keen Austrian interest in the new science of racial hygiene. For example, the 1900 Krupp prize for an essay on the “principles of evolution for the de-velopment and laws of states” attracted eight entries from imperial Austria.8 The Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene (Racial Hygiene Society) — the first ever eugenics society — was founded in Berlin on 22 June 1905 at the Steglitz


apartment of ethnologist Richard Thurnwald, who was born in Vienna in 1869. Thurnwald maintained his links to Vienna even while at Harvard and Yale universities in the early 1930s, from where he reported his observations on racial segregation in the United States, writing for the journal Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (ARGB; Archive of Racial and Social Biol-ogy).9 Another key Austrian figure in this Berlin nucleus was the anthropolo-gist Felix von Luschan, born in Höllabrunn bei Wien in 1854, who joined the nascent Racial Hygiene Society early in 1907. Thurnwald and the Vien-nese anthropologist Rudolf Pöch (1870–1921) came to know the society’s founder, Alfred Ploetz, first as a medical student in Zurich and subsequently through the international anti-alcohol movement at its congress in Vienna, which was held from 9 to 14 April 1901, and at meetings in Germany.10 Physiologist, socialist, and leading anti-alcohol campaigner Rudolf Wlassak (1865–1930), who was born in Brno and was active in Vienna, shared with Ploetz a concern over the influence of alcohol on the brain and race.

The embryonic Racial Hygiene Society was Grossdeutsch (advocating a greater German social unity) in outlook, meaning that it sought to cultivate links beyond the borders of imperial Germany. The society eventually in-cluded an Austrian lodge. Pöch joined on 5 November 1906 and published on the subject of racial hygiene in New Guinea under its auspices.11 Hans Graf Wilczek, a member of the society by April 1908, agreed to found a separate Austrian group together with the Viennese economist Michael Hainisch (1858–1940) and the eminent professor of pathology and anti-alcohol campaigner Anton Weichselbaum (1845–1920), who joined on 15 February 1909.12 Weichselbaum was rector at the University of Vienna in 1912 when he spoke on inherited constitutional diseases.13 Beginning in 1904, Ploetz coedited the journal Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie with Thurnwald, who had been inspired by the racial sociology of Ludwig Gumplowicz. The journal regularly published articles on Austrian and Vien-nese eugenics, which offered a platform to critics such as social scientist Friedrich Hertz, as well as to völkisch racial enthusiasts.14

Hainisch served as Austrian Bundespräsident from 1920 to 1929 and was a member of Vienna’s Fabier Gesellschaft, a group of social reformers modeled on the British Fabian Society. He provided official points of entry for eugenics into the interwar welfare state.15 Social thinker and scholar Rudolf Goldscheid was a pioneering Viennese figure in linking eugenics to social science. Both Hainisch and Goldscheid were members of what in 1910 be-came the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene (German Racial Hygiene Society). Since Ploetz, its founder, was interested in social instinct, altruism, and social solidarity, his activities offered a controversial biological perspec-tive on key sociological concepts. Another link between general German eugenics and its Viennese counterparts was formed by the bacteriologist and former Fabian Max von Gruber, who helped build up Munich as a center of racial hygiene together with his Austrian assistant Ignaz Kaup. Gruber main-


tained contacts with racial thinkers in Vienna, as well as with the influential Géza von Hoffmann in Berlin and Budapest.16

In 1909 Goldscheid founded the Soziologische Gesellschaft (Socio-logical Society) in Vienna, and by 1912 he had established a separate section for “social biology and eugenics.” On 12 February 1909 Ploetz conducted a six-hour discussion with Goldscheid in Vienna.17 Although Goldscheid was keen to maintain relations with Ploetz, for some reason the latter distanced himself from Vienna, preferring instead to cultivate links to nordic Scandi-navia. One plausible explanation is that Vienna was too “Jewish” in its make-up, on the one hand, and too “Catholic” in terms of the academics involved, on the other. The London-based Eugenics Review recorded the founding of an Austrian Society for Eugenics, but Ploetz wished only to work with a select number of Viennese eugenicists.18 Goldscheid’s group amounted to the first Vienna-based eugenics association, and while it was limited to discussions at a conceptual level, it acted as a focal point for various ideolo-gies about population, welfare, and eugenics. Expectations of the Austrian eugenics society were in themselves influential throughout the dual mo-narchy.19 By 1914 the Deutsch-Österreichische Beratungsstelle für Volks-wohlfahrt (German-Austrian Office for the People’s Welfare) had become a center for eugenics information.20

To conclude that eugenics was practically nonexistent in Vienna before 1918 is to overlook two important issues that hindered relations between Austrians and Germans concerning racial hygiene, namely, antisemitism and Roman Catholicism.21 The anatomist Julius Tandler (1869–1936), who was born Jewish but was baptized a (nominal) Catholic in 1899, played a crucial role. He became Sektionsleiter (section head) of the Viennese Section for So-cial Biology and Eugenics of the Sociological Society in Vienna (Soziolo-gische Gesellschaft in Wien). On 7 March 1913 Tandler presented a lecture to the German Racial Hygiene Society on constitution and racial hygiene, and his views were discussed by the Vienna Society for Social Biology and Eugenics on 20 March 1914. Tandler served on the editorial board of the journal Archiv für Frauenkunde und Eugenetik (Archive for the Study of Women and Eugenics), which was launched in Berlin in 1914 by social gynecologist Max Hirsch and was actively supported throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire.22 The secretary of the Viennese Section for Social Bi-ology and Eugenics was Paul Kammerer, the Lamarckian zoologist.23 (One should note in passing the prevalence in Vienna of Lamarckian biology, which demonstrated an animal’s capacity to adapt to environmental influences through its adaptive behavior, mental responses, or physiological change over generations.) The third key person was Rudolf Goldscheid, whose residence (at Jacquingasse 45) served as the office of the section. Goldscheid’s work on the concept of Menschenökonomie (“human economy,” in which human life took priority over profit) appeared in 1911 and had wide appeal for eugeni-cists despite its rejection of the principles of Darwinian natural selection.24


Kammerer used this theory to advance his ideas of symbiosis as a critique of the selective biology of the German eugenicist Wilhelm Schallmayer, who focused on state public health.25 The Viennese group founded by Goldscheid in 1913 provided the foundation for interwar initiatives in eugenics and so-cial welfare that differed fundamentally from the German model of Ploetz. This explains why Ploetz distanced himself and the German Racial Hygiene Society from the Vienna Section, which was considered by contemporaries as the first Austrian eugenics society.

When Ploetz moved from Berlin to Munich in 1907, expatriate Aus-trians were already prominent in the Munich Ortsgruppe (section). Max von Gruber, together with Swiss psychiatrist and eugenicist Ernst Rüdin, jointly organized the racial hygienic exhibition in Dresden in 1911. Six Viennese contributed to this venture: botanist Erich von Tschermak (co-discoverer of Mendel’s theories); zoologist Kammerer; pathologist Weichselbaum; medical statistician Siegfried Rosenfeld; genealogist Otto Forst; and agriculturalist C. Fruhwirth.26 Abstinence from alcohol cemented their zeal. Support came from Gruber, professor of hygiene in Munich, and his Austrian assistant Kaup, who emerged as an energetic Lamarckian advocate of racial hygiene. Both politically and morally (in terms of social purity), they were both gra-vitating steadily toward the right. In 1917 Gruber supported the ultra-German and annexationist Deutsche Vaterlandspartei (German Fatherland Party) of Ludendorff, while Kaup supported the Austrian, right-wing popu-list Georg von Schönerer. Considered together, they provide a perspective on Austrian eugenics that was both völkisch and socially engaged, though very much from a Pan-Germanic perspective. Revealed here are the roots of an alternative Deutschösterreichisch (German-Austrian) strand in interwar eu-genics and racial hygiene. Yet this German axis is far from the whole story. Some Viennese eugenicists saw themselves as part of a Grossdeutsch racial en-tity; other, more liberal and socially engaged, eugenicists focused on welfare.

Kaup, a bridge figure between Austria and Germany, was active between the early years of racial hygiene and the Nazi period. In 1897 he became “Demonstrator” at the Hygiene Institute in Vienna under Gruber. Kaup was especially interested in occupational hygiene and how toxic factors limited the fertility of working women. He moved to Berlin in 1907, assumed a prominent role in social medicine, but returned to Austria in July 1914 to fulfill his military obligation. By December 1917 he had become head of the Abteilung für Volksgesundheit (Department for People’s Health) in the Ministry of the Interior. In August 1918 he was appointed head of the department in the imperial Ministerium für Volksgesundheit (Ministry of Public Health), only to become its minister on 30 November of that same year. Significantly, one of the first ministers of health in any country was a eugenicist. Kaup took a leading role in the republic’s new Volksgesund-heitsamt (Office of Public Health). On 9 May 1919 he was replaced by Tandler, a recent convert to socialism and therefore in line with the politics


of Red Vienna. Kaup’s Habilitation (higher doctorate) in Vienna on social hygiene coincided with a political storm in 1919–20, which resulted in his return to Munich.27 One can only conclude that medicine — and social medicine in particular — remained highly politicized, since Tandler was later forced into exile.

Imperial Vienna was a cauldron of scientific racism, not least thanks to the virulent assertions of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who resided in Vienna until 1908. Vienna was also the city that generated the two most important critiques of race as myth. Unfortunately, the significance of social scientist Friedrich Hertz’s Moderne Rassentheorien (Modern Race Theories) and Antisemitismus und Wissenschaft (Antisemitism and Science) of 1904, and radiologist and scientist Ignaz Zollschan’s work Das Rassenproblem (The Racial Problem) of 1910 have largely been overlooked. Although Hertz’s and Zollschan’s careers took them to Halle and Karlsbad, respectively, both retained strong links to Vienna during the interwar period. Each revised his work to take issue with racial hygiene as a basis of social policy — Zollschan as a result of his background as a Jew and Hertz because of his liberal out-look.28 What emerged was the distinction between the biological values of Goldscheid’s Menschenökonomie and racial eugenics.

The First World War led to a strengthening of links between state social policy and birthrates in Austria. On 26 June 1917 the Verein für Bevölke-rungspolitik (Association for Population Politics), which later became the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Bevölkerungspolitik (Austrian Society for Population Policy), was launched amid demands for Aufzuchtspolitik (regen-enerative politics). Its estimated three hundred founding members repre-sented a broad coalition of interests, ranging from Kaup, who was positioned to the right of more centrist members Hainisch and Goldscheid, and Tandler (as deputy chair) and occupational health expert Ludwig Teleky, on the left. Gudrun Exner observes that 78 percent of its members were based in Vienna, and that such degenerative factors in the population as tuberculosis and syphilis were of special concern to the group. While ethnic and racial issues were not explicitly discussed, the hygiene expert and bacteriologist Heinrich Reichel (a friend of Ploetz and a key figure in racial hygiene) saw illegitimacy as “minderwertig” (inferior).29 Beginning in 1917, Rudolf Pöch lectured on anthropology, heredity, and physical degeneration based on large-scale photographic projects on Tartar and Bashkir prisoners of war held in Bohemia, followed by lectures on Wolhynian refugee families.30

The Viennese group maintained active links to German and Hungarian associations devoted to eugenics, population concerns, and demography through such figures as Géza von Hoffmann. The first German-Austrian-Hungarian conference on population was planned for 23 September 1918 but was called off at the last minute — although strong Central European net-works continued to function even following defeat, when defending race


became a priority.31 Nevertheless attempts at maintaining a broadly united front among eugenicists crumbled with the collapse of the empire in 1918.

Red Vienna, Black Austria The breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Allied strictures im-posed on Deutschösterreich resulted in the autonomous organization of eu-genics and racial hygiene in the new Austrian republic. Anthropologists aspired to create a centralized state Institut für Rassenbiologie (Institute for Racial Biology) like the one that existed in Sweden, although this goal was never attained. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, founded by Jesuit Hermann Muckermann in Berlin in 1927, became an attractive model that received its support from the center left. Pater Wilhelm Schmidt exer-cised a strong influence on the Catholic anthropologist Viktor Lebzelter at the Museum of Natural History. A further difference between Austria and Prussia was that, unlike their counterparts in Berlin, public health experts in Vienna were unable to secure a state council to guide health reform on the basis of eugenics. The dynamism generated by social and racial engagement, as well as the sense of rejuvenating the new nation, first had to overcome the financial stagnation that characterized a post-imperial era.32 Only sporadically does race appear on the administrative agenda of either the Volksgesundheit-samt or the overarching Gesellschaft für Volksgesundheit (Society for Public Health), which was launched by advisers to Hainisch, the Austrian republic’s president.33 These included bacteriologist and anthropologist Heinrich Reichel, who advised Hainisch in 1922 on the main problems of racial hy-giene as well as the need to sustain a family-oriented morality.34 By 1919 he had conducted surveys on the health status of both marital (legitimate) and illegitimate children, whom he regarded as manifesting degenerate charac-teristics.35 Reichel emerged as a key figure in the organization and dissemina-tion of racial hygiene: he was a nationalist who was also ready to collaborate with the liberals. While he ultimately viewed the Anschluss as a way to realize eugenics, he refrained from joining the Nazi Party.36

Within Austrian universities there existed no university chairs devoted to racial hygiene (unlike Munich, where Fritz Lenz had held the position of Extraordinariat [associate professor] since 1923), although the topic was of-ten included in various lectures and seminars. The conservative nationalist Reichel offered courses on Rassenhygiene beginning with the summer semes-ter of 1920 until 1932.37 Although the Austrian network of organizations mirrored the situation of eugenic state and municipal public health in the Weimar Republic, in other respects it remained wholly distinctive. Graz dermatologist Rudolf Polland, who later became a covert Nazi Party mem-ber (membership in the party had been banned by the government as a threat to the Austrian state), pressed for an agenda of race hygiene. Richard Chiari and L. Gschwendner organized local groups of academics and teach-


ers in Linz, where teaching in the field of eugenics existed at the Bundes-realschule (high school with a modern curriculum).38 Eugenics also received support at the medical faculty at the University of Innsbruck.

While these conservative groups dominated provincial Austrian eugenics during the interwar years, the situation in Vienna was more complex and polarized. In 1935, the Eugenics Review outlined three strands of political influence that divided Viennese eugenics: the German nationalists, the so-cialists, and (since the 1930s) a moderate Catholic group.39 Although there were conservative Darwinians, like the bacteriologist Reichel, and socialist Lamarckians, like the zoologist Kammerer, one cannot conclude that all socialists adhered to Lamarckism and conservatives to natural selection. To take one example, Kaup subscribed to a right-wing and völkisch political ideology, whereas his scientific view remained Lamarckian. This situation of divided political and scientific loyalties was complicated even further by in-novative medical discoveries regarding hormones, blood groups, and the causes of genetic mutations, which offered new possibilities for shaping re-productive health.

The postwar shift to the left in the realm of municipal politics raised Julius Tandler to a position of political influence as a driving force behind Vienna’s health and welfare programs. As was noted previously, on 9 May 1919 Tandler assumed a leading role in the republic’s new Volksgesund-heitsamt. However, prior to that he had for years been involved in issues of racial hygiene. On 7 March 1913 Tandler lectured before the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene, marking a clear entry from positive anatomi-cal science into eugenic circles, although he did not join the society. The text of his lecture was printed in his journal, and he delivered a lecture on a similar theme to the new Volksgesundheitsamt in 1920.40 In 1914, when Tandler launched the Zeitschrift für angewandte Anatomie und Konstitu-tionslehre (Journal of Applied Anatomy and Constitution), the idea of an inherited constitution was viewed as shaping all aspects of the metabolism, human anatomy, and psychology.

Tandler soon assumed the mantle of the visionary architect of the Vienna municipal welfare system. Although certain of his extreme comments, such as the sterilization of the unfit, have gained prominence, it should also be noted that these link him to radical sexology rather than to an exterminatory racial hygiene. In practice Tandler’s eugenic bark was worse than his bite when it came to preventing those considered of lesser value — the Minder-wertigen — from procreating. In 1926 he stated that scientific knowledge to date provided an inadequate basis for practical measures. Tandler’s positions as undersecretary of state in the Staatsamt für Volksgesundheit (State Office of Public Health) and as Stadtrat für das Wohlfahrtswesen der Stadt Wien (Councilman for the Public Welfare of the City of Vienna), who was respon-sible for municipal hygiene, rendered him a major player of welfare reform in Red Vienna. In these projects Tandler concentrated on the delivery of


benefits to mothers and kindergartens, as well as model housing schemes, as cures for the degeneration of society. This can be seen as a biological form of environmentalism.

On the social policy side, Vienna became the site of Europe’s first municipal Eheberatungsstelle (marriage-counseling clinic in the municipal health office run by Karl Kautsky Jr. from June 1922 until 1934, when it was closed under the auspices of the right-wing clerical state. This office served interests similar to those of the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, which from 1919 until 1924 also provided counseling on “reproductive hygiene.”41 Tandler supported this influential practical plan to promote voluntary birth control, most famously in his lecture on marriage and population policy, de-livered in February 1923.42 Significantly, both Kautsky and Tandler viewed the marriage clinic as having a rationale based on a populist form of eu-genics, accessible to working people, who could be advised on effective birth control. Kautsky argued that racial hygiene served the ruling elite, whereas his clinic remedied mass sexual ignorance; combating degeneration among the masses would serve to produce a healthy race.43 Over twelve years nearly five thousand people visited the clinic for consultations.44

Not only did Vienna remain the international center of psychoanalysis during the interwar years, but the city also became the locus for even more radical advocates of sexual enlightenment for the masses. The World League for Sexual Reform, launched in 1928, met in Vienna in 1930. The editorial board for the 1931 issue of Sexus, a short-lived journal sponsored by the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, was likewise based in the city. The league-sponsored conference attracted such international luminaries as Nor-man Haire, Magnus Hirschfeld, Pierre Vachet, and Josef K. Friedjung, a Vien-nese psychoanalyst, Social Democrat, and campaigner for sexual reform. Also prominent at this conference were Ernst Toller, the Expressionist playwright, and Wilhelm Reich, a Freudian apostate who offered a heady mix of Marx-ism and psychology.45 In general the group was comprised of members who were tolerant of homosexuality and the idea that sexual types were subject to considerable variation, and who also rationalized their views in terms of biology, physiology, and glandular functions.46 Their psychological and sci-entific approach to homosexuality challenged the Catholic Church, which was in the process of formulating a family-oriented, nonselective eugenics.

Eugenics issues focusing on the birthrate, as well as child and youth health, became prominent in public health education during the interwar period, as was demonstrated at the Vienna Hygiene Exhibition of May–June 1925, held in the Messepalast (a large exhibition hall located in the city cen-ter). Reichel and Otto Reche, a German nationalist and professor of anthro-pology and ethnography at the University of Vienna from 1924 to 1927, contributed eugenic tables, to which they gave the very same title as the seminal 1911 eugenic exhibition in Dresden: “Fortpflanzung, Vererbung und Rassenhygiene” (Reproduction, Inheritance, and Racial Hygiene).


Reichel also provided an elaborate presentation of Goethe’s genealogy, with the aim of showing that genius was a product of Germanic ancestry rather than creative individuality. He also presented the results of family genealo-gies collected since 1919, indicating that high achievement derived from Germanic ancestry.47

Tandler shared the Lamarckian environmentalism of the biologists of the Prater Vivarium, who believed that improving the physique of one genera-tion would improve the nation’s stock. The Vivarium was a biological ex-perimental institute whose scientists studied regeneration, transplantation of limbs and organs, and the environment.48 Its founder, Hans Przibram, worked with Steinach, Walter Finkler (a zoologist and journalist), and Paul Kammerer. All were gifted spokespersons who popularized science in clear, vivid terms for a wider public. In addition to the booklet Allgemeine Biologie (General Biology), Finkler combined research with journalism in the Neue Freie Presse, Neues Wiener Journal, and the Wiener Tageblatt. His trans-plantation experiments caught the interest of Julian Huxley, the British eugenicist and sterilization advocate. The fact that Finkler’s publications extended beyond the bounds of scientific journals to newspapers and popu-lar educational booklets indicated that his futuristic ideas of transplantation, rejuvenation, and a socially progressive evolution actually permeated the broader Viennese cultural discourse.49 Kammerer remained a remarkable ex-ample of a Lamarckian socialist who in 1909 published a defense of symbi-osis in the ARGB that combined science, socialism, and advocacy of a new morality based on positive science.50 He ended his life in 1926 in a tragic and highly publicized suicide.51 Socialist propagandists for biological enlighten-ment remained convinced that Kammerer’s specimens had been tampered with by the ultra-right in order to discredit him.52 Finkler’s Lamarckism posed a barrier to a career in biology and genetics when he arrived in Britain having fled the Nazis. That Kammerer was discredited by right-wing conser-vatives was suggested by authors like Arthur Koestler and Mendel biog-rapher Hugo Iltis.53

Grossdeutschen enthusiasts also demanded control of infectious, sexual, and hereditary diseases, which they castigated as symptoms of liberalism, a point relentlessly emphasized by right-wing physicians in their conservative propaganda.54 In response to fears about liberal and socialist control over public health, on 2 September 1924 the 137-member Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege (German Society for Racial Welfare) was founded in Vienna with the goal of disseminating scientific anthropology laden with racial poli-tics. The term Rassenpflege was chosen for its Germanic overtones, providing a substitute for the supposedly alien, foreign word “hygiene.” The Deutsch-völkischer Verein (German Race Association) agitated for its foundation at the Deutsches Haus (German House) located in the Elisabethstrasse.55 In keeping with its strong German nationalist orientation, the Deutsche Gesell-schaft für Rassenpflege accepted no Jewish members and fostered the careers


of a number of scientists who would later join the Nazi Party. The driving force behind the founding of this organization was Reche; nationalists Robert Körber, Fred Ebert, and Willibald Neubacher also lent their support. In December 1924 the organization was supplemented by the more po-litically restrained Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege (Vienna Society for Racial Hygiene), which was based at the Anthropological Institute in the van Swietengasse. This resulted in a dual structure: an inner racist core shielded by an academic, respectable organization. Reche’s opening remarks in the Festsaal (ceremonial hall) of the University of Vienna on 18 March 1925 claimed it was the responsibility of the new republic to sustain a healthy racial stock and condemned individualism, social deviance, and inherited disease.56 Michael Hesch, an assistant to Reche, served as the organization’s secretary.57

In June 1926 Reche cofounded (with German naval medical officer Paul Steffan) the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Blutgruppenforschung (German Soci-ety for the Research of Blood Types), based in Vienna. After some hesitation émigré serologist Karl Landsteiner (who had moved from Vienna to the Rockefeller Institute in New York City) allowed himself to be listed as hon-orary member, this despite the fact that the society had a racial agenda of demonstrating the Central European distribution of race. The hydraulics engineer Siegmund Wellisch, who had accomplished a great deal of work in providing Vienna with water from alpine sources, became a major supporter of research on blood genes with data on over 6,000 families. Wellisch, although not born Jewish, had Jewish ancestry, and Reche lobbied to restrict Wellisch’s activities. While Reche, a “Prussian Silesian by origin,” was to leave Vienna in 1927, he continued to support ultranational groups active in Vienna. He later collaborated with SS anthropologist B. K. Schultz on the journal Volk und Rasse (People and Race) and was involved in other schemes to promote Rassenpflege.58

The chief protagonists of the society included: Alois Scholz, a teacher at the Bundeslehranstalt (Federal College) in Mödling bei Wien, who took over the chairmanship from Reichel and served as a leading light of the society; and bacteriologist Heinrich Reichel, a German national conservative who nevertheless steered clear of Nazism, who served as deputy chair. Others became covert members of the Nazi Party.59 In 1922 Reichel authored a pamphlet entitled Die Hauptaufgaben der Rassenhygiene in der Gegenwart (The Main Tasks of Racial Hygiene in the Present) for the Volksgesundheit-samt in the Sozialministerium (Social Welfare Ministry) and also represented Austria on the board of the International Federation of Eugenics Organiza-tions, remaining close to Ploetz, whom he honored in a lecture delivered to the Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege on 9 December 1930.60

Outreach and dissemination of the society’s ideology beyond the bounds of the city remained a key goal. In 1929 Walter Rosentingl, based in Gmund, founded a newsletter in order to disseminate lectures outside Vienna, and in


1930 the society published radio lectures given by Reichel, as well as one by the German Catholic eugenicist Hermann Muckermann.61 That the program of the society influenced other scientists is clear from the example of Karl Thums, a medical student at the University of Vienna who came from a Vi-ennese Catholic family. He was influenced by the racial hygiene seminars of Reichel, the hereditary pathology of Franz Chvostek, and by Rassenkunde (racial studies). Thums joined the Nazi Party in Vienna in 1931, which was followed by his entry into the SA and the Austrian Legion. After 1933 he studied in Munich under racial hygienist Ernst Rüdin, completing his Ha-bilitation in 1935. His quick rise in academia culminated in his appointment in 1940 as chair of the department of Erb- und Rassenhygiene (Heredity and Racial Hygiene) at the German University of Prague.62

National Consolidation The founding in May 1928 of the Österreichischer Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde (Austrian League for Regeneration and Heredity), which held its constitutive meeting in 1929, represented a new period of consensus about eugenics, when certain socialists, Catholics, and conservatives joined forces.63 This organization became the counterpart to the Deutscher Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde (German League for Regeneration and Heredity), which was founded in 1925. The term Aufartung (lit. the im-provement of the species) indicated a desire for a “regeneration” of the population in response to the growing popularity of the ideals of German nationalist racial hygiene, which became increasingly exclusionary toward Jews and socialists (many of whom were Jewish). The Österreichischer Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde declared itself to be apolitical and, like its German counterpart, claimed to be working toward the general goal of the salvation of the German people, meaning “German-Austria” as a national entity alongside the Weimar Republic. It favored education on how to avoid factors that could lead to degeneration, as well as how to preserve and in-crease notable physical and intellectual racial elements. Its agenda included a commitment to maintain the family, which it viewed as the carrier of hered-itary factors. Other priorities included health education, a healthy lifestyle, advice on treating illnesses such as tuberculosis and alcoholism, and child rearing. Its board of directors had among its members Tandler and Reichel (who moved to Graz in May 1933 to become professor of hygiene), plus such politically well connected figures as Karl Kautsky. The presence of the nationally oriented Reichel and Scholz, on the one hand, and the socialist Kautsky, on the other, reflects an effort to integrate the left and the right at a time when Austria was shaken by a cataclysmic economic downturn and de-pression. Ironically, despite their increasingly exclusionary agenda, nationalist eugenicists were still willing to cooperate with socialists and Jews.


Österreichischer Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde — Vorstand (Board of Directors)

and Wissenschaftlicher Beirat (Scientific Advisory Board), 1928–32

Name V: VorstandWB: Wissenschaft-

licher Beirrat

Position

Julius Wagner-Jauregg

V (Chair) Professor of Psychiatry

Felix Tietze V (Secretary) Pediatrician

Ernst Brezina V Sanitary Engineer

Karl Gaulhofer V Physical Educator

Robert Hofstätter V Social Psychologist

Karl Kautsky Jr. V Director of the Vienna Mar-riage Counseling Center

Alois Scholz V NSDAP Member, 1931

Julius Bauer WB Internal Medicine

Carl Brockhausen WB Constitutional Lawyer

Ernst Finger WB Dermatologist

Alexander Fraenkel WB Surgeon; Editor, Wiener klinische Wochenschrift

Alexander Hofstätter WB Unknown

Hans Kelsen WB Constitutional Lawyer

Julius Metzl WB Forensic Pathologist

Heinrich Reichel WB Bacteriologist and Public Health Official

Siegfried Rosenfeld WB Statistician

Thomas Scherrer WB Ministerial Medical Official

Hermann Swoboda WB Psychologist

Julius Tandler WB Anatomist

Siegmund Wellisch WB Hydrological Engineer

Josef Weninger WB Anthropologist

Since the society was founded with the purpose of serving the whole of the German volk, irrespective of politics and religion, it is no coincidence that


the term “race” was deliberately absent from its title. The purpose of hered-ity, according to the society’s ideology, was to promote national health. The group recruited members from a wide range of professions, including physi-cians, priests, teachers, and social workers. In fact, according to its guide-lines, membership was open to any Austrian.64 The group met mainly at the lecture theater of Julius Tandler’s Anatomical Institute. Psychiatrist and Nobel laureate (1927) Julius Wagner-Jauregg served as chair, with Felix Tietze as secretary.65 The society received a state subsidy of 400 Schillings a year from the Bundesministerium für soziale Verwaltung (Federal Ministry for Social Administration) from 1929 until 1931. Members lobbied for courses on racial hygiene to become part of school curriculum. Psychiatrist Erwin Stransky even advocated “mental hygiene,” which meant a combination of psychological advice for disturbed children and adolescents and (following the German model of Rüdin) segregation and sterilization. In short, the establishment of this broad-based society, with its membership drawn from both the left and the right, can be seen as an attempt to consolidate eugenics groups in an independent Austria, thereby stabilizing the Austrian republic in the face of economic collapse and ultra-right opposition. By the late 1920s Austrians were seeking common ground with British and American eugeni-cists. Felix Tietze (until 1929 an assistant to the renowned pediatrician Clemens von Pirquet and, from 1929 until 1938, director of the Infant Wel-fare Center in Vienna) advocated both positive and negative eugenics on a nonracial basis. His positive actions included supporting maternal and child welfare based on an American model pioneered by the Commonwealth Fund (a corporate philanthropy endowed by the Harkness family), as well as the formation of networks to include British eugenicists and child-welfare ex-perts. These approaches contrasted with the development of a eugenic “puericulture,” a program of enhancing the nation’s racial stock by attention to maternal and child health. Tietze tried to align the Bund für Volksaufar-tung und Erbkunde with selective, negative eugenics as practiced in the United States and advocated in Britain. By 1926 he had became a member of the American Eugenics Society, had translated into German both Leonard Darwin’s (son of Charles Darwin and a leading British eugenicist) “What Is Eugenics?” and Californian sterilization and marriage-counseling advocate Paul Popenoe’s treatise “The Child’s Heredity,” and had developed close relations with British eugenicists while serving as a delegate to the Interna-tional Federation of Eugenics Organizations (see table, p. 97). All these ac-tivities indicate that Tietze was one of the most internationally oriented eu-genicists in Vienna at that time.66 Not only had Tietze become a member of the (British) Eugenics Society by 1932, but in 1936 it elected him to its Consultative Council.67

Tietze first advocated sterilization in 1929 and was prosecuted in Graz in 1933 for advocating sterilization in his lectures and writings. Although he was initially acquitted, the Austrian Supreme Court reversed the verdict in


May 1934 in keeping with the Catholic authoritarianism of the Ständestaat.68 In Tietze’s case his advocacy of sterilization and Anglo-American connec-tions indicated that he favored negative, albeit nonracial, eugenics. Tietze’s efforts to link Austrian eugenics to international movements and his advo-cacy for nonracial eugenics provided a substantial countereffort to the growing movement to align Austrian eugenics with German groups through Reichel’s long-standing links to Ploetz and Rüdin in Munich.

International Federation of Eugenics Organizations: Congresses

Year Location Austrian Representatives

1928 Munich Reichel

1929 Rome Reichel

1930 Farnham, England Reichel, Tietze

1932 Ithaca, NY Tietze

1934 Zurich Polland, Reichel, Schinzel, Tietze, Hamburger

1936 Scheveningen, Netherlands Reichel, Weninger? The society supported innovative initiatives in fertility control that looked beyond eugenic sterilization. For example, Finkler became interested in rhy-thm methods of contraception and biochemists in the group researched fertility control and pregnancy testing. Among the latter, the research of Regina Kapeller-Adler, whose innovative pregnancy test gained her an inter-national reputation, remains exemplary.69

Although these innovative approaches may have been in keeping with international eugenics developments, such as the interest of the British in a chemical contraceptive, they also provoked animosity between Viennese dis-ciples of British eugenics and those more closely aligned with German race hygiene, resulting in often barbed comments. For example, in 1929 Fritz Lenz, the eugenicist with Nazi leanings, derided Erbkunde as liable to be confused with Erdkunde (geography).70


Österreichischer Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde (Austrian League for

Regeneration and Heredity), 1929–32

Speaker Date Topic

Julius Tandler 23 Jan. 1929 Ziele der Eugenik (Aims of Eugenics)

Erich von Tschermak-Seyssenegg

15 March 1929 Die Mendelschen Vererbungsgesetze (The Mendelian Laws of Inheritance)

Heinrich Reichel 15 March 1929 Erb- und Familienforschung (Heredity and Family Research)

Julius Bauer 10 April 1929 Vererbung erworbener Eigenschaften (Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics)

Felix Tietze 28 Feb. 1929 Sterilisierung zu eugenischen Zwecken [1. Hauptversammlung] (Sterilisation for Eugenic Aims [1st Main Meeting])


8 May 1929 Erbliche Geistes- u Nervenkrankheiten (Hereditary Mental and Nervous Illnesses)

Karl Kautsky Jr. 22 May 1929 Eheberatung (Marriage Counseling)

Karl Gaulhofer 23 Oct. 1929 Eugenik und der Hygiene in der Erziehung (Eugenics and Hygiene in Child Rearing)

Burghard Breitner 18 Dec. 1929 Die Blutgruppen des Menschen und ihre Vererbung [2. Hauptversammlung] (Human Blood Types and Their Inheritance [2nd Main Meeting])


10 Dec. 1930 Über Eugenik (On Eugenics)

Hermann Muckermann

18 April 1931 Wohlfahrtspflege und Eugenik (Welfare Service and Eugenics)

Otto Pötzel 27 Oct. 1931 Zwillingsproblem und Kriminalität (The Problem of Twins and Criminality)


Hermann Sternberg

1 Dec. 1931 Erbliche und nicht erbliche Fehlbildungen (Hereditary and Non-Hereditary Deformations)

Erwin Stransky 9 Dec. 1931 Richtungen der psychischen Hygiene [3. Hauptversammlung] (Directions in Mental Hygiene [3rd Main Meeting])

Harry Sicher 19 Jan. 1932 Vererbungsfragen in der Zahnheilkunde (Hereditary Questions in Dental Surgery)

Viktor Hammerschlag

16 Feb. 1932 Über Heredodegeneration des Innenohres (On Hereditary Degeneration of the Inner Ear)

Karl Paschkis 19 April 1932 3 May 1932

Vererbung und Konstitution bei Erkrangungen des Blutes (Heredity and Constitution with Respect to Blood Diseases)

H. W Siemens 19 May 1932 Vererbung der Hautkrankheiten (Hereditary Skin Diseases)

Karl Keller 14 Dec. 1932 Betrachtungen über den Entartungsbegriff vom tierzüchterischen Standpunkt aus [4. Hauptversammlung] (Thoughts on the Concept of Degeneration from the Point of View of Animal Breeding [4th Main Meeting])

Whereas the sister society in Germany, the Gesellschaft für Volksaufartung (Society for Regeneration), had supported positive eugenics, the economic crisis of 1929 increased pressure for cutting the costs of welfare and eugenic sterilization. On 13 February 1929 Julius Tandler presented a lecture en-titled “Die Gefahren der Minderwertigkeit” (The Dangers of Inferiority). He calculated that the five thousand psychiatric patients in Vienna cost eleven million schillings annually and argued for their sterilization. Tandler stressed the need to take science and humanity into account in any such measure and argued for greater enforcement in implementing a selective population policy.71 His speech marked a shift in interest to sterilization at a time of economic crisis, albeit on a nonracial basis.72 By way of contrast, Catholics and conservatives were drawn to the fascist models of sterilization that had been developed by such Italian demographers as Corrado Gini, whose focus remained on increasing fertility. Tandler and Tietze tried to use


international trends and developments in eugenics in order to combat the increase in antisemitic and nationalist trends in interwar Vienna.

The members of the long-standing Österreichische Gesellschaft für Bevölkerungspolitik remained divided among pro-natalism, welfare, and eugenics.73 The society gravitated toward the Italian Fascist demography of Gini (who was close to Mussolini) and the concept of a bachelor tax. The Protestant eugenicist Hans Harmsen was a point of contact for Austrian eugenicists, for he studied eugenics in the Ostmark (the Austrian region within Nazi Germany).74 In 1930 the encyclical “Casti Connubii” (On Christian Marriage) issued by Pope Pius XI condemned birth control, abor-tion, and sterilization. Yet there remained common ground with eugenicists on the issue of family welfare. Catholic —especially Jesuit — biologists and physicians played a key role in promoting eugenics.75 A lecture presented by the German priest Muckermann is indicative of how Catholics wavered among the various organizations. Various strands of Catholic eugenics emerged dur-ing the 1930s as the papacy vacillated on the question of how far to con-demn racism and antisemitism.

Austrofascism The “New Austria” was a Catholic authoritarian state.76 In January 1934 Austrian Catholics formulated new policies that promoted the family, ad-vocated racial hygienic education in schools and in the medical curriculum, made attendance compulsory in “maternity schools,” and required health certificates prior to marriage. A revised taxation policy imposed higher taxes for single individuals but lower ones for large families.77 Left-wing eugenic-ists and opponents of National Socialism, such as Hugo Iltis of Brno/Brünn (a city that was once home to Mendel), retained high hopes that the circle of Cardinal Innitzer in Vienna would stand firm against Nazi race ideology.

Austrofascism shamefully forced the socialist Tandler into exile. He died in Moscow in 1936 while on the way to China, where he had a commission to work for the League of Nations Health Organization. Kautsky was also dismissed in 1934. The Eheberatungsstelle was transformed by Roman Cath-olic Albert Niedermeyer into a Christian family welfare center in June 1935.78 Those on the left were persecuted for their politics, and the racial hygienists on the right — including some members of the Nazi Party, which was illegal at the time — were reigned in. In 1935 the Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege, while allowed to remain at the Anthropological Institute at the University of Vienna, became subject to restrictions; for example, it lost the use of display cases in the medical and law faculties and was required to first gain the ap-proval of the Ministry of Education before outside speakers were engaged. As a result, the society covertly joined the German Racial Hygiene Society as the Ortsgruppe Wien in 1935. Given that the latter had been nazified under Hitler’s policy of Gleichschaltung (enforced conformity) in 1933, to become


affiliated in this manner was a demonstrably political act, indicating that the members agreed to be aligned with the Nazis. Some scholars view the Wiener Gesellschaft as a Nazi organization in disguise.79 In addition, the society began to hold joint meetings with the Anthropological Society (based at the Anthropological Institute) as of October 1937, suggesting a rightward shift in anthropology as well.

Anthropology remained a politically fractured science throughout the interwar years. The Anthropological Department at the Naturhistorisches Museum, which was led by Viktor Lebzelter, intensified regional excava-tions, notably in the Burgenland, and collected measurements of peasants, soldiers, and schoolchildren. Lebzelter’s work represented a specifically Aus-trian form of racial anthropology that was opposed to the Germanic racial hygiene of Reche and Günther as “aristocratic biology.” Lebzelter tried to reconcile eugenics with Christian ethics, pointing to the need to turn away from the individual in order to safeguard the welfare of future generations.80

Pater Wilhelm Schmidt, the Austrian Catholic patron of anthropology, opposed modernist culture and psychoanalysis. Having served as Privat-dozent (adjunct professor) in ethnology at the University of Vienna since 1921, in 1925 he was appointed president of the Familienschutz (Family Protection) organization. Schmidt had sponsored Lebzelter’s appointment.81 While the university department in Vienna had (despite Weninger’s hesita-tions) a “Greater German” orientation (two assistants, Albert Harrasser and Eberhard Geyer, had become “illegal” Nazi Party members in 1933), the museum began to increase its focus on the Austrian nation, resulting in criticism that it was engaged in a program of establishing an Austrian race. Lebzelter stressed the patriotic priorities of combating the declining birth-rate and boosting the “österreichischer Menschenschlag” (Austrian branch of mankind). Upon Lebzelter’s death in 1936, Josef Wastl, who held a re-search position at the museum beginning in 1935 and who had also been an illegal member of the Nazi Party since 1933, developed a scheme for anthro-pological measurements at the Vienna swimming pool called the Dianabad.82

Throughout the 1930s academics reconsidered their views, and soon a new organization emerged. The psychiatrist and Nobel laureate Julius Wagner-Jauregg, who was a long-standing member of the Vienna Anthropo-logical Society, came out in support of sterilization in 1935. He dismissed the Viennese experiment in marriage counseling while supporting German compulsory sterilization for the hereditarily sick.83 The exhibition Erbfor-schung am gesunden Menschen (Hereditary Research on Healthy People), which was held at the Naturhistorisches Museum in 1935, marked a turning point. For some it expressed the program of biologically based family wel-fare, while others, such as Eberhard Geyer, the illegal Nazi Party member and anthropologist, saw it as aligning Austria with the Nazi sterilization law. Complementing sterilization was the need to understand the hereditary


components of health, which formed part of an international wave of studies on total health.84

At the same time, however, there was a reconfiguration of Austrian eu-genics organizations. The Österreichischer Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde was no longer viable since the Nazis had dissolved its German counterpart, which had formerly attracted Jews, Catholics, and socialists.85 From 1934 until the Nazi takeover on 12 March 1938 it was known as the Verein für menschliche Vererbungslehre und Endokrinologie (Association for Human Heredity and Endocrinology).86 Socialists were excluded, while those on the ultra-right, such as Reichel, shifted their activities to the Gesell-schaft für Rassenpflege. Jewish members became increasingly marginalized. Wagner-Jauregg and Tietze appear to have been displaced by the “constitu-tional pathology” of the endocrinologist Julius Bauer. The focus was pri-marily medical rather than serving an outreach role.87 Its transformation marked a shift to the right in the period 1934 to 1938, without direct affilia-tion with the Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege and its links to the Nazis.

Verein für menschliche Vererbungslehre und Endokrinologie (Association for Human Heredity and Endocrinology), 1934–38

Date Lecturer Title Chairman

21 Nov. / 5 Dec. 1934

Victor Hammerschlag

17 March 1936 Josef Weninger Menschliche Erblehre und Anthropologie (Human Heredity and Anthropology)

Bauer?

1937 W. Fleischmann

J. Kisser

Hans Eppinger

24 Dec. 1938 O. Fischer

Weninger

Physiologie der Epiphyse

Über Rückkreuzung beim Menschen (Physiology of Epihysis on Human Hybridization)

N. von Jagic


16 March 1938 E. Hanhart Über die Vererbung der allergischen Bereitschaft und die Konstitutions-problem des Neuro-Arthritismus (On the Heredity of Allergic Capability and the Constitutional Problems of Neuro-Arthritis)

Hans Eppinger

27 April 1938 O. von Verschuer Über die Bedeutung der Vererbung in der Heilkunde (On the Meaning of Heredity in Medical Science)

Hans Eppinger

In November 1937 right-wing professors Nikolaus von Jagic, W. Denk, J. Versluys, Eduard Pernkopf, and L. Adametz joined the committee of the Association, replacing Bauer, Tietze, and Bernhard Aschner. Of the members present, 110 voted in favor and 9 against, indicating that the society had been aligned with the German nationalists in late 1937 under the renowned in-ternist Hans Eppinger, who chaired these meetings. The secretary at this time was Erwin Risak, and in 1939 Eppinger’s assistant was the “illegal” Nazi and internist Wilhelm Beiglböck.88 Eppinger belonged to Nazi academic associa-tions and during the war was to promote experiments at Dachau concen-tration camp carried out by Beiglböck. The society now focused on racial anthropology and the genetics of blood and race. Following the Anschluss it limited its membership to pure Aryans. A lecture by Nazi racial geneticist Otmar von Verschuer represented a symbolic celebration of academic An-schluss. On 18 January 1939 the society was renamed the Gesellschaft für menschliche Erbbiologie in Wien (Society for Human Hereditary Biology in Vienna) and became a branch of the Wiener medizinische Gesellschaft (Vi-enna Medical Society).89 It was ultimately dissolved on 2 August 1948.90

Final Dissolution The Anschluss brought with it the rapid racialization of Austrian medicine. When Pernkopf assumed the deanship of the Vienna medical faculty on 6 April 1938, he specifically addressed “German” students, extolling the im-portance of eugenics and race and marking the decline of earlier efforts to promote distinctively Austrian forms of eugenics.91 Although the issue of the extent to which the Ostmark retained any regional autonomy in medical and scientific matters had yet to be resolved, Vienna nevertheless lost its distinct identity in eugenics as part of the Greater German Reich. Some Nazi doctors


moved from Vienna to Berlin, such as the psychiatrist Maximinian de Crinis, who assumed a ministerial office and played a key role in the nazification of medicine.92

Other developments indicated worsening circumstances for those not aligned with or supported by Nazi racial ideology. Josef Weninger, Reche’s successor as university professor of anthropology since 1927, was first mar-ginalized and finally suspended in August 1938 after his wife had been clas-sified as Jewish.93 Neither his research on developing reliable techniques of paternity testing nor his emphasis on the inheritance of traits like eye color were enough to secure his place in post-Anschluss Vienna. Weninger had long combined scientific skepticism of racial categories with pragmatic toler-ance of Nazi Party activism among members of his institute. However, fear-ing for his wife, he considered emigration. Various efforts (all unsuccessful) were made by fellow anthropologists to bring him to Britain on the basis of his expertise on paternity testing.94

Biologists and eugenicists who were Jewish (or, as in the case of the blood-group statistician Wellisch, of Jewish ancestry) were excluded from scientific circles. In the case of Wellisch, his life ended in apparent suicide in December 1938. Others were more fortunate. Some Jewish eugenicists fol-lowed Tandler and emigrated after the Anschluss. Felix Tietze left Vienna in a hurry on 17 March 1938. He was favorably received in England by Stella Churchill, a child-welfare expert and member of the Eugenics Society, and by Cora Hodson, who was affiliated with the Bureau of Human Heredity in London.95 On 17 January 1939 Tietze presented a lecture in London to the Eugenics Society entitled “Eugenic Measures in the Third Reich,” which drew a stark contrast between the science of eugenics and the brutality specific to the Nazi regime.96 Two other Jewish eugenicists, Bernard and Bertha Aschner, managed to escape via London to New York. Significantly, Hertz and Zoll-schan formed a critical grouping in the Austrian Center in London, where they found support from such liberal eugenicists as Julian Huxley.97 In short, a number of important Viennese eugenicists found that they could continue a critical position toward Nazi eugenics after their forced emigration.

The Austrian Society for Population Policy [and Welfare] was dissolved and its resources were transferred to the Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege.98 This, in turn, became a constituent group of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene, becoming the Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene, Orts-gesellschaft der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene (Vienna Society of the German Society for Racial Hygiene). This marked the loss of a distinc-tively Austrian brand of eugenics despite the rapidly increased membership (it counted 559 members by the end of 1938), courses, and lectures.99 When Ernst Rüdin traveled from Munich to Vienna in April 1938 to lecture on sterilization, he was one of many German medical experts specifically sent with the intention of subsuming Vienna into the New Germany. By Septem-ber 1939 anthropologist Josef Wastl of the Naturhistorisches Museum was


conducting his research at the Prater stadium, taking measurements and making plaster casts of the faces of 440 Jews; afterward the victims were housed in abominable conditions in Buchenwald.100 Under Gauleiter Odilo Globocnik, who later became a key figure in running the extermination camps of the Aktion Reinhard in occupied Poland, the Gauamt für Sippenfor-schung der NSDAP Wien (District Office for Research on Ancestry of the Nazi Party Vienna) pursued racial classification with rapidity and energy.101

As this essay has demonstrated, rather than direct continuities linking eugenic racists in Vienna between 1905 and 1938 one sees both academic and political discontinuities and fragmented groupings. However, the racial biological concerns of Vienna social and racial hygienists can still be read as developing from distinctive Austrian cultural concerns, mediated by an Aus-trian Catholicism prepared to embrace anthropology and social medicine, plus other distinctive Viennese cultural traits. Viennese interwar eugenics was complex and diverse. Representing a combination of various ideological strands — not only from Germany but also from Britain, Czechoslovakia, and Italy — it undertook organizationally complex endeavors in social policy and in shaping a fragile Austrian identity. It was characterized by a split cul-ture, with Tandler’s eugenics and Reche’s Rassenpflege representing polar opposites. Intermediate groups attempted to bridge these two extremes. The Österreichischer Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde represented such an attempt, although the exclusion of Jews from its later incarnation as the Verein für menschliche Vererbungslehre und Endokrinologie indicates a clear shift to the right. In conclusion, one must take into account not only conflicting forms of eugenics but also efforts to build coalition and consensus, and to oppose racist extremes. One finds differing and shifting positions on the German national right. The alignment of Viennese medicine with Nazism was late but rapid, and it was to have devastating, inhumane consequences.

Time Line: The Development of Austrian Eugenics, 1904–38

1904–44 Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (Archive of Racial and Social Biology)

1904 Friedrich Hertz, Moderne Rassentheorien (Modern Racial Theories)

1905 [Internationale] Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene ([International] Society for Racial Hygiene)

1913 Soziologische Gesellschaft, Vienna (Section on Eugenics, Sociological Society, Vienna)

1917–38 Österreichische Gesellschaft für Bevölkerungspolitik [und Fürsorgewesen] (Austrian Society for Population Policy [and Welfare])


1923 Oberösterreichische Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene, Linz (Upper Austrian Society for Racial Hygiene, Linz)

1924 Verband der Österreichischen Gesellschaften für Rassenhygiene (Association of Austrian Societies for Racial Hygiene)

1924 Ortsgruppe Graz (Graz Section)

1924–37 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege (German Society for Racial Welfare)

1925–48 Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege [Rassenhygiene] (Vienna Society for Racial Welfare [Racial Hygiene])

1926–35 Die Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene in Freistadt (Society for Racial Hygiene in Freistadt)

1927 Verband der österreichischen Gesellschaften für Rassenhygiene, Linz (Association of Austrian Societies for Racial Hygiene, Linz)

1928/29–34 Österreichischer Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde (Austrian Association for Regeneration and Hereditary Studies)

1934–38 Verein für menschliche Vererbungslehre und Endokrinologie (Association for Human Heredity and Endochrinology)

1934–38 Erbbiologische Arbeitsgemeinschaft, Institut für Anthropologie (Hereditary Biological Collaboration, Institute for Anthropology)

1939–48 Gesellschaft für menschliche Erbbiologie in Wien (Society for Human Hereditary Biology, Vienna), later a branch of the Wiener medizinische Gesellschaft (Vienna Medical Society).

Notes

1 See also Marius Turda and Paul Weindling, eds., Blood and Homeland. Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (Budapest: Central European UP, 2006); Gerhard Baader, Veronika Hofer, and Thomas Mayer, eds., Eugenik in Osterreich. Biopolitische Strukturen von 1900 bis 1945 (Vienna: Czernin, 2007). 2 Brigitte Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 235. See also Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race (Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1999) (only covers post-Anschluss Vienna). 3 Eugen Steinach and Josef Loebel, Sex and Life (London: Faber, 1940), 19, 24, 286–88. 4 Brigitte Fuchs, “Rasse,” “Volk,” Geschlecht: Anthropologische Diskurse in Österreich (Frankfurt: Campus, 2003), 17–18, 193–200, 255–57.


5 Vorreiter der Vernichtung? Eugenik, Rassenhygiene und Euthanasie in der öster-reichischen Diskussion vor 1938, ed. Heinz Gabriel and Wolfgang Neugebauer (Vienna: Böhlau, 2005). 6 Veronika Hofer, “Positionen und Posen eines Experten: Die Konstitutionsforscher Julius Bauer (1887–1973) und die Eugenik in der Wiener Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Eugenik in Osterreich: Biopolitische Strukturen von 1900 bis 1945, ed. Gerhard Baader, Veronika Hofer, and Thomas Mayer (Vienna: Czernin, 2007), 41. 7 For a classic study on socialist eugenics schemes and their authoritarian implications, see Doris Byer, Rassenhygiene und Wohlfahrtspflege: Zur Entstehung eines sozialdemo-kratischen Machtpositives in Österreich bis 1934 (Frankfurt: Campus, 1988). 8 Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 116. 9 Ploetz Papers, Herrsching [now housed in the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry, Munich], Diary. Thurnwald’s address was Fichtestrasse 47/III. See Marion Melk-Koch, Auf der Suche nach der menschlichen Gesellschaft: Richard Thurnwald (Berlin: Museum für Völkerkunde, 1989), 44–47. 10 VIII. Internationalen Congress gegen den Alkoholismus, Wien, 9.–14. April 1901, ed. Congress-Bureau (Vienna: Verlag des Congresses, 1901). 11 Rudolf Pöch, “Rassenhygiene und ärztliche Beobachtungen aus Neu-Guinea,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 5 (1908): 46–66; Heinrich Reichel, “Rudolf Pöch als Arzt,” Wiener klinische Wochenschrift 46, no. 14 (1933): 434–36. 12 Ploetz Papers, Herrsching [now housed in the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry, Munich], Mitglieder der G.f.R.H. [1905–7]; Internationale Gesellschaft für Rassen-Hygiene, Mitgliederliste vom 10 Dezember 1909, Diary. See Anton Weichselbaum, Die gesundheitsschädlichen Wirkungen des Alkoholgenusses (Vienna: Philipp, 1905). 13 Anton Weichselbaum, Über die Beziehungen zwischen Körperkonstitution und Krankheit (Vienna, 1912). 14 Maria Teschler-Nicola, “Volksdeutsche and Racial Anthropology in Interwar Vi-enna,” in Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940, ed. Marius Turda and Paul Weindling (Budapest: Central European UP, 2006), 55–82; and Paul Weindling, “Central Europe Confronts German Racial Hygiene” in Turda and Weindling, eds., Blood and Homeland, 263–81. 15 Michael Hainisch, 75 Jahre aus bewegter Zeit (Vienna: Böhlau, 1978), 109–10. 16 Marius Turda, “Heredity and Eugenic Thought in Early Twentieth-Century Hun-gary,” Orvostörténeti Közleméney: Communicationes de Historia Artis Medicinae 194–95 (2006): 101–18. 17 Ploetz Papers, Diary, 12 February 1909. 18 “Eugenics in Austria,” Eugenics Review 5 (1913–14): 387. 19 Marius Turda, “The First Debates on Eugenics in Hungary, 1910–1918,” in Turda and Weindling, eds., Blood and Homeland, 185–221. 20 Géza von Hoffman to Harry Laughlin, 26 May 1914. http://www.eugenicsarchive .org/html/eugenics/static/images/1155.html (accessed 30 August 2007).


21 “Eugenics in Austria,” Eugenics Review 5 (1913–14): 387. See also Thomas Mayer, “Akademische Netzwerke um die ‘Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege (Rassen-hygiene)’ von 1924 bis 1948” (master’s thesis, Univ. of Vienna, 2004), 58. 22 Paul Kammerer and Julius Tandler to Max Hirsch, no date [1914], on headed paper of Soziologische Gesellschaft in Wien. Sektion für Sozialbiologie und Eugenik, Max Hirsch Papers in Sammlung Darmstaedter, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. This evidence contradicts the view that there was no eugenics organization in Vienna prior to 1914. See also Michael Hubenstorf, Die Genese der Sozialer Medizin als Universitäres Lehrfach in Österreich bis 1914 (MD Thesis, Free University Berlin, 1992); Michael Hubenstorf, “Vorwort,” in Eugenik in Österreich, ed. Baader, Hofer, and Mayer, 11. 23 Albrecht Hirschmüller, “Paul Kammerer und die Vererbung erworbener Eigen-schaften,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 26 (1991): 26–77. 24 Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 140–41; Ploetz Papers, letter from Goldscheid to Ploetz, 31 May 1910; Rudolf Goldscheid, Höher Entwicklung und Menschenökonomie: Grundlegung der Sozialbiologie (Berlin: Klinkhardt, 1911). 25 Paul Kammerer, “Höher Entwicklung und Biologie (Kritik und Antikritik der Menschenökonomie),” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 9 (1914): 222–33. Schallmayer to Hertz, 11 April 1915, in the Papers of Friedrich O. Hertz, Archiv für die Geschichte der Soziologie Österreichs, Graz. Schallmayer sent reprints to Hertz on 13 March 1905 (“Selektionstheorie, Hygiene und Entartungsfrage”) and 1915 (“Unzeitgemässe Gedanken über Europas Zukunft”); Fritz Lenz, “Antwort an Hertz,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 12 (1917): 472–75; Friedrich Hertz, “Rasse und Kultur: Eine Erwiderung und Klarstellung,”Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschafts-biologie 12 (1917): 468–72; Fritz Lenz, “Friedrich Hertz: Rasse und Kultur,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 18 (1926): 109–14. 26 Fortpflanzung, Vererbung, Rassenhygiene, ed. Max von Gruber and Ernst Rudin (Munich: Lehmanns, 1911), 262–63. 27 Ignaz Kaup, Volkshygiene oder selektive Rassenhygiene (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1922); Michael Hubenstorf, “Sozialmedizin, Menschenökonomie und Volksgesundheit,” in Aufbruch und Untergang. Österreichische Kultur zwischen 1918 und 1938, ed. Franz Kadrnoska (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1981); Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 225–26, 318. 28 Paul Weindling, “The Evolution of Jewish Identity: Ignaz Zollschan between Jewish and Aryan Race Theories, 1910–1945,” in Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006), 116–36; Weindling, “Central Europe Confronts German Racial Hygiene,” 263–80. 29 Gudrun Exner, “Sozial- und bevölkerungspolitik im ‘Roten Wien’ und im Stände-staat: Die ‘Österreichische Gesellschaft für Bevölkerungspolitik (und Fürsorgewesen)’ (1917–1938),” in Bevölkerungslehre und Bevölkerungspolitik vor 1933: Arbeitstagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Bevölkerungswissenschaft und der Johann Peter Süßmilch-Gesellschaft für Demographie, ed. Rainer Mackensen (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2002), 193–213. See also Mayer, “Akademische Netzwerke,” 68; Gudrun Exner, Josef Kytir, and Alexander Pinwinkler, eds., Bevölkerungswissenschaft in Österrreich in der Zwischenkriegszeit, 1918–36: Personen, Institutionen, Diskurse (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), 374–76. On Reichel see Mitteilungen der Österreichische Gesellschaft für Bevölkerungs-politik, vol. 1, no. 1 (July 1918): 1–40.


30 Josef Weninger, “25 Jahre Anthropologisches Institut an der Universität in Wien,” Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 68 (1938): 191–205. 31 Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 303; Turda, “The First Debates,” 185–221; Turda, “Heredity and Eugenic Thought,” 101–18; Marius Turda, “‘A New Religion’: Eugenics and Racial Scientism in Pre–World War I Hungary,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religion 7, no. 3 (2006): 303–25. 32 Verena Pawlowsky, “Quelle aus vielen Stücken: Die Korrespondenz der Anthro-pologischen Abteilung,” in Vorreiter der Vernichtung?, ed. Gabriel and Neugebauer, vol. 3, 145–49. 33 See also Mayer, “Akademische Netzwerke,” 70–71, 105–6; Werner Kienreich, “Die Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege im Lichte ihrer Nachrichten,” Zeitschrift zur Kritik bürgerliche Psychologie 3, no. 4 (1979): 61–73. The Swedish eugenicist Hermann Lundborg was an honorary member of the Vienna Anthropological Society. 34 Heinrich Reichel, Die Hauptaufgaben der Rassenhygiene in der Gegenwart (Vienna: Volksgesundheitsamt, 1922). 35 Heinrich Reichel, Fragebogen zum ehelichen/unehelichen Familienblatt, [1919]. Copy in the Anthropological Library, Museum für Naturgeschichte, Vienna. 36 Gudrun Exner, “Eugenik in Österreich bis 1938: Heinrich Reichel (1876–1943), Odo Olberg (1872–1955) und die ‘Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege (Rassen-hygiene),’” in Bevölkerungslehre und Bevölkerungspolitik im “Dritten Reich,” ed. R. Mackensen (Leverkusen: Leske und Budrich, 2003), 337–58; Thomas Mayer, “‘. . . dass die eigentliche österreichische Rassenhygiene in der Hauptsache das Werk Reichels ist’: Der (Rassen-)Hygieniker Heinrich Reichel (1876–1943) und seiner Bedeuting für die eugenischen Bewegung in Österreich,” in Vorreiter der Vernichtung?, ed. Gabriel and Neugebauer, 65–98. 37 Mayer, “Heinrich Reichel,” 75–76. Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 16 (1925): 316. 38 See also “Aus der rassenhygienischen Bewegung in Österreich,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 17 (1925–26): 239. 39 “Eugenics in Austria,” Eugenics Review 26, no. 3 (1935): 259–61. The author is likely to have been Tietze as “a regular contributor” from Vienna. 40 Julius Tandler, in Mitteilungen des Volksgesundheitsamtes 2 (1920): 1, 5–16. 41 Kristine von Soden, Die Sexualberatungsstellen der Weimarer Republik, 1919–1933 (Berlin: Hentrich, 1988), 9, 62–64. 42 Doris Byer, Rassenhygiene und Wohlfahrtspflege: Zur Entstehung einer Sozialdemo-kratischen Machtdispositivs in Österreich bis 1934 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1988); Karl Sablik, Julius Tandler: Mediziner und Sozialreformer: Eine Biographie (Vienna: Schendl, 1983), 278–80. 43 Karl Kautsky Jr., “Eugenik in Österreich,” Archiv für soziale Hygiene und Demo-graphie 5 (1930): 132–34; Mayer, “Akademische Netzwerke,” 72. 44 “Eugenics in Austria,” Eugenics Review 26, no. 3 (1935): 259–61. 45 Wilhelm Reich, Geschlechtsreife, Enthaltsamkeit, Ehemoral (Vienna: Muenster Verlag, 1930); Reich, “Sexualnot und Sexualreform,” Verhandlung der WLSR, IV. Kongress (Vienna, 1930); Josef K. Friedjung, Die geschlechtlichliche Aufklärung der Kinder (Vienna: Josef Safar, 1926).


46 Ralf Dose, “The World League for Sexual Reform: Some Possible Approaches,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 12 (2003): 1–15. 47 Heinrich Reichel, “Die Stellung der Rassenhygiene zur Hygiene und Medizin,” Wiener klinische Wochenschrift 38, no. 18 (1925), suppl. See also Mayer, “Akademische Netzwerke,” 179–81. 48 Veronika Hofer, “Rudolf Goldscheid, Paul Kammerer und die Biologen des Prater-Vivariums: Die liberale Volksbildung der Wiener Moderne,” in Wissenschaft, Politik und Öffentlickeit, ed. Mitchell Ash and Christian Stifter (Vienna: WUV, 2002), 149–84. 49 Oxford Brookes University Collection on European Medical Refugees, Walter Finkler Papers, Hansi Finkler, Lebenslauf über Walter Finkler; Walter Finkler, Vertauschte Köpfe: Aus der Werkstatt der modernen Lebensforschung (Leipzig: Anzengruber Verlag / Vienna: Brüder Suschitzky, n.d.); Walter Finkler, “Analytical Studies on the Factors Causing the Sexual Display in the Mountain-Newt (Triton alpestris),” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character, vol. 95, no. 669 (1 Nov. 1923): 356–64. 50 Paul Kammerer, “Allgemeine Symbiose und Kampf ums Dasein als gleichberechtigte Triebkräfte der Evolution,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 6 (1909): 585–608. 51 Arthur Koestler, The Case of the Midwife Toad (London: Hutchinson, 1971). 52 Information supplied to the author by Hugh Iltis, San Jose, CA, December 2006, and Fred Iltis, Madison, WI, March 2008. 53 Koestler, The Case of the Midwife Toad. 54 Mayer, “Akademische Netzwerke,” 72. 55 “Unserer Gesellschaft in der Verbotszeit, 1933–1938,” Nachrichten der Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege (Rassenhygiene), no. 1 (1938), 19–20. Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv (hereafter WStLA), M. Abt 119: A32 Gelöschte Vereine, 7223/24 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege. 56 O. Reche, Die Bedeutung der Rassenpflege für die Zukunft unseres Volkes (Vienna: Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege, 1925); “Aus der rassenhygienischen Bewegung,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 17 (1925): 128; “Geleitwort,” Nachrichten der Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege (Rassenhygiene), 1, no. 1 (1938): 1–2; Katja Geisenhainer,“Rasse ist Schicksal”: Otto Reche (1879–1966) — ein Leben als Anthropologe und Volkerkundler (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2002), 108–22. Gustav Kraitschek, Rassenkunde: Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des deutschen Volks, vor allem der Ostalpenländer (Vienna: Burgverlag, 1923). 57 Michael Hesch, “Die Tätigkeit der Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege (Rassenhy-giene) im Jahre 1925,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 18 (1926): 236–37. 58 Josef Wastl, “Otto Reche, 1879–1966,” Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesells-chaft in Wien 96–97 (1967): 1–9. Geisenhainer,“Rasse ist Schicksal,” 197–201. 59 Alois Scholz, Rassenpflege und Erziehung. Vortrag, gehalten am 29. Jänner 1926 (Vienna: Selbstverlag der Gesellschaft, 1926), Veröffentlichungen [der] Wiener Gesell-schaft für Rassenpflege (Rassenhygiene), vol. 2. 60 Heinrich Reichel, “Alfred Ploetz und die rassenhygienische Bewegung der Gegen-wart,” Wiener klinische Wochenschrift, no. 9 (1931), 284–87; reprint Eugenics Society, London. Exner, “Eugenik in Österreich,” 337–58; A. Harrasser, “Bericht über die


Tätigkeit der Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege (Rassenhygiene) in der Arbeitsjahren 1928–31,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 26 (1932): 349–50. 61 Grundlagen der Vererbungswissenschaft und Eugenik: Acht Vorträge von Prof. Dr. Heinrich Reichel und ein Vortag von Prof. Dr Hermann Muckermann (Vienna: Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege, 1930). 62 Mayer, “Akademische Netzwerke,” 169. 63 WStLA 7223/24, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege, Felix Tietze to Magistrat, 31 May 1928, trans. Leonard Darwin. Felix Tietze, Was ist Eugenik? (Berlin: A. Metz-ner, 1931); Wellcome Library Eugenics Society papers, SA/EUG/C.332 192739; Dr Felix Tietze, “Eugenic Measures in the Third Reich” (17 January 1939), in Eugenics Review, 31, no. 2 (1939–40): 105–7. 64 “Österreichischer Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde,” Medizinische Klinik, 25, no. 3 (13 January 1929), 132. WStLA 7223/24, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassen-pflege, Satzungen der Österreichischen Bundes für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde. 65 “Österreichischer Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde,” Volksaufartung, Erbkunde, Eheberatung 4 (1929): 10–11. Bericht der Kommission zur Beurteilung der Frage, ob “der Namensgeber der Landes-Nervenklinik [Julius v. Wagner-Jauregg] als historisch belastet angesehen werden muss,” 2005. See also Mayer, “Akademische Netzwerke,” 128. 66 Bodleian Library, Oxford, Society for the Protection of Science and Learning 413/2, Felix Tietze; Paul Popenoe, The Child’s Heredity (Baltimore, MD: Williams, 1929); Felix Tietze, “Sterilisierung zur Verbesserung des Menschengeschlechts,” Volksaufar-tung, Erbkunde, Eheberatung 4 (1929): 264. 67 Eugenics Society Annual Report, 1936–37, 17. Tietze held this honor until 1970. Wellcome Library Eugenics Society, C. 332 Letter from Tietze to Secretary of Eugenics Society, 23 June 1932. 68 Felix Tietze, “The Graz Sterilization Trial,” Eugenics Review 25 (1933–34): 259; Felix Tietze, “The Graz Sterilization Trial: Judgment of the Supreme Court,” Eugenics Review 26 (1934): 213–15; Wellcome Library Eugenics Society, C. 332 Tietze to C. P. Blacker, 12 Sept 1933; Eugenics Society to Tietze, 15 September 1933. 69 Kappeller-Adler files in the Oxford Brookes University Collection on European Medical Refugees. Information supplied by Liesl Kastner. 70 Lenz’s remark was published in the Wiener klinische Wochenschrift 42, no. 42, 17 October 1929, 1372. 71 Sablik, Julius Tandler, 276–77. Tandler, “Gefahren der Minderwertigkeit,” Jahrbuch 1928 des Wiener Jugendhilfswerk, [1929], Sonderabdruck, 11, 16. 72 Tietze, “Sterilisierung zur Verbesserung des Menschengeschlechts,” Volksaufartung, Erbkunde, Eheberatung 4 (1929): 264. 73 Exner, Kytir, and Pinwinkler, eds., Bevölkerungswissenschaft in Osterrreich, 213–14. 74 See also Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift 42, no. 2 (1929): 58, Tagesgeschichte. 75 Monika Löscher, “Zur Popularisierung von Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Wien,” in Ash and Stifter, eds., Wissenschaft, Politik, 233–66. 76 See Austrofaschismus: Politik — Oekonomie — Kultur, ed. Emmerich Talos and Wolfgang Neugebauer (Vienna: Lit, 2005).


77 “Eugenics in Austria,” Eugenics Review 26, no. 3: (1935): 260. 78 Michael Hubenstorf, “Österreichische Ärzteemigration, 1934–1945,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 7 (1984): 88. 79“Unserer Gesellschaft in der Verbotszeit, 1933–1938,” Nachrichten der Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege (Rassenhygiene), no. 1 (1938): 19–20; Exner et al., eds., Bevölkerungswissenschaft, 223. 80 Viktor Lebzelter, “Die Rasse im Gemeinschaftsleben der Gegenwart,” Volkswohl: Katholische Monatschrift für Volksbildung, Kultur und Gesellschaftsreform 26, no. 6 (1934–35): 171–77. 81 Fuchs, “Rasse,” 206–20, 283–85; Joseph Henninger, “P. Wilhelm Schmidt S.V.D., 1868–1954,” Anthropos 51(1956): 19–60. 82 Pawlowsky, “Korrespondenz,” 159–61. See also Margit Berner, Verena Pawlowsky, and Claudia Spring, “Wiener Anthropologie im Nationalsozialismus,” Zeitgeschichte 32, no. 2 (2005): 67–116. 83 Julius von Wagner-Jauregg, “Zeitgemässe Eugenik,” Wiener klinische Wochenschrift 48 (1935): 1–2. 84 Enerhard Geyer, “Bericht über die Ausstellung ‘Erbforschung am gesunden Menschen,’” Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft Wien 65 (1935), (22)–(27); Fuchs, “Rasse,” 298. Marek Kohn, The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). 85 See also Mayer, “Akademische Netzwerke,” 148. 86 WStLA 5124/28, Verein für menschliche Vererbungslehre. 87 See also Mayer, “Akademische Netzwerke,” 149–50; Julius Bauer, “Erbpathologie und ihre praktischen Konsequenzen,” Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 84 (1934): 1317–18, 1380–83. 88 WStLA 5124/28, Verein für menschliche Vererbungslehre, Verein to Magistrat, 25 February 1938. 89 WStLA 5124/28, Verein für menschliche Vererbungslehre, Verein to Magistrat, 6 October 1938; Satzungen; Magistrat to Verein, 15 October 1938; Beiglböck, 14 July 1939. On Beiglböck see Paul Weindling, Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials (Basingstoke, Engl.: Palgrave, 2004). 90 WStLA 5124/28, Verein für menschliche Vererbungslehre, Sicherheitsdirektion Wien. 91 Eduard Pernkopf, “Nationalsozialismus und Wissenschaft,” Wiener Klinische Wochen-schrift 20 (1938): 8225–31. 92 H. Jasper, Maximinian de Crinis, 1889–1945: Eine Studie zur Psychiatrie im Na-tionalsozialismus (Husum, Germany: Matthiesen, 1991). 93 See Daily Telegraph, 4 May 1938. 94 Maria Teschler-Nicola, “Aspekte der Erbbiologie und die Entwicklung des rassen-kundlichen Gutachtens in Osterreich bis 1938,” in Vorreiter der Vernichtung?, ed. Gabriel and Neugebauer, 125–26. Society for the Protection of Science and Learning Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK, 360/2, Weninger file. 95 Eugenics Society Papers, C.68, Stella Churchill to “Pip” Blacker, 28 July 1938.


96 Eugenics Society Papers; see J.13 for notice of lecture, C. 332 and J. 14 for typescript of lecture. Tietze, “Eugenic Measures in the Third Reich,” Eugenics Review 31 (1939): 105–7. 97 Weindling, “Central Europe,” 263–80. 98 Exner et al., eds., Bevölkerungswissenschaft, 215. Hans Wellisch information to author concerning his grandfather’s suicide. 99 “Tätigkeitsbericht,” Nachrichten der Wiener Gesellschaft, no. 2 (1939): 21. 100 Maria Teschler-Nicola and Margit Berner, “Die Anthropologische Abteilung des Naturhistorischen Museums in der NS-Zeit: Berichte und Dokumentation von Forschungs- und Sammlungsaktivitäten, 1938–1945,” Senatsprojekt der Universität Wien: Untersuchungen zur Anatomischen Wissenschaft in Wien, 1938–45 (1998): 333–38 [unpublished report]; Margit Berner, “Judentypologisierungen in der Anthropologie am Beispiel der Bestände des Naturhistorischen Museums, Wien,” Zeitgeschichte, no. 32 (March–April 2005): 111–16; Margit Berner and Claudia Spring, “The Vienna Stadium Study,” in Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race (Washing-ton, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004), 114–15. 101 Fuchs, “Rasse,” 304–13; Herwig Czech, Erfassung, Selektion und “Ausmerze”: Das Wiener Gesundheitsamt und die Umsetzung der nationalsozialistischen “Erbgesundheits-politik,” 1938 bis 1945 (Vienna: Deuticke, 2003).

Part III

Cultural Forms

5: Free Dance in Interwar Vienna

Andrea Amort

S AN ARTISTIC HOTHOUSE of the fin de siècle, Vienna attracted artists, choreographers, and dancers of all persuasions not only from the lands

of its own monarchy but also from overseas. Despite the loss of the mon-archy, however, Vienna became even more of a crossroads uniting East and West following the First World War. The substantial transfer of knowledge and the development of a variety of cultural links between Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, and Vienna during this period should not be underesti-mated and still await adequate research.1 “Ausdruckstanz” or rather, free dance, reached its peak in Vienna in the 1920s and began to wane for both political and artistic reasons around the early 1930s. The vital impulses for this pioneering development during the interwar years can be summed up in two words: interdisciplinarity and internationalism.

Free dance in interwar Vienna refers primarily to dance forms whose cre-ators wished, first and foremost, to distance themselves from the traditional content and aesthetics of classical ballet. However, free dance should not be considered a uniform or single phenomenon since it comprises many diver-gent influences that first came together at the end of the nineteenth century to create an extremely varied Viennese dance scene.2 This variety was symp-tomatic of free dance’s aim of enabling new subject matter and personal forms of expression in dance. It emerged in the wake of similar trends in the various arts and in cooperation with writers, composers, costume designers, photographers, and artists, who supported dancers and worked with them in a variety of capacities. This interdisciplinarity paradoxically both created and helped to solve the difficulties faced by free dancers, not the least of which was finding venues in which to present themselves, having been banned from the stages of opera houses where established dance, such as ballet, was per-formed. Free dance was therefore to be seen in an unprecedented number of different settings, ranging from intimate variety shows and cabaret theaters to established music venues such as the Konzerthaus. Free dance was also performed in art museums and art galleries, as well as the majestic halls of the Hofburg, the palace that had stood empty since the fall of the monarchy. Clearly many of these spaces were not suitable for dance performances. However, this fact did not prevent dancers like Gertrud Kraus from renting a hall in the Hofburg for her 1924 debut and exclaiming: “If it is going to

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be a flop, let it be a spectacular one!”3 In the 1920s the theaters of the Volks-bildungshäuser (adult education centers) close to the Social Democrats, such as the Urania and the Volksheim Margareten, became popular performance venues for free dancers, as did the park of the centrally situated Burggarten. Not long after the First World War dance artists clamored for a theater uniquely dedicated to dance, although this was not realized until 2001 with the creation of the Tanzquartier (Dance Quarter) in Vienna’s new Mu-seumsquartier (Museum Quarter).

Period boundaries are, of course, always somewhat arbitrary, and it can be argued that free dance in interwar Vienna extended over the better part of half a century. The interwar blossoming of free dance would not have been possible without the development of interdisciplinarity and cosmopolitanism in Vienna before the First World War. Likewise, the proliferation of teaching methods and the ongoing careers of individual dancers and schools following the end of the Second World War meant that Vienna’s interwar dance scene continued to influence the international dance world up to the 1950s, if not beyond. However, a close analysis of free dance from 1918 to 1938 shows how the unique complexities of politics and culture in Vienna following the collapse of the empire influenced individuals who were instrumental in shap-ing innovative modern dance. It also highlights free dance as a frequently overlooked creative outlet where women in particular worked on new forms of culture in the public sphere. Although a small number of men — includ-ing Fritz Berger (alias Fred Berk), Otto Werberg, and Sascha Leontjew — were also involved in modern dance in interwar Vienna, the driving force behind the period’s creativity and originality was largely female. Key figures of both genders were almost invariably of Jewish origin. This not only serves to explain the decline of free dance in the mid-to-late 1930s due to increased antisemitism but also raises the question looming in many other areas of the arts in interwar Vienna, namely, that of the potential connections between Jewish identity and modernist creativity.

The Influence of American Female Guest Performers since 1895

The developments that were to dominate Vienna’s dance scene in the in-terwar period can be traced back, in part, to the influence of controversial American female guest performers who left their mark on the Austrian capi-tal beginning in the 1890s. In 1895 the five Barrison sisters, Danish immi-grants who settled in America, made a series of guest appearances at Vienna’s Ronacher playhouse, a vaudeville venue in the heart of the city. Well into the interwar period such theaters offered “exotic” artists an opportunity to per-form in Europe’s capitals: their shows shattered the conventions of both cos-tume and subject matter and could, moreover, prove very lucrative thanks to audience appeal.4 As a journalist remarked at the time: “Die Barrisons tanz-

FREE DANCE IN INTERWAR VIENNA ♦ 119

ten in der That die Sünde, während es schien als ob sie die Tugend tanzten, die so keusch ist, dass sie sich sogar in Spitzenhöschen zeigen kann” (In ac-tual fact the Barrisons danced “sin,” although they seemed to be dancing “virtue,” which is so chaste that it can even show itself in lace panties).5 This 1895 guest appearance marked the beginning of modern dance in Vienna. In fact, Gertrude Barrison lived in the Austrian capital for more than two decades and made a career for herself there, surrounding herself with a circle of literary figures that included Peter Altenberg.6 She gave recitations, danced in historical costume, and later also choreographed ensemble pieces and even headed a dance school. Another American who left a lasting impression on Vienna and paved the way for other innovative women was Loïe Fuller, the creator of the much-copied Serpentine Dance. She gave her first guest per-formance at the Ronacher in 1898 and later helped the young Isadora Duncan gain a foothold in Austria. When Duncan, the most famous Amer-ican pioneer of free dance, came to Vienna for the first time in February 1902, she performed not at variety theaters but at such elegant establish-ments as the Hotel Imperial, the Jugendstil Secession building that had just been opened, as well as the Künstlerhaus, where Duncan performed before a “höchst hochelegantes Publikum” (illustrious and highly elegant audience), including the minister of education and Countess Pauline von Metternich-Sandor, a patroness of the arts.7

Duncan explained the meaning of her dances to the Viennese writer Hermann Bahr, who, as one reviewer put it, “dolmetschte” (interpreted) them for the audience.8 This was not, however, an “interpretation” in the tradi-tional sense of an accompanying narration. Duncan’s performances followed no plot and did not present any recognizable story line. Instead, they focused on the liberation of the body and the inner expression of the dancer’s per-sonality. This was in stark contrast to the traditional ballet canon that audi-ences were used to, in which expression followed fixed and impersonal formulae. Duncan danced barefoot to classical music, wearing costumes based on antique models. The substance of her dances was so unusual that Bahr’s commentary was considered necessary to explain her methods to the spec-tators. Duncan always remained a controversial figure for the Viennese cultural establishment. She was not permitted to appear at the k. k. Hof-Operntheater (Imperial Royal Court Opera Theater). Its director, the com-poser and conductor Gustav Mahler, repeatedly refused her requests, although Duncan had already performed for Emperor Franz Josef at his summer res-idence in Bad Ischl.9 Nevertheless, her appearances were discussed at great length in the city’s press. Her encore performance of Strauss’s “Blue Danube Waltz” — that musical monument to Vienna — was considered particularly successful.10 Other popular dance performances by Americans included shows by Maud Allan, who appeared in Vienna beginning in 1903, and Ruth St. Denis, a protégée of the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who began per-forming in the city in 1907.


Interestingly, these American female guest performers had a rapid and marked influence on the choreographers of the Viennese ballet of the Im-perial Royal Court Opera Theater, who often quoted or parodied them. However, the performances of these pioneers of modern dance were not yet taken seriously by Vienna’s ballet dancers but instead were considered a mere curiosity. In 1897 Josef Hassreiter, head of the ballet company at the Im-perial Royal Court Opera Theater for twenty-nine years, created Pierrot als Schildwache (Pierrot as Sentinel) featuring dancers “à la Barrison.” The 1907 ballet Rübezahl (Rübezahl — Spirit of the Giant Mountains), by Carl God-lewski, ballet master at the opera, featured an Indian dance “à la St. Denis,” and in Hassreiter’s Mondweibchen (Moon Female) of 1910 there is a “Wel-lenwalzer” (Waltz of the Waves) in the style of Loïe Fuller.11 Nevertheless, as early as Duncan’s first public guest performance in 1903, journalists were commenting on the profound changes these performers had brought to Viennese dance:

[Wir] glauben [. . .] dass Isadora Duncan in der Geschichte unseres Tanzwesens Epoche machen wird, ja zum Teil schon gemacht hat. Die Unnatur unserer Reifrockballetteusen wird schon hie und da durch die rhythmische Linie langer faltiger Gewänder, ihr Hüpfen, Springen und Wirbeln durch ein edleres Schreiten, Gleiten und Schweben ersetzt.12

[(We) believe [. . .] Isadora Duncan will make her mark on the history of dance, indeed, that she already has in some respects. The unnaturalness of our ballerinas in their hooped skirts is already being replaced here and there by the rhythmical line of long, draped garments, their jumps, leaps and pirouettes by a more noble pacing, gliding and floating.]

These American guest appearances helped prepare Viennese audiences for the advent of expressionism in dance, which further developed many of free dance’s controversial innovations.

Key Figures of Vienna’s Interwar Dance Scene The major figures of the free dance scene in Vienna in the interwar period embodied the internationalism and interdisciplinarity that drove the phe-nomenon as a whole. The original impulse for pursuing a career in free dance often grew out of the rejection of classical ballet. Nevertheless, some key rep-resentatives of the movement in Vienna continued to utilize the traditional form canon of the danse d’école, especially for training purposes, since this had been an important aspect of their own training. Grete Wiesenthal studied ballet at the Imperial Royal Court Opera Theater. Gertrud Bodenwieser studied with Carl Godlewski, and even Rosalia Chladek and Hanna Berger were familiar with classical training methods. The combination of classical schooling with innovations in other areas was one of the factors that invari-ably led foreign commentators to describe free dance in Austria as softer and


more lyrical than its German counterpart. This observation was compounded by the Viennese emphasis, repeatedly mentioned in both Austrian and for-eign newspapers, on training “particularly beautiful dancer material.”13 Look-ing good, a dance’s formal beauty, and its theatrical effectiveness were all of equal importance in the Austrian capital. Hans Brandenburg was clearly referring to this state of affairs in 1931 when he asserted that the severity of the German dancer Vera Skoronel was not to be found in Vienna.14 However, despite these general similarities, the following portraits of Vienna’s major dance innovators of the period indicate that the characteristics of the city’s free dance scene incorporated a wide variety of styles, subjects, and influences.

Grete Wiesenthal

Although Grete Wiesenthal (b. Vienna 1885–d. Vienna 1970) (figs. 5.1, 5.2) never attended the performances of Isadora Duncan, while still a trainee at the Imperial Royal Court Opera Theater she was already aware that Duncan had pioneered a new approach. In her own work Wiesenthal actively criticized traditional forms of ballet for their repetitiveness, as in the following com-ment: “Es war nur ein Hopsen nach dem Takt, ohne Empfindung und Aus-druck von der Idee der Musik!” (It was nothing but hopping to the beat, without feeling and expression of the music’s idea!).15 The classical code of movement became so unbearable to her that she was even ashamed of per-forming it.16 Following an argument with Hassreiter, in 1908 she left the Imperial Royal Court Opera Theater and made her professional debut, to-gether with her sisters Elsa and Berta, definitively marking the beginning of a new period in the history of Central European dance. The sisters held their first performance at the Cabaret und Theater Fledermaus, a brand-new venue that had been founded a few months earlier by the Wiener Werkstätte (Vi-enna’s cooperative enterprise for craft and design).17 It offered not only an exclusive space for Kleinkunst (cabaret) performances and theater but also for innovative dance of various kinds.18

By appearing together as an ensemble, the Wiesenthal sisters were very much in keeping with the trend of the time for sister acts. However, the manner in which they performed set them apart. On a very small stage, clothed in costumes that were often reminiscent of Duncan’s flowing robes rather than the constricting bodices and point shoes of ballet, the trio danced fervidly and energetically to Chopin, Strauß, Lanner, and Schubert waltzes. In fact, waltz interpretations became Grete Wiesenthal’s trademark. In 1934 she wrote:

Ich lebte mit der Musik der großen Musikschöpfer, [. . .] ich tanzte ein Allegretto von Beethoven, und ich arbeitete wie an einem Heiligtum an meinem ersten Walzer, dem Donauwalzer von Johann Strauß, und an ihm hatte ich die Form gleich gefunden und sie war richtig. Aber diese Form war sowohl fest wie elastisch, [. . .] es war nicht nur primitiv

Fig. 5.1. Grete Wiesenthal performing her solo “Allegretto” (1908, music: Ludwig van Beethoven) with a handwritten comment by Peter Altenberg: “The dancer! One of the few whom the likes of us should have married, to

lead her from the playful dance of life to the noble seriousness of life itself!” Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.


heitere Lebensfreude, es war auch das Dionysisch-Ekstatische und Himm-lisch-Unbeschwerte, das sich in diesen Musikschöpfungen darstellte.19

[I lived with the music of the great composers. [. . .] I danced an al-legretto by Beethoven and I worked on my first waltz, the “Blue Danube” by Johann Strauß, as if it had been something sacred, finding the right form here straightaway for the first time. This form was both firm and elastic, [. . .] it was not just primitive, buoyant joie de vivre that these musical creations represented but also Dionysian ecstasy and hea-venly lightheartedness.]

It could be that the inebriated, ecstatic element of these dances had some-thing, however distant, to do with the phenomenon of the cancan, which was also being performed in Vienna at the time at the nightclub Parisien,20 but Grete Wiesenthal’s love of folk dance also played a part.21 The three Wiesenthal sisters soon became popular throughout Europe. Nevertheless in 1910 Grete separated from her sisters and had a successful career during the interwar period as a solo dancer, choreographer, and silent film actress. Her innovative dance system is still in use today. Several of her choreographed works are still in the repertoire of the Vienna State Opera, in particular the solo dance “Wein, Weib und Gesang” (Wine, Women, and Song), which was created by Wiesenthal in 1922 to the waltz of the same name by Johann Strauß.

Wiesenthal’s style was not only original in terms of form and content but also innovative in that it was developed exclusively for female dancers. Maria Josefa Schaffgotsch, Wiesenthal’s assistant for many years, described it as follows:

Grete Wiesenthals primäres Anliegen war, das im Klassischen unum-gängliche statische Element weitestgehend zu überwinden und alles Posenhafte in einen nie endenden Bewegungsfluss aufzulösen. Das Fließende, Schwingende, Wellenförmige des Dreivierteltakts, die Strauß-Walzer in Bewegung umzusetzen, das war ihre besondere Kunst, dafür wurde sie weltberühmt.22

[Grete Wiesenthal’s primary concern was to overcome as far as possible the unavoidable static element of classical dance and to dissolve every-thing that smacked of a pose in a never-ending stream of movement. The flowing, swinging, wavelike three-four rhythm, transforming Strauss’s waltzes into movement — that was her particular art, that was what made her world famous.]

Schaffgotsch summarized Wiesenthal’s unique technique as comprising four main groups of exercises: balance exercises without spotting (i.e., without fixing the eyes on a certain point, as in ballet); waltz swings performed while stretching the body out backward horizontally; dynamically intensified turns without spotting; and, finally, specific jumps (e.g., with the knees pulled up

Fig. 5.2. Poster of Grete Wiesenthal in the title role of the lost film Das fremde Mädchen (1913), directed by Mauritz Stiller, screenplay by Hugo

von Hofmannsthal. Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.


to the chest). For the first two groups, dancers carried out preparatory exer-cises at the barre wearing sandals or soft ballet shoes.

Wiesenthal’s most notable achievement was the creation of a style that was seen by contemporaries as Austrian or, rather, typically Viennese, not least because of its resemblance to the art and design of the Jugendstil move-ment. Her style was characterized, above all, by its sweetness and charm; although her movements were often fiery and temperamental, they were also always rounded and flowing, unlike the jerky, angular style of later expres-sionist dancers.23 Wiesenthal’s work did not address complicated themes, instead concentrating on the expression of emotion. Although she helped pave the way for the development of expressionist dance styles, she was not a member of any expressionist groups. Rather, she belonged to the previous generation, the aesthetes associated with the Wiener Werkstätte, and colla-borated with such young Secession painters as Rudolf Huber and Erwin Lang.24 As one of free dance’s earliest proponents, by the 1920s she was no longer considered an innovator, although she remained a cultural authority in Vienna and her popularity continued both at home and abroad. Elements of her dance forms considered kitschy were subsequently revised and up-dated by Schaffgotsch, who continued to teach at the Wiener Akademie für Musik und Darstellende Kunst (Vienna Academy of Music and the Perform-ing Arts) until 1972. Transformed by her pupils, Grete Wiesenthal’s dance style was broadcast worldwide in the televised choreographies for the New Year’s Day Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

Gertrud Bodenwieser

Gertrud Bodenwieser (b. Vienna 1890–d. Sydney 1959) (figs. 5.3, 5.4). Boden-wieser’s life and work were for many years almost totally forgotten in Austria as a result of her forced exile in 1938 as a Jew living under Hitler’s regime and the fact that her contemporaries mostly failed to mention her in their mem-oirs. The major exhibition Tanz — 20. Jhdt. in Wien (Dance in Twentieth-Century Vienna) held at the Austrian Theater Museum in 1979–80 represented a milestone not only in terms of Bodenwieser’s rediscovery but also in devel-oping new approaches to this aspect of Austria’s past and its exiles.25 The three great dancers of Vienna’s interwar period — Wiesenthal, Bodenwieser, and Chladek — collectively had many pupils, but it was most often Bodenwie-ser’s who went on to successful dance careers. Like Bodenwieser, both Wie-senthal and Chladek were dancers of exceptional ability and also headed their own ensembles and trained dancers. Nevertheless, Bodenwieser had an in-spirational quality that fostered the creativity of younger colleagues, a char-acteristic she also shared with Hanna Berger, whose work represented the second generation of free dance in Vienna. Bodenwieser trained such dancers as Trudl Dubsky, Erika Hanka, Hilde Holger, Gertrud Kraus, Stella Mann, and Cilli Wang, to name only a few.26 Like Bodenwieser, most of these dancers were Jewish and were therefore forced to flee the country after 1938.27

Fig. 5.3. Gertrud Bodenwieser performing her solo “Cakewalk” (1919, music: Claude Debussy). Photographer: Franz Löwy.

Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.


Bodenwieser made her debut in 1919 at the age of twenty-nine at Vi-enna’s Konzerthaus as part of an exhibition of the Neue Vereinigung für Malerei, Graphik und Plastik (New Federation for Painting, Graphic Design, and Sculpture) with solo dances such as “Hysterie,” “Cakewalk,” and “Gro-teske” to music by Max Reger, Claude Debussy, and Sergei Rachmaninov. This combination of fine art, music, and movement can be seen as a continu-ation of the interdisciplinarity that had been introduced by Isadora Duncan. Bodenwieser’s performance was supported by the Hagen-Bund, an associ-ation of painters to which artists such as Lang and Felix Albrecht Harta be-longed.28 Her personal contacts with individual members of this group led to her inclusion in their exhibition, representing one example among many of how personal networks facilitated artistic innovation in interwar Vienna. Bo-denwieser’s style contributed greatly to a growing sense that dance was now “catching up” with the reforms already well under way in other areas of the arts. As Alfons Török, one of the most important dance critics of the time, wrote:

Neu, bedingungslos neu war alles was uns die Künstlerin bot. Wir sahen hier erstmalig dasjenige im Tanze zur Geltung kommen, was der Malerei, der Dichtkunst und der Musik der Jungen schon seit einiger Zeit eigen ist: die bedingungslose Abkehr von allem Überliefertem und das ehrliche Suchen nach neuen rein persönlichen Ausdruckswerten.29

[Everything this artist offered us was new, uncompromisingly new. For the first time we saw come to fruition in dance what the painting, litera-ture, and music of the younger generation has made its own for some time now: the unconditional refusal of all tradition and the honest search for new, purely personal expressive values.]

Bodenwieser founded her own ensemble in 1923 and began to create dance dramas with several acts. In these she sought to unify the techniques of inno-vative movement devised by such teachers and theoreticians as Delsarte, Dalcroze, and Laban.30 The diversity of her art had impressed observers from the very beginning, although in later years she was criticized for exploiting the beauty of her dancers and the close resemblance of her style to other choreo-graphers. Her collaboration with theater directors introduced her to new possibilities for achieving theatrical effects. For example, she worked with the director Karlheinz Martin on Frank Wedekind’s Franziska (1924), Klabund’s Der Kreidekreis (The Chalk Circle, 1925), and with Max Reinhardt on his Mirakel (Miracle, performed at Circus Renz in 1927). In 1926 Boden-wieser’s evening-long program of dramatic dance scenes — consisting of “Der brennende Dornbusch” (The Burning Thorn Bush), based on a text by Oskar Kokoschka; her work “Dämon Maschine” (Demon Machine; fig. 5.4), with music by Lisa Maria Mayer (which is still performed today in Vienna); and her interpretation of a dance suite by Stravinsky — were considered “the most interesting of the season.”31

Fig. 5.4. The Gertrud Bodenwieser dance ensemble in “Dämon Maschine” from the dance drama “Life Forces” (Choreography: Gertrud Bodenwieser, 1924, music: Lisa Maria Mayer), Photographer: D’Ora BENDA, 1936.

Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.


News of her innovations in dance also crossed national borders. In 1929 Bodenwieser was invited to to perform in England and subsequently made a lasting impression on the British dance scene. “Dämon Maschine” received a warm reception in London. As the London Evening Standard enthusiastically proclaimed: “Five young people become parts of a machine, lose their per-sonality and become levers and screws, wave and wheel.”32 Lining dancers up in close, almost interlocking formations had become a popular choreo-graphic motif during this period. It may be that the idea originally derived from Asian ethnic dances seen by Western performers during guest appear-ances in Europe. Rudolf Lämmel described Bodenwieser’s ensemble in 1928 as one of the most influential of the time — and not just in Vienna:

Gleichwohl stellt sie nach meiner Auffassung eine Vermittlung zwischen dem Alten und dem Neuen Tanz vor — jedenfalls einen Beweis dafür, dass der nichtabstrakte Tanz keineswegs tot ist, sondern sich ebenfalls weiterentwickelt.33

[In my opinion she mediates between old and new dance — in any case, she is evidence that non-abstract dance is by no means dead, but is equally capable of further development.]

Bodenwieser’s talent also lay in her capacity to create a very broad rep-ertoire that made the most of the abilities of her individual dancers. She often gave a new perspective on traditional Viennese themes, such as the “Blue Danube Waltz,” which she performed and choreographed in countless variants over the years. However, the Bodenwieser dancer Miquette Hirmer-Markl claimed that this emphasis on Vienna stemmed more from Boden-wieser’s desire to honor requests from tour agents than her own interests, which tended more toward experimental dance.34

Shona Dunlop-MacTavish (New Zealand) was one of the first foreign dancers to study with Bodenwieser in Vienna, and her writings provide a unique insight into the originality of her former teacher’s methods. As she explains, the training “Frau Gerty” offered was unusually comprehensive for its time, and included gymnastics, classical ballet, acrobatics, jumping, tap dance, and expressive dance:

Bodenwiesers Stunden begannen immer mit grundlegenden Übungen an der Stange, um die verschiedenen Muskeln des Körpers zu dehnen und zu strecken. Jede Stunde wurde um eine Idee und ein Bild aufgebaut, und den Schülerinnen wurde jeweils ein bestimmtes motorisches oder kinetisches Bewegungsmodell vorgestellt, das “Tagesthema” sein sollte. Nachdem dieses Thema präsentiert war, wurde es in den Raum über-tragen, und schließlich wurden durch Änderungen von Dynamik, Tempo oder Betonung oder durch den Zusatz von Sprüngen oder Stürzen Va-riationen erarbeitet. Immer endeten ihre Stunden mit Improvisation. [. . .] Die erstaunliche Reichweite ihrer Bewegungen, die sie sich aus-


dachte, vom Lyrischen zum Dämonischen oder Bizarren, war das Kenn-zeichen ihres persönlichen Erfolges als Lehrerin und Choreografin.35

[Bodenwieser’s classes always commenced with basic barre exercises to stretch and flex various muscles of the body. Each lesson was built around an idea and image, and the students made aware of a specific mo-tor or kinetic movement that was to be the “theme of the day.” Follow-ing the introduction of this theme, it was then carried into space, from which variations were developed through experiments consisting in change in dynamics, time, or stress, or in the addition of leaps or falls. Her classes invariably ended with an improvisation. [. . .] The amazing range of movement she devised, from the lyrical to the demonic or bizarre, was the hallmark of her individual success, both as teacher and as choreographer.]

Thanks to an invitation to join the fourth centenary celebrations un-derway in Bogota, Columbia, in July 1938 Gertrud Bodenwieser was able to leave Austria with her ensemble. This invitation was arranged by the ex-tremely young Viennese dancer Magda Brunner-Hoyos, whose father was town planner in Bogota at the time, and whom Bodenwieser had asked for help in escaping Austria following the Anschluss. Bodenwieser also appealed to Dunlop-MacTavish and was eventually able to settle in Australia and to establish a new career there. Although she remained largely forgotten in postwar Austria, former Bodenwieser dancers Bettina Vernon and Evelyn Ippen reconstructed several of her choreographic works in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Surrey, Vienna, and Linz — including two of her most important works, “Dämon Maschine” and “Terror,” part of the dance-drama Die Masken Luzifers (The Masks of Lucifer) — and passed them on to young dancers.

Rosalia Chladek

Rosalia Chladek (b. Born 1905–d. Vienna 1995) (fig. 5.5). Whereas Wie-senthal was charm personified and retained her girlishness to the end of her days, Chladek was known as the sinister grande dame of expressive dance in Vienna, though she by no means lacked a sense of humor. Thanks to sheer luck and to the powers of persuasion of Gerhard Brunner, Vienna’s longtime ballet director, some of her choreographical oeuvre has again become accessible to the public since the mid-1980s, when Chladek decided to teach some of her soli to young dancers. Her dances were sophisticated cho-reographic works that revealed her own considerable intellect while further developing the techniques of the Dalcroze School as well as the teachings of her instructors, Valeria Kratina and Jarmila Kröschlova. Not only did she immortalize great women in such full-length works as Jeanne d’Arc from 1934 (with music by Arthur Kleiner and later Erwin Neuber, second version) and Die Kameliendame of 1943 (The Lady of the Camellias, with music by

Fig. 5.5. Rosalia Chladek performing her solo “Intrade” (1930, music: Franz Liszt). Photographer: Siegfried Enkelmann (photograph taken

at a later date). Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.


Chopin) but she also created such strictly abstract musical interpretations as the “Tanz mit dem Stab” (Dance with the Baton) from the Rhythmen-Zyklus (Rhythms Cycle, 1930). Chladek was above all a great solo dancer, whose “begnadeter Körper” (extraordinary physique) was often commented upon. However, she herself was never concerned with the liberation or exhibition of her own body, preferring to focus on giving coherent form to themes created from rational ideas, with the individual’s expressive powers re-maining secondary.36

In stark contrast to other performances in the period from 1920 to 1940, neither ecstasy and eroticism nor pathos are to be found in Chladek’s work. Instead, she infused her stage performances with particular rules she had drawn up during her studies, making the former almost entirely depen-dent on the latter. Anatomy, sequences of motion, and the study of natural expressions formed the basis for her works — elements to be found in the teachings of other dancers but never to the same degree as in Chladek’s performances. Chladek at first counted herself among the expressionist artists of the period, although she overcame the confines of the movement rela-tively swiftly and sought an ideal form that would combine the discipline and severity that characterized her life outside the theater. In this search for an absolute and representative form, the strictness of her method can be com-pared to that of classical academic ballet.

Although the beauty of her body and her boyish appearance were often praised, as was her seriousness, she never received the extensive ovations that greeted the performances of her major competitors, such as dancer Mary Wigman from Germany. In a solo dance competition held in Warsaw in 1933, Chladek’s “Tanz mit dem Stab” was awarded second place after Ruth Sorel-Abramowitsch’s fiery interpretation of “Salome,” which still vexed her sixty years later.37 Although being judged second in the famous 1932 Paris choreography competition had also come as an unpleasant surprise, the later Warsaw competition left her feeling like a miserable failure for months after-ward. According to her, it was this lack of public and critical acclaim that confirmed her decision to concentrate on her pedagogical activities. She spent over sixty years — longer than any other modern dance artist, with per-haps the exception of the American Martha Graham — developing and teaching her system for training a dancer’s body. Chladek was less concerned with encouraging creativity than with teaching the physio-analytical context of dance; only limited aspects of this context were to be personalized by the individual. Chladek’s analytical capabilities have also intrigued today’s gen-eration of dancers, whose task it is to examine the body models of past prac-titioners and periods and to develop them further.


Hanna Berger

Partly due to her early death, the works of Viennese dancer, choreographer, and teacher Hanna Berger (b. Vienna 1910–d. East Berlin 1962) (fig. 5.6) have only recently been rediscovered. This rediscovery, including works such as L’Inconnue de la Seine (The Stranger from the Seine, 1942, with music by Claude Debussy) reveals her as one of the greats of the free dance move-ment, alongside Wiesenthal and Chladek.38 As the youngest of these three women, her work belongs to a later, newer phase of free dance spanning the 1930s and 1940s that developed as a result of the Second World War. Com-pared to her immediate predecessors, Berger no longer had to concern her-self as much with liberating dance from the fetters of tradition and was free to incorporate aspects of many different styles and art forms into her works. For example, one of the most important influences on Berger’s work was the German sculptor Fritz Cremer,

39 with whom she lived for many years in

Berlin and Vienna. Typically her solo dances concentrated almost entirely on conveying the feeling of a particular situation expressed with an apparent minimum of technique. Berger achieved this unique and innovative ap-proach by combining her internal image of the dance’s subject with the outside forces that influenced the “role” she was dancing. For example, in L’Inconnue de la Seine she showed in an almost cinematic way the existential struggle of a woman who has decided to commit suicide and expires in the waves of the river. Performances of this dance created the impression that Berger simultaneously represented the waters of the river and the woman who is extinguished by them. Another typical characteristic was that her solo dances were not definitively choreographed; although certain moments were fixed, other sections were to be improvised freely by the dancer. Improvisa-tion, as propagated above all by Laban, was and remains a crucial element in the development of dance material, with its role in an actual performance varying greatly. Berger obviously wished to do justice to the moment of performance while providing a creative incentive to the next generation of dancers.

Hanna Berger studied in Berlin, briefly toured in the ensembles of Mary Wigman (Germany) and Trudi Schoop (Switzerland), and began her solo career in 1937. Berger was one of the very few dance artists of the period who demonstrated a clear political commitment in her works. Her solo cho-reographed works often included political elements, such as the brandishing of a red flag. Her strong commitment to social justice and connections to the Communist resistance group Die Rote Kapelle in Berlin, led to her arrest by the Gestapo, who sentenced her to two years in a concentration camp. Having survived, she returned to Vienna and led an extraordinarily active life during the following years, including solo and group performances (in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Rome, as well as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary), cho-reographing works, teaching at the Vienna Academy, acting, and writing.40

Fig. 5.6. Hanna Berger performing her solo “Dogaressa” from the dance cycle “Italian Journey” (1942, music: Domenico Scarlatti).

Probable photographer: Siegfried Enkelmann. Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.


Free Dance Schools in Interwar Vienna Although free dance did not reach its peak until the interwar years, schools were founded relatively early in Vienna — some even before the First World War. In 1911 Käthe Ulrich founded her School for Delsartism in Vienna, and in 1912 the sisters of Grete Wiesenthal, Elsa and Berta, opened their school. In 1913 the Dalcroze Association for Rhythmic Gymnastics was founded under the direction of Grete Bieberbach. The school maintained links to the Americans Loïe Fuller and Elizabeth Duncan and the Russian Ellen Tels-Rabeneck. It flourished throughout the interwar period and finally closed in 1968, although a former pupil still gives children’s classes. In 1919 Grete Wiesenthal founded her own school. In 1934 she was also invited to present a master class at the Vienna Academy for Music and the Performing Arts. Wiesenthal directed the dance department at the academy from 1945 to 1952. Her technique is still taught at the ballet school of the Vienna State Opera. Recently the value of her dances and her technique has been rediscovered and researched by a group of former dancers and scholars in Austria.41 Beginning in 1920 Gertrud Bodenwieser taught “Mimik und Tanz” (mime and dance) at the academy. The following year she was offered a temporary contract to teach “Künstlerischen Tanz” (artistic dance) there, the subject being officially introduced at the academy under this title.42 Bodenwieser taught at the academy until 1938, but from 1922 onward she also ran her own private studio as an authorized Laban School in the basement of the Vienna Konzerthaus.43 The success of her many tours — she sometimes even ran two troupes at a time — attracted foreign pupils to Vienna. The courses offered at private studios such as Bodenwieser’s were extremely varied, as is evident from Carl Ivanitsch’s Dance Almanac from 1930: acrobatics, ballet, gymnastics, rhythmics, rhythmic gymnastics, and athletics. Thirty-eight schools offered courses under the heading “Artistic Dance” alone.44 Another international attraction was the Hellerau-Laxenburg School. In 1925 the Hellerau dance school near Dresden, which had been initiated by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, moved to the Laxenburg Palace on the outskirts of Vienna. Rosalia Chladek was its artistic director from 1930 to 1938. Hellerau-Laxenburg also offered summer courses, in which 2,625 students from all over the world were enrolled from 1925 to 1933.45 The large number of new schools founded during the interwar years in Vienna bears witness to the unprecedented success of free dance in this period. The variety of styles and approaches taught also shows how many different me-thods of movement contributed to its development. In addition, the founding of new institutions was an important source of income and prestige for dance artists and choreographers, and also seved as a boost for working women in this period. Until the 1980s there was no state support for female or male choreographers in Austria, nor was there any support on a com-munal level from the city of Vienna.


Following the resounding success of the first international choreography competition in Paris in 1932, in which the Viennese dancers Chladek and Bodenwieser had participated to great acclaim, and the solo dance competi-tion in Warsaw in 1933, where Chladek carried off second prize, Vienna was chosen as the venue for the 1934 competition. Grete Wiesenthal chaired the jury of this Wiener Tanzwettbewerb (Viennese dance competition), which was made up of a broad range of modern and classical dancers. A folk dance meeting was held immediately following the competition.46 The vast majority of competitors came from Central and Eastern Europe, and many of the win-ners were Polish. No German dancer participated due to the “Tausend Mark Sperre” (thousand mark levy) on travel to Austria that the Third Reich had imposed upon its citizens.47 In his opening speech Rolf de Maré, the presi-dent of the competition, called for the founding of an association for inter-national dance cooperation, with headquarters in Vienna, although there is no evidence that this proposal ever got off the ground.48 Clearly the mood of uncertainty in the later 1930s was already affecting Vienna’s cultural scene. Nazi Germany was no longer considered as a suitable headquarters for such an undertaking, but the political situation in Vienna was also too fraught to allow an intensification of its role as hub of the free dance movement.

From the mid-1930s onward, foreign students of free dance began leav-ing Austria. The National Socialists put a stop to classes at Hellerau-Laxen-burg in 1939. They had always regarded free dance as fundamentally suspect, either too abstract to be subject to their ideological control or too intellec-tual and outspoken where it represented recognizable dramatic plots. The National Socialist Reichstheaterkammer (Reich Theater Chamber) issued decrees stipulating how dance and the other arts were to be performed. Al-most all the private dance studios were forced to close down following the Anschluss since most were run by Jewish artists. Some of the traditions of free dance in Vienna were continued at the Conservatoire of the City of Vi-enna and at the dance class at the Vienna Academy for Music and the Per-forming Arts.

Continuity with the Vienna of the interwar period was ensured follow-ing the Second World War thanks to classes at the academy headed by Wiesenthal and Hanna Berger, as well as guest courses of Harald Kreutzberg, one of the few male stars of the interwar period. Chladek took over as direc-tor of dance at the academy in 1952, a position she held until 1970, al-though she continued to teach a university course in dance until 1977. The Chladek system, in a more refined form, is still taught at the Konservatorium Wien Privatuniversität (Vienna Conservatoire Private University), further prov-ing the lingering influence of interwar developments.

Although the National Socialists closed down the more radical modern dance establishments in Vienna following their annexation of Austria in 1938, the city’s reputation as a center for dance culture nevertheless promp-ted the regime to make a little-known decision in 1941. Baldur von Schirach,


the Gauleiter of Vienna, entrusted Kreutzberg with founding a dance aca-demy in Vienna: “Durch diese Berufung machen wir die Tanzakademie in Wien zur zentralen Ausbildungsstätte des Tanzes für ganz Deutschland und darüber hinaus für ganz Europa” (This appointment makes the dance acade-my in Vienna the main dance training center in the whole of Germany and, moreover, in the whole of Europe).49 The plan was never carried out, al-though teaching rooms had been found in the Reisnerstrasse in the third district, and pupils had already registered for courses, as the uncatalogued application forms in the archives of the Vienna Academy for Music and the Performing Arts show. Schirach was no doubt hoping to fill to the gap left by the failure of a National Socialist dance institution in Berlin. The Deutsche Tanzbühne (German Dance Theater), which included Chladek and Kreutz-berg among its members, was closed in 1941.

Political Influences and Free Dance It would appear that in the 1920s the Social Democrats supported free dance and wanted to include it in their concept of modernity.50 As was pre-viously mentioned, Social Democratic educational centers hosted innovative dance performances and elements of free dance were featured in many party events, from May Day marches to workers’ gymnastics displays. The decision to move the Hellerau-Dresden School to Vienna was partly inspired by the success of a guest performance in Vienna in 1923, following which the Social Democratic city council invited the school to take up residence in the Austrian capital. The Hellerau-Dresden School applied for a low rent for the castle in Laxenburg, which was granted by the Ministry of Education. Chladek later confessed that she was disappointed by the move, feeling that the Viennese castle was rather old-fashioned compared to the new garden colony in Hellerau. The school was run as a private dance academy. In 1929 a “Fest-zug der Gewerbe” (Trade Pageant) around the Ringstrasse was organized as part of the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival), which grew out of the mu-sic and theater festival initiated by the Social Democrats in 1924. Rudolf von Laban coordinated and choreographed the “Festzug der Gewerbe” and de-signed the floats. Three thousand amateur dancers performed in the pageant, including workers and trade union representatives.51

The political situation with respect to free dance became more difficult after 1934 as a result of the seizure of power by the Austrofascists. One of the first dancers to leave was Gertrud Kraus, who immigrated to Palestine in 1935. Following the Anschluss in March 1938, Jewish dancers — who rep-resented a large swath of the Viennese dance scene — were forced to flee, many under dreadful circumstances. Stella Mann spent two years on the run. Dancer and choreographer Sascha Leontjew, who hailed from Riga and had been active in Austria since 1928, died in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Milan Dubrovic later recorded how Grete Wiesenthal helped the per-


secuted as much as she could.52 Rosalia Chladek went to Berlin in 1940 as a solo dancer and choreographer of the Deutsche Tanzbühne and from 1940 to 1941 was director of modern dance training at the German Meisterstätten für Tanz (Dance Academy). Beginning in 1942 she ran the training course “Tanz für Bühne und Lehrfach” (Dance for the Stage and for Teaching) at the Vienna Conservatoire. Decades later she admitted in an ORF documen-tary that she had suffered under yet tolerated the National Socialist regime.53

Following the Second World War, Vienna did not recall its exiled artists. A photograph dating from 1945–46 shows Grete Wiesenthal and her stu-dents from the Vienna Academy sitting in front of a huge mound of Ameri-can care packages. These were sent thanks to Magda Brunner-Hoyos, who was still living as an émigré in Bogota and had organized a collection for them. Brunner-Hoyos herself was one of a mere handful of dancers who chose to move back to Vienna in the late 1940s. In 1951 Grete Wiesenthal, made redundant by the new director Rosalia Chladek, retired from the acad-emy. This was also the year Hanna Berger left the academy and shifted her activities to East Berlin. At the same time, classical ballet regained the ground it had lost not only in Vienna but all over Europe. Modern dance in all its varied forms became less important as a result of the newly imported genre of the musical.

Since the late 1970s the artistic legacy of Viennese free dance has been studied with increasing frequency in the form of choreographic recon-structions, performances, exhibitions, and publications. In 1998 I founded the series Tanz im Exil (Dance in Exile), dedicated to exploring the work of émigré dancers through lectures and performances. As part of the com-memorative events of 2008, marking seventy years since the Anschluss, I cu-rated the festival “Berührungen: Tanz vor 1938 — Tanz von heute” (Touch-ings: Dance Before 1938 — Dance Today). Consisting of thirty-three events, it took place mainly in the Theater Odeon in Vienna. In six staged pro-ductions and a gala for the eighty-seven-year-old Viennese dancer Wera Goldman (who had been driven out of her native city in 1938 but still re-mains active today in Tel Aviv), historical works were performed alongside examples of contemporary choreography. The programs reflected the abun-dance and variety of dance in Austria before 1938.54 In recent years a flou-rishing contemporary dance scene has once again developed in Vienna, with many international projects. For the first time since the interwar period, one can once again speak of dance migration to Vienna rather than emigration from the city.55

— Translated by Deborah Holmes


Notes

1 The work accomplished thus far tends to concentrate on the links between dance and theater in Vienna and Berlin. For example, Franz-Peter Kothes’s work Die theatralische Revue in Berlin und Wien: Typen, Inhalte, Funktionen (Wilhelmshaven, Germany: Heinrichshofens Verlag, 1977) does not deal with innovative modern dance. Austrian developments earn a brief mention in George Jackson’s “Blutsverwandtschaften und Wahlverweigerungen: Der moderne Tanz in Deutschland und Amerika,” in Aus-druckstanz: Eine mitteleuropäische Bewegung der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schüller (Wilhelmshaven, Germany: Florian Noetzel, Heinrichs-hofen-Bücher, 1992), 397–404. A revised edition of this work appeared in 2004. 2 In fact, there is evidence that modern or, rather, nonclassical or free artistic dance, or “Ausdruckstanz” reached its peak before 1910. This contradicts Michael Huxley’s claim that it did not even begin until 1910; see his essay “European Early Modern Dance,” in Dance History, ed. Janet Adshead-Lansdale and June Layson (London: Routledge, 1994), 151–68. It must be remembered, however, that research only began to address this issue in the 1980s and that many studies in German have yet to be made available in English. 3 Giora Manor, The Life and Dance of Gertrud Kraus (Israel: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1978), 9. Kraus’s comment is recorded by Manor in English. 4 The American performer Loïe Fuller also made her first guest appearance at the Ronacher in a variety show in 1898, six years after her European debut at the Folies Bergère in Paris. In Vienna her dance style was immediately judged to be “richtige Fin de siècle-Kunst” (real fin-de-siècle art); see Wiener Fremden-Blatt, 17 March 1898. 5 Arthur Möller-Bruck, Wiener Fremden-Blatt, 18 October 1895, as quoted by Helga Ihlau, “Das Ronacher als Varietétheater” (PhD diss., Univ. of Vienna, 1978), 45. 6 See Andrea Amort, “‘Ich könnte mir eine moderne Tänzerin denken, die auf Krücken tanzt’: Anmerkungen zum Paradigmenwechsel im künstlerischen Tanz am Beispiel des Tanzprogramms im Wiener Theater & Kabarett Fledermaus von 1907 bis 1913,” in Fledermaus Kabarett, 1907 bis 1913: Ein Gesamtkunstwerk der Wiener Werkstätte — Literatur, Musik, Tanz, ed. Michael Buhrs, Barbara Lesák, and Thomas Trabitsch (Vienna: Brandstätter, 2007), 137–53. 7 Ludwig Hevesi, “Miss Duncan in der Sezession,” in Acht Jahre Sezession (Vienna: Carl Konegen, 1906), 368–70. 8 Hevesi, “Miss Duncan in der Sezession.” 9 Ruth Matzinger, “Die Geschichte des Balletts der Wiener Hofoper, 1869–1918” (PhD diss., Univ. of Vienna, 1982), 260. 10 See Neue Freie Presse, Vienna, 8 January 1904. 11 Matzinger, “Die Geschichte des Balletts der Wiener Hofoper,” 424–25. 12 Wiener Zeitung, 23 March 1903. 13 See the unpaginated “Album Miquette Hirmer” housed in the manuscript depart-ment of the Austrian Theater Museum as part of the “Hilverding-Stiftung,” labeled “Mitglied der weltberühmten Wiener Tanzgruppe Prof. Gertrud Bodenwieser, 1926–1933” (Member of Prof. Gertrud Bodenwieser’s World-Famous Viennese Dance Group, 1926–33).


14 Neueste Münchener Nachrichten, 31 May 1931, quoted in Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schüller, “A Driving Force Towards the New: Bodenwieser — Exponent of Aus-druckstanz,” in Gertrud Bodenwieser and Vienna’s Contribution to Ausdruckstanz, ed. Bettina Vernon-Warren and Charles Warren (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Pub-lishers, 1999), 23–24. 15 Grete Wiesenthal, Der Aufstieg: Aus dem Leben einer Tänzerin (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, 1919), 169. 16 Wiesenthal, Der Aufstieg, 171. 17 The Kabarett und Theater Fledermaus was founded in the autumn of 1907. The Wiener Werkstätte was a leading association of applied artists headed by the architect and designer Josef Hoffmann, who from 1903 to 1932 designed objects — ranging from cutlery to furniture to clothes and textiles — for everyday use and made them available to a broader public. This effort also included experimental theater. See Michael Buhrs, Barbara Lesák, and Thomas Trabitsch, eds., Fledermaus Kabarett, 1907 bis 1913 (Vienna: Brandstätter, 2007). 18 The Austrian Theater Museum’s program for 2007–8, in cooperation with the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, included the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to the Kabarett Fledermaus. 19 Grete Wiesenthal, Im Anfang war der Tanz, in the Vienna State Opera program Wiesenthal-Tänze, 25 October 1984. 20 Ihlau, “Das Ronacher als Varietétheater,” 58. 21 See Wiesenthal, Im Anfang war der Tanz; see also Wiesenthal, Der Aufstieg, 10–11. 22 Maria Josefa Schaffgotsch, “Aus der Ekstase geboren,” in the Vienna State Opera program Wiesenthal-Tänze, 25 October 1984. 23 Andrea Amort, “Ausdruckstanz in Österreich bis 1938,” in Schüller-Oberzaucher, ed., Ausdruckstanz, 387. 24 Wiesenthal, Der Aufstieg, 173, 181. 25 Agnes Bleier-Brody, “Gertrud Bodenwieser und der neue Tanz,” in Tanz — 20. Jhdt. in Wien (exhib. cat.), Austrian Theater Museum (Vienna: Biblos Schriften, 1979), 53–58. 26 Another famous example would be Margarete Wallmann, a student of Wigman’s who served as ballet mistress of the Vienna State Opera from 1934 to 1938. Having trained in Vienna and Berlin and returned to Vienna in the 1930s, Wallmann was forced to immigrate to Argentina. For the most recent personal account of an émigré artist forced to flee Austria after the Anschluss see Stella Mann, A Dance of Life (London: Kamal Editions, 2005). 27 Andrea Amort, “Das Ballett der Wiener Staatsoper, 1918–1942” (PhD diss, Univ. of Vienna, 1982), 156–73. 28 See G. Tobias Natter, Die verlorene Moderne: Der Künstlerbund Hagen, 1900–1938 (exhib. cat.), Austrian Galerie Belvedere in Schloss Halbturn (Vienna, 1993). See also Rudolf Leopold, Birgit Laback, and Cornelia Cabuk, eds., Zwischen den Kriegen: Österreichische Künstler, 1918–1938 (exhib. cat.) (Vienna: Leopold Museum, 2007). 29 Alfons Török, “Wiener Tanzabende,” Der Merker (Vienna), 1 June 1919.


30 François Delsarte (1811–71) pioneered the study of expressive techniques for actors and was studied by Isadora Duncan, among others. Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950), a composer and music teacher, founded a method of symbolizing music through body movements. His movement theory stressed rhythm above all else. Rudolf von Laban (1879–1958) studied and taught the use of space in dance, among many other concepts. See Schüller-Oberzaucher, ed., Ausdruckstanz. 31 Paul Stefan, “Bodenwieser — Kokoschka — Strawinsky, Vienna, 1926,” newspaper clipping in the “Album Miquette Hirmer,” Austrian Theater Museum. 32 “Album Miquette Hirmer,” Austrian Theater Museum. 33 Rudolf Lämmel, Der Moderne Tanz (Berlin: Peter J. Oestergaard, 1928), 179. 34 “Album Miquette Hirmer,” Austrian Theater Museum. 35 Shona Dunlop-MacTavish, Gertrud Bodenwieser: Tänzerin, Choreographin, Päda-gogin — Wien-Sydney (Bremen: Zeichen + Spuren, 1992), 24. This is a translation of the English edition An Ecstasy of Purpose: The Life and Art of Gertrud Bodenwieser ([Dunedin, New Zealand]: Les Humphrey & Associates, 1987), 16. The examination syllabi used to train dance teachers according to Bodenwieser’s methods are preserved in the Bodenwieser Archive in Sydney; see Dunlop-MacTavish, Gertrud Bodenwieser, 24–25. See also Bettina Vernon-Warren and Charles Warren, “The Bodenwieser Style” and “Bodenwieser Teaching in Vienna and Australia,” in Gertrud Bodenwieser, ed. Vernon-Warren and Warren, 51 and 57, respectively. 36 Andrea Amort, “Rosalia Chladek: Eine kritische Würdigung,” in Hommage à Rosalia Chladek, program for the festival ImPuls Tanz, held in Vienna on 24 July 2005, 6–8. See also “Rosalia Chladek: A Critical Appreciation,” in Hommage à Rosalia Chladek for the Centenary, 1905–2005, comp. and ed. Ingrid Giel (Vienna: n.p., 2007), 31–34. 37 I conducted numerous interviews with Rosalia Chladek in Vienna during the final years of her life (1993–95). 38 In 1995 former Berger dancer Ottilie Mitterhuber reconstructed the Hanna Berger solo L’Inconnue de la Seine for the production Tänze der Verfemten (Dances of the Ostracized) as part of the Antifascist Festival in Linz. Since then the solo has been performed at various evenings I organized and has also become the departure point for new creations by young choreographers. 39 Andrea Amort, Auf den Spuren einer Tänzerin im Widerstand: Hanna Berger (Wien, 1910–Berlin-Ost, 1962) (Vienna: Christian Brandstäter, forthcoming 2010). 40 My interdisciplinary project consists of a biography (forthcoming), the notation and film documentation of the only three solo works that have come down to us, per-formances of the same (which have already taken place on various occasions), and the further development of these works by contemporary artists in order to bring Hanna Berger’s works to the attention of a new audience. I call this process “retouching.” The project, which premiered on 20 June 2006 in the St. Pölten Festival Hall in Austria, featured the choreographers Nikolaus Adler, Manfred Aichinger, Rose Breuss, Bernd R. Bienert, and Willi Dorner, as well as the seventy-four-year-old Berger dancer Ottilie Mitterhuber and the young dancer Esther Koller. It was also presented on 31 October 2006 at the Greenberg Theater in Washington, DC, as the opening performance of the Austrodance Festival “Beyond the Waltz.”


41 As part of the 2008 Viennese festival “Berührungen: Tanz vor 1938 — Tanz von heute” (Touchings. Dance Before 1938 — Dance Today, artistic director Andrea Amort), the director Fanny Brunner contextualized original dances by Grete Wie-senthal based on unpublished diary entries by the artist dating from 1938 and texts by Hugo von Hofmannsthal from the pantomime “Das fremde Mädchen” (The Strange Girl), which he wrote for Wiesenthal. A collection of essays dealing with Wiesenthal’s achievement appeared under the title Mundart der Moderne: Der Tanz der Grete Wiesenthal, ed. Gabriele Brandstetter and Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schüller (Munich: Kieser-Verlag, 2009). 42 Archive of the University for Music and Performing Arts, Vienna. Gertrud Boden-wieser’s contract is catalogued alphabetically alongside the contracts of teachers up to the present day. 43 Oberzaucher-Schüller, “A Driving Force Towards the New,” 22. 44 Carl Ivanitsch, Tanz Almanach (Vienna: n.p., 1930), 94. 45 See Hilverding-Stiftung, Austrian Theater Museum. 46 The Viennese competition took place from 28 May to 5 June 1934 under the presi-dency of Rolf de Maré. See Wolfgang Born, “Erster Internationaler Tanzwettbewerb in Wien,” manuscript (Archives Internationales de la Danse 597), housed in the Biblio-thèque-Musée de l’Opéra, Paris; published in French as “Le Concours International de la Danse à Vienne,” Archives Internationales de la Danse 3 (15 July 1934): 111–13. 47 See the exhibition catalogue Tanz — 20. Jhdt. in Wien, 136. 48 See Hilverding-Stiftung, Austrian Theater Museum. 49 Baldur von Schirach, as quoted in “Innovativer Versuch — die Berufung Harald Kreutzbergs,” in Lynne Heller, “Die Reichshochschule für Musik in Wien 1938–1945” (PhD diss., Univ. of Vienna, 1992), 242–50. 50 Yvonne Hardt, “Ausdruckstanz und die Ästhetisierung des Arbeiterkörpers,” in Leibhaftige Moderne: Körper in Kunst und Massenmedien, 1918 bis 1933, ed. Michael Cowan and Kai M. Sicks (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2005), 245–63. 51 Andrea Amort, “Die tanzende Strasse: Zum ‘Festzug der Gewerbe’ von Rudolf Laban 1929 in Wien,” in Arbeiterkino: Linke Filmkultur der Ersten Republik, ed. Christian Dewald (Vienna: Filmarchiv, 2007), 53–65. 52 Milan Dubrovic, Veruntreute Geschichte: Die Welt der Grete Wiesenthal (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1987), 170–84. 53 Gerhard Rosska, dir., Die systematisierte Freiheit: Rosalia Chladek und der moderne Ausdruckstanz (TV documentary) (Vienna: ORF, 1990). Andrea Amort, “Künst-lerische Migration statt Emigration,” in Das Lesebuch zum Jubiläumsjahr, ed. Bun-deskanzleramt (Vienna: Residenz Verlag, 2004), 210–11. 54 For more details go to http://www.odeon-theater.at/54.0.html. 55 Among the many aspects of free dance in Vienna omitted because of lack of space are the following: specific Viennese dance forms; the ratio of men to women in Viennese free dance; and political resistance in dance. The significance of the Schwarzwald School, traces of free dance in Austrian film, and dance reviews and their authors also merit discussion. For more information on all of the preceding, see Österreich tanzt — Geschichte und Gegenwart ed. Andrea Amort and Mimi Wunderer-Gosch (Vienna: Böhlau, 2001). Abstracts in English appear at the end of each chapter.

6: Hollywood on the Danube? Vienna and Austrian Silent Film of the 1920s

Alys X. George

ESCRIBING THE INCONGRUITIES characteristic of postwar Vienna, au-thor, cultural critic, and feuilletonist Alfred Polgar wrote: “Die Berichte

von Wiens Elend sind wahr. Die Berichte von Wiens Wohlbehagen sind auch wahr,” adding sardonically, “Der Berichterstatter muß nur definieren, was er meint, wenn er ‘Wien’ sagt” (The reports of Vienna’s misery are true. The reports of Vienna’s well-being are also true. The commentator must simply define what he means when he says “Vienna”).1 The essay in which these comments appeared, entitled “Geistiges Leben in Wien” (Intellectual Life in Vienna), published on 14 November 1920 in the Prager Tagblatt, points to the dualisms Polgar viewed as pervasive in the freshly minted capital of the First Republic. The rift between the “two Viennas” (4)2 — “Vorstadt” (out-lying districts) versus “innere Stadt” (city center), in Polgar’s categorization — found expression in all spheres of life, including the economic, political, social, and cultural.

What was the thread that held together this multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural metropolis, a city that not only tolerated but also, to some ex-tent, thrived on its fundamental contradictions? According to Polgar, prior to the end of the First World War and the subsequent dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the link had been a distinct sense of imperial identity, whether real or imagined. Without that binding thread, it was not only the edges that threatened to fray. The tensions at play in postwar Vien-na were at the heart of the city’s existence. Polgar could identify only one force universal and powerful enough to function as a unifying ersatz for the imperial identity that collapsed along with the empire in 1918: “Das eini-gende Band, das die Völker Wiens umschlingt — früher war dieses Band be-kanntlich die Dynastie — ist das Kino” (4; The unifying bond that links the people of Vienna — previously this bond was widely known to have been the [Habsburg] dynasty — is cinema).

How could cinema become a substitute for a lost empire? By the time Polgar’s surprising assertion was published — Vienna was in its infancy as the capital of the First Republic — it was clear to most that film could no longer be dismissed simply as the “Gehirnvergiftungswerk” (brain-poisoning enter-prise)3 many critics had asserted it to be. Cinema was gaining increasing

D

144 ♦ ALYS X. GEORGE

credence as a legitimate artistic medium in the wake of the passionately waged “Kino-Debatte” (cinema debate)4 in the first decades of the twentieth cen-tury. As Edward Timms has argued, the Viennese had a long and unique tradition of receptivity to art forms that straddled socioeconomic divides. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the Viennese passion for perfor-mance allowed common cultural ground to be forged in the popular theater. As the century progressed, however, the rift between elite and popular culture reappeared with the rise of an increasingly prosperous urban bour-geoisie.5 Polgar charged, “Den Zugang zur Illusionswelt des Theaters ver-barrikadieren furchtbare Eintrittspreise, und auch Bücher können nur noch von Leuten erworben werden, die so viel Valuta besitzen, daß sie’s nicht mehr nötig haben, zu lesen” (4; Access to the theater’s world of illusion is barred by outrageous ticket prices, and even books are now affordable only for people who have so much money that they no longer find it necessary to read at all). By 1900 Vienna was ripe for a new popular theater tradition. Film emerged as a mass medium around the same time, and movie theaters became for the Viennese working class the popular theaters of yore. En-couraging universal access that elite cultural institutions hindered, cinema remained the only common cultural forum capable of keeping “das geistige Leben der Stadt in Schwung” (the city’s intellectual pot boiling) (4). Film thus filled the cultural vacuum left by early nineteenth-century popular the-ater. Contemporary critics praised the new medium as the “Volkstheater unserer Zeit” (popular theater of our time) and the “Volkskunst unseres Jahr-hunderts” (folk art of our century).6 Serving as a bridge between tradition and modernity, cinema gave the “two Viennas” common ground. Historian Siegfried Mattl has argued as follows:

Die Kultur der Ersten Republik ist weit mehr eine Überlagerung von Volks-, Hoch- und Massenkultur innerhalb der und zwischen den ver-schiedenen sozialen Schichten, als dies zeitgenössisch und retrospektiv wahrgenommen worden ist.7

[The culture of the First Republic consists far more in a layering of popu-lar, high, and mass culture in and between social strata than contem-porary and past scholarship have acknowledged.]

If this is the case, it is necessary to read Austrian silent film of the 1920s — with its center in Vienna, the “Hollywood on the Danube”8 — as a product of that city’s distinctive cultural tradition, a unique interplay of high culture, Volkskultur, and mass culture.

This essay traces the contours of the Austrian silent film industry from the end of the First World War to the introduction of talkies.9 It is premised on the belief that Austrian cinema is a national tradition distinct from its German cousin. Until relatively recently, film scholarship tended to subsume Austrian cinema under the category of German cinema.10 Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [D 1919/20]); Nosferatu, eine

HOLLYWOOD ON THE DANUBE? ♦ 145

Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror [D 1922]); Metro-polis (D 1927): these and other German films stand as milestones of Central European silent cinema in the 1920s and have overshadowed the rich con-tributions of Austria to silent film. The prevailing notion of German and Austrian cinemas as two parts of a single cinematic tradition was further un-derscored by the mobility of key directors, actors, and screenwriters between the two nations. While the existence of a “Vienna-Berlin axis” in the film industry has been documented,11 the title of a late essay by Heimito von Doderer, “Nicht alle zogen nach Berlin” (Not Everyone Moved to Berlin) also held true for the business of cinema. To a great extent, the development of Austrian cinema in the 1920s embodies the specifically Austrian and Vien-nese economic, political, and sociocultural tensions that played out on the stage of the former imperial capital during the interwar years. This essay re-gards cinema as a two-way mirror of sorts. While initially reflecting back to us representations of the diverse and, at times, incongruous economic, po-litical, and sociocultural undercurrents of a fledgling republic that were pro-jected onto contemporary movie screens, it also acts as a window onto how these same undercurrents combined to shape the development of the Aus-trian film industry itself.

Roller-Coaster Economies: The First Republic and the Film Industry

After 1918 Vienna — a former imperial capital now minus an empire, dives-ted of its erstwhile population, resources, and territory — was left without a clear identity yet still had to shoulder the financial burdens of a lost war. The economic angst that pervaded the city — indeed, the nation as a whole — also hung over the film industry. As early as 1919 contemporary film industry journals like the Neue Filmwoche had already begun to comment on the uncertainty induced by the economic crisis following the First World War:

So schwebt unsere Branche in vollster Ungewißheit, wie sich die Dinge ändern werden. Man weiß weder, ob Wien seine Stellung als Filmzentrale behaupten wird, noch, ob die eben aufstrebende österreichische Film-industrie einen weiteren Aufschwung nehmen wird oder vielleicht gar in ihrer jungen Blüte ersticken werden wird.12

[Our branch is in the grip of a debilitating uncertainty about how the situation will progress. No one knows whether Vienna will retain its po-sition as the capital of film, whether the Austrian film industry will con-tinue to flourish, or whether its early bloom will rather be squelched.]

The volatile postwar Austrian economy led to wild financial oscillations for the nation’s silent film industry as production and distribution companies al-ternately soared to new heights or teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. As


such, mapping the fortunes of Austria’s film industry can serve as a baro-meter for the economic circumstances of the First Republic in general — and its capital city in particular — during the first decade of their existence. Both in the Austrian economy at large and in the film industry three phases can be delineated: 1918 to 1922; 1923 to 1925–26; and 1926–27 up to the in-troduction of talkies. This section focuses on how these roller-coaster econo-mies of the 1920s were driven by hyperinflation, currency devaluation, and subsequent regulation and stabilization.13

The effects of a lost war and a vanished empire made film distribution more problematic than it had been previously. Because the First Republic en-compassed only a fraction of the territory and population of the former em-pire, the possible domestic outlets of film distribution firms were drastically reduced. Before the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, approximately 1,400 cinemas were scattered across the monarchy. With the loss of the crown lands, the market for domestically produced films was effectively reduced by two-thirds, with the number of movie houses in the First Republic now num-bering just 450.14 Hyperinflation presented additional difficulties. As the value of the crown depreciated against foreign currencies in the early 1920s, it became prohibitively expensive for film distributors to import foreign films. As a result, distribution companies struggled to cover their import costs by exporting Austrian films, though these could be sold at bargain prices on for-eign markets.15 Taken together, these two situations — hyperinflation and a significantly reduced home market — weakened the distribution side of the domestic film industry by making it dependent on foreign distribution, sales, and revenue.16 The years leading up to 1922 thus witnessed distribution firms partially shifting their prewar focus on home-market cultivation toward devel-oping possible foreign outlets for Austrian films. Although Germany was the most obvious foreign market, film distributors also looked to new Eastern European capitals of the former crown lands as possible export markets.

The situation with respect to film production tells a different story. A growing market for domestic propaganda films and import embargoes on many foreign films combined to benefit wartime Austrian film production. The number of domestic films grew by an astonishing 300 percent during the war: 231 long and short films were produced between 1914 and 1918, compared with only 81 films in the five years preceding the war. In the final year of the war Austrian film studios, most of which were located in Vienna, turned out close to 100 films.17 Following the empire’s dissolution, the buoy-ant growth that had characterized Austrian film production during the war was sustained by the inflationary bubble. Despite a smaller domestic market, rising unemployment, and war debt, the combination of postwar hyperin-flation and the lifting of restrictions regulating international commerce in goods and capital led to a speculative boom in international goods and mon-etary markets. This fleeting and volatile combination sparked a veritable “Gründungsfieber” (founding fever)18 in film production. The sector blos-


somed, and it is estimated that the number of film-production companies more than doubled during the hyperinflationary years.19 The most robust pro-duction firms — Sascha-Film, Astoria-Film, Dreamland Film Company, and Vita-Film — were joined by more than twenty new companies. By 1922 over fifty Viennese firms active in different segments of the film industry had driven Austrian silent-film production to peak levels.20 Between 1918 and 1922 Vien-nese production firms turned out an average of 70–75 feature-length films and 50–60 shorter comedies, documentaries, plus educational and cultural films annually.21 At the height of the upturn, in December 1922, the film in-dustry even unionized. The Vereinigung aller am Film Schaffenden Öster-reichs (Austrian Film Industry Union), commonly known as the Filmbund, sought healthcare and other social services to protect Austria’s thousands of film industry employees against unemployment. This move would prove pres-cient given the weakened next phase of the First Republic’s film industry.

In late 1922 inflation began to spiral out of control. Accompanying the currency devaluation was the fact that many film-production companies were opportunistic, speculative operations out to make a quick crown in the im-mediate postwar years. Such an unstable foundation could hardly support sustainable growth for the industry. Meanwhile, the nation’s economy was collapsing: hyperinflation and wild oscillations in currency value culminated in the crash of the Viennese stock market in 1924. These factors propelled the Austrian film industry into a full-blown crisis. Production costs for an average feature film had soared from eighty million crowns in the spring of 1922 to upwards of fifty billion crowns by early 1924.22 When the stock mar-ket ultimately crashed, the majority of the production firms, which had been founded on an initial, buoyant postwar optimism, became insolvent. The few production companies that still remained were forced to cut back drastically on domestic productions and shift their focus to international coproductions in an attempt to remain afloat.23 While the introduction of the Schilling in late 1924 restored at least a semblance of stability to the economy at large, it only drove the film industry deeper into crisis. By effectively leveling the hyperinflation that had spurred the preceding years’ dizzying growth, it re-inforced the financial woes of the distribution firms.24 Furthermore, the cor-rected capital market could not sustain the remaining production firms or their domestic films.25 Comparative production figures for the years 1923–25 tell the whole story: while thirty-five domestic films were released in 1923, the number had sunk to just fifteen in 1924. By 1925 production had ground nearly to a halt, with only five Austrian films produced in that year.26 Der Filmbote, a leading industry publication, summarized the industry’s crisis:

Die würgende Geldknappheit, der hohe Zinsfluß, die Unmöglichkeit, sich die notwendigen Mittel zur Aufrechterhaltung des Betriebes zu verschaffen, hat die Industrie und den Handel vor eine nie gekannte Situation gestellt. Große, seit Jahren bestehende Unternehmungen, die


über jeden Zwiefel erhaben galten, sind gezwungen an die Geduld ihrer Gläubiger zu appellieren und die Zahl der kleinen Betriebe, die dem daherbrausenden Sturm nicht wiederstehen können, nimmt von Tag zu Tag zu.27

[The choking shortage of capital, the high interest rates, the impossibility of raising the resources necessary to maintain enterprises: these factors have put business and industry in an unprecedented situation. Large firms with long histories, firms considered secure beyond all doubt, have been forced to appeal to their creditors; and the number of small businesses that have been unable to weather the brewing storm is multiplying daily.]

The fiscal woes that permeated every sector of the Austrian film industry in the mid-1920s resulted in scores of unemployed. The dried-up market, in turn, sparked an exodus of Austrian directors, actors, producers, and screen-writers to film industries abroad, particularly to Germany and the United States, where many found not only jobs but also success.28

The influence of the American film industry during this period cannot be underestimated: it did far more than offer refuge to unemployed Austrian film industry workers. As in other European countries, Austria’s film market was virtually flooded with Hollywood productions at dumping prices in the mid-1920s.29 These films filled the market niche left by bankrupt domestic production companies. While the number of Austrian production firms shrank to just three, the distribution branch profited immensely from the increased demand for foreign productions. New distribution companies mushroomed, their numbers increasing dramatically from twelve in 1922–23 to approxi-mately seventy in 1925.30 The Austrian government attempted to counter the glut of imported foreign films by subsidizing domestic productions. To this end, in 1926 a quota system regulating the ratio of foreign to domestic films was introduced. Austrian films were rigorously scrutinized to determine whether they were certifiable domestic productions (called Stammfilme), based on such factors as film length and domestic studio time involved in the production. The import of foreign films was subsequently based on a vari-able ratio to domestic productions. Over time the quota system allowed pro-duction companies to regain some ground against imported films, with the situation stabilizing somewhat by 1926.

Beginning in 1927, the domestic silent film industry entered a third phase, slowly recovering from its dire mid-decade straits. Several larger Aus-trian production firms were able to resume making pictures in Vienna, with twenty-eight feature films released in 1927. However, the gradual intro-duction of talkies at decade’s end, combined with the worldwide economic downturn beginning in late 1929, ultimately guaranteed a Hollywood end-ing of sorts: the brief golden age of Austrian silent film rode quietly into the sunset on the heels of the Habsburg Empire. The notion of Vienna as “Hol-lywood on the Danube” would remain a dream.


“Red Vienna” = Red Film? Social Democracy and the Politics of Cinema

The euphoria of the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Österreichs (Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria, or SDAPÖ) at having won the first national democratic elections in 1919 following the establishment of the First Republic was quickly tempered when that mandate was lost to the Christ-lichsozialen (Christian Socials) just one year later. Vienna, however, remained a stronghold of socialist politics: the SDAPÖ maintained a two-thirds majority there for most of the 1920s, earning the capital the nickname “Rotes Wien” (Red Vienna).31 Known for its ambitious social programs and its attempts to stabilize the postwar economy, the party struggled throughout the decade to develop a unified party line about arguably the most significant medium of the day, namely, film. As such, cinema — viewed as an integral facet of cul-tural politics — is a revealing lens through which to interpret the tensions brewing in the Viennese SDAPÖ in the interwar years.32

The party stance regarding film ranged from ambivalence and outright hostility in the early 1920s to an uneasy acceptance of cinema’s importance as a medium toward the middle of the decade. Socialist periodicals such as the Arbeiter-Zeitung, Bildungsarbeit, Das kleine Blatt, Der jugendliche Arbei-ter, and Der Kampf documented a heated party debate and the evolution of the SDAPÖ’s positions on film.33 Around 1920 socialist publications began run-ning articles warning readers about cinema’s dangers. The most polemical critics dismissed mass-market films as little more than “Allerweltsverdum-mungstrust” (a cartel for dumbing down the entire world). At its worst cine-ma was viewed as a “Machtmittel zur Beherrschung der Gehirne” (political instrument for mind control).34 The film industry was accused of peddling third-rate capitalist products to the working class. While robbing workers of their hard-earned salaries, the film industry lulled them into complacency with a steady stream of falsely optimistic images of a cheerful class society and the good old days of the monarchy.35 Debates raged within the SDAPÖ about how to best intercede. Was it not the party’s responsibility to enligh-ten workers about cinema’s illusions, to rescue them from the clutches of capitalist film? In the absence of any unified party line about how to best achieve this goal, the SDAPÖ’s official party newspaper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung, began fighting fire with fire. Rather than merely dismissing movies in broad strokes as trivial rubbish, it devoted more space to the topic. In 1924 it launched an ongoing series of socialist film reviews by Fritz Rosenfeld, the SDAPÖ’s leading film critic.36

Rosenfeld was among the first to openly acknowledge that the SDAPÖ could potentially exploit film to its own political advantage. Commenting on movie theaters, he wrote: “Es geht nicht um eine unwichtige Vergnügungs-stätte; es geht um politisches Machtwerkzeug” (It’s not a matter of insig-nificant entertainment venues; it’s a matter of a tool of political power).37


Rosenfeld considered it the party’s responsibility not only to intervene and educate the masses about cinema’s illusions, but also to mobilize the medium as a promotional vehicle for the SDAPÖ’s politics. The ideal was to make feature-length socialist films that could reach broader audiences. Taking Soviet movies such as Battleship Potemkin (1925) as models, an original brand of socialist film could act as a counterweight to the mass-market of-ferings of mainstream cinemas. According to Rosenfeld, the goal of prole-tarian film was “sich mit dem Leben des Arbeitsmenschen befassen und dem Kinopublikum das Bild der Welt [zu] zeigen, wie sie wirklich ist” (to deal with the lives of workers and to show movie audiences a picture of the world as it really is).38 From the outset, however, Rosenfeld and others in the party were realistic about the prohibitive costs involved in actually producing so-cialist films of marketable quality. Though some influential party members made attempts to add historical “Unterhaltungsfilme” (entertainment films) to the SDAPÖ’s film repertoire,39 Austrian socialist film by and large remained limited to documenting party activities. For example, the Viennese branch of the SDAPÖ commissioned a film entitled Die Maifeier der Wiener Arbeiter-schaft 1923 (May Day Festivities of the Vienna Workers 1923). Based on that film’s success, the party leadership commissioned the Allianz-Filmproduk-tions- und Vertriebsgesellschaft to produce eleven additional short films documenting the parliamentary elections later that year.40 Following these initial efforts, numerous short films recorded the achievements of the SDAPÖ in Vienna, including political rallies, state funerals, mass demonstrations, highlights of the Arbeitersportbewegung (Workers’ Sports Movement), and the like. Later in the decade the SDAPÖ’s Arbeiterbildungszentrale (Workers’ Education Headquarters) began to use Schmalfilm (16-millimeter film) as its main medium. Its portability and significantly lower production costs set it apart from standard 35-millimeter film and enabled it to become a popular vehicle for education and propaganda. The SDAPÖ even copied 35-millimeter propaganda films onto 16-millimeter film to bring them to broader audiences. In 1929 it founded a 16-millimeter film archive comprising around 130 films by 1930.41

Parallel to subsidizing Schmalfilm, the SDAPÖ attempted to influence film production via distribution channels and cinema programming. Founded in May 1926, the Kino-Betriebsgesellschaft m.b.H. (Kiba) was designed to di-rect programming in so-called Arbeiterkinos (workers’ cinemas). It proved a much more successful and economical approach for the SDAPÖ than produc-ing its own films. By 1931 over ten percent of film programming in Vienna was controlled by Kiba, which by that time owned twelve cinemas, among them large, profitable movie theaters like the Apollo-Kino in the Mariahilf district and the Schweden in Vienna-Leopoldstadt.42 Kiba was a commer-cially profitable operation from the outset, both increasing tax revenue for the city and turning a profit for the party.43 However, perhaps precisely be-cause of its fiscal viability, Kiba proved a disappointing experiment in ef-


fecting political change through mass-cultural outlets.44 In the end, not only was the project unable to achieve its goal of uniting commercial and political interests in cinema but it had made enemies within the SDAPÖ. Rosenfeld was one of Kiba’s most outspoken critics:

Fast alle diese [Arbeiterkinos] spielen nicht nur den üblichen Schund, sie spielen von diesem Schund noch das Schlechteste. Fast alle diese Kinos vernachlässigen nicht nur ihre Pflicht gegenüber dem künstlerischen Film, sie spielen auch Filme, die ihrer politischen Einstellung nach nie in Arbeiterkinos gespielt werden dürften.45

[Nearly all of these [workers’ cinemas] show not only the usual rubbish; they show the very worst of the rubbish. Nearly all of these cinemas not only neglect their duty to artistic film; they also show films that, because of their political slant, should never be allowed to play in workers’ cinemas.]

Those within the SDAPÖ who recognized film’s potential as a powerful medium for political and social change were fundamentally at odds with the party-line denunciation of cinema as an “opiate of the working class, created by capitalism to seduce workers from their true goal.”46 Ongoing ideological disputes within the party, coupled with Kiba-focused programming and a dearth of domestic socialist feature films with mass-market appeal, prevented the SDAPÖ from actualizing a widely marketable socialist politics of cinema, a paradoxical concept in and of itself. In the end the SDAPÖ failed to transform “Red Vienna” — a stronghold of socialist politics in the 1920s and the cen-ter of the Austrian film industry — into a national or international hub for “red film.”

On-Screen Austria: Society, Culture, and History as Cinema

A cursory glance at the diversity of Austrian mass-market silent films in the 1920s reveals several prominent strands in film production and consump-tion: social melodramas; historical biographies; and films with Jewish, ex-pressionist, and epic themes. These genres serve as indicators of moviegoing audiences’ demand for domestic films while also reflecting the sociocultural and historical particularities of the First Republic and its capital. In this sense cinema acts as a means of gauging how national identities were created by a medium that, in the words of Alfred Polgar, had the power to unite the two interwar Viennas.

Despite the SDAPÖ’s dismay at much mainstream cinematic fare, there was one current in postwar Austrian film production that satisfied, at least in part, the party’s ideal of bringing to light relevant working-class concerns. Vienna’s economic and social woes found their way onto Austrian screens in a number of realistic, sociocritical “enlightenment” films that linked a docu-


mentary approach to disturbing social conditions with the melodrama of Hollywood blockbusters. These became popular in the early 1920s, tapered off during the middle of the decade, and reemerged later in the decade. Many such films, particularly the earlier productions, were partially subsi-dized by public funds and were coproduced by the Staatliche Filmhauptstelle (National Film Headquarters). Directors such as Heinz Hanus, Leopold Niernberger, and Hans Otto Löwenstein brought the effects of postwar poverty and social ills to the screen in films with such revealing names as Das Kinderelend in Wien (Vienna’s Suffering Children, 1919), Alkohol, Sexua-lität und Kriminalität (Alcohol, Sexuality, and Criminality, 1922), Tuber-kulose (Tuberculosis, 1923), Durch die Quartiere des Elends und Verbrechens (A Journey into the Neighborhoods of Poverty and Crime, 1920), Haifische der Nachkriegszeit (Sharks of the Postwar Era, 1926), and Moderne Laster (Modern Vices, 1924), the latter referring to the dangers of alcohol and drug abuse. Increasingly, women’s issues were also brought to light in films such as Paragraph 144 (1924), dealing with the law regulating abortion, Frauen aus der Wiener Vorstadt (Women from Vienna’s Suburbs, 1925), Gefährdete Mädchen (Girls at Risk, 1928), Eine Dirne ist ermordet worden (A Prostitute Has Been Murdered, 1930), and Andere Frauen (Other Women, 1928), a progressive film about lesbianism based on Viennese author Hugo Bettauer’s novel. The popularity of this genre proved that realistic, contem-porary subject matter with social relevance could be made commercially palatable to audiences by embedding serious social messages within melo-dramatic, fictional frame narratives.

This model, which adapted real-life events to cinema, proved enticing to First Republic audiences in another highly popular genre, namely, biopics dramatizing the lives of important political, military, and cultural figures drawn from Austrian history. The wide range of biographical dramas not only satisfied the public’s desire for celebrity entertainment and readily recog-nizable historical figures but also played an important role in helping citizens of a fledgling republic establish a tentative sense of national identity in light of recently redrawn geopolitical boundaries.47 The post-Napoleonic Bieder-meier era was taken up in Vater Radetzky (1929), Karl Reiter’s film about the early-nineteenth-century Austrian general. More recent imperial history was documented in Kaiser Karl (1921), a drama about Austria-Hungary’s last ruler, and Leibfiaker Bratfisch (The Royal Coachman Bratfisch, 1925). This film, an account of Crown Prince Rudolf’s death at Mayerling in 1889 as remembered by his coachman, was treated from a different perspective in the earlier film Das Drama von Mayerling (The Drama at Mayerling, 1919). The years leading up to the First World War were dramatized in Oberst Redl (Colonel Redl, 1925), which covered the highly publicized espionage and suicide case of Colonel Alfred Redl, a homosexual counterintelligence officer in the Austrian secret service who was exposed as a Russian spy. Other films took up the First World War directly: Der Traum eines österreichischen Reser-


visten (The Dream of an Austrian Reservist, 1928) was a remake of the 1915 original by film industry pioneers Louise and Anton Kolm.

Many biopics focused on the musicians and composers so integral to Austria’s national identity. Der Märtyrer seines Herzens (The Martyrer of His Heart, 1918; alternate title: Beethovens Lebensroman [Beethoven’s Life Story]) and a later film simply titled Beethoven (1927) portrayed the German com-poser’s musical genius and successful career in Vienna. Perhaps the more obvious choice of Austrian musical subjects was brought to the screen in the first feature-length film about Mozart, Otto Kreisler’s Mozarts Leben, Lieben und Leiden (Mozart’s Life, Loves, and Suffering, 1921).48 However, the most filmed musical personalities were neither Mozart nor Beethoven but Austrian composers of two quintessentially Viennese popular music forms: waltzes and operettas. Wilhelm Thiele’s Carl Michael Ziehrer, der letzte Wal-zerkönig (Carl Michael Ziehrer, the Last Waltz King, 1922), an homage filmed and released in the year of Ziehrer’s death, drew crowds at the box office. Franz Lehár was another popular subject, with no less than three films devoted to his life and work: Franz Lehár (1923; alternate title: Der Schöpfer der modernen Operette [The Creator of the Modern Operetta]); Alfred Deutsch-German’s Franz Lehár, der Operettenkönig (Franz Lehár, the Oper-etta King, 1925); and Hans Otto Löwenstein’s biographical film Franz Lehár (1929). Franz Schubert was an equally fashionable subject. Franz Schuberts letzte Liebe (Franz Schubert’s Last Love, 1926); Franz Schubert und seine Zeit (Franz Schubert and His Times, 1928); and Franz Schubert und sein lachendes Wien (Franz Schubert and His Merry Vienna, 1928) took a closer look at the life and work of one of Vienna’s most famous composers. The two later films were released on the hundredth anniversary of Schubert’s death. Three mid-decade films paid tribute to what would have been the hun-dredth birthday of another of Vienna’s noted musical sons, Johann Strauss the younger: Ein Walzer von Strauss (A Waltz by Strauss, 1925), directed by Max Neufeld; Hundert Jahre Johann Strauss (One Hundred Years of Johann Strauss, 1925); and An der Wiege des Walzerkönigs Johann Strauss (At the Cradle of the Waltz King Johann Strauss, 1925).

The Viennese public’s penchant for musical themes was not limited to biopics of famous composers. It also extended to cinematic representations of popular operas, operettas, and other musical forms, particularly in the ear-ly years of the decade. Such films included Max Neufeld’s version of Jacques Offenbach’s opera Hoffmanns Erzählungen (1923; alternate title: Les Contes d’Hoffmann); Die schöne Müllerin (1920), based on Franz Schubert’s roman-tic song cycle for piano and voice; and a filmic version of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe (1920), a cycle of sixteen romantic Kunstlieder (art songs) based on poems from Heinrich Heine’s Buch der Lieder. Films about Vienna’s musical scene were also popular at the time: Der Siegeszug der Wiener Operette (The Triumphant Progress of Viennese Operetta, 1923), Carl Michael Ziehrers Märchen aus Alt-Wien (Carl Michael Ziehrer’s Fairy Tales from Old Vienna,


1923), and Wien, die Stadt der Lieder (Vienna, the City of Songs, 1923). The most successful (and costly) production in the musical silent-film genre in the 1920s was a film version of Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier (1925), directed by Robert Wiene and produced by Pan-Film. The opera’s librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, also wrote the screenplay for the produc-tion. This film in particular paved the way for a wave of very profitable filmic adaptations of Viennese operas and operettas. Increasingly popular in the 1930s and beyond, both in Austria and abroad (most notably in Germany), this genre flourished after talkies made silent films all but obsolete.49

Films specifically targeting a Jewish audience comprised another leading Viennese genre in the early 1920s. In his history of Yiddish film, J. Hoberman has written that “the first European movies made by Jews for Jews, from a distinctly Jewish perspective, were produced in postwar Vienna — where political tensions were such that Jews were compelled to shift from passive stereotype to active self-representation.”50 Many of these films bore a resem-blance to the more general historical narratives so popular at the time. Cine-matic adaptations of biblical and European tales about Jewish history and culture were often aimed at a broad, secular Judeo-Christian audience. Other historical films with explicitly Zionist messages were primarily intended for Jewish moviegoers. Otto Kreisler’s Theodor Herzl, der Bannerträger des jüdischen Volkes (Theodor Herzl, Standard-Bearer of the Jewish People, 1921) combined biographical details from Herzl’s life with episodes from Jewish history. Yiddish-language films (or films including Yiddish musical and di-alogic components) were also part of the Viennese cinema scene and were intended both for Austrian audiences and for export to Eastern European and overseas markets. The driving force behind this category of film was the prominent American producer and director Sidney M. Goldin, who saw a large market for Yiddish film in Vienna and founded the relatively short-lived Jüdische Kunstfilm-Gesellschaft (Jewish Feature Film Society) there in 1921.51 Goldin directed several popular movies in the first half of the 1920s, in-cluding Ost und West (East and West, 1923) and Jiskor (Yiskor, 1924). The goal of several Jewish-themed films, among them Opfer des Hasses (Victims of Hatred, 1923), extended beyond mere entertainment value. Similar to mass-market “enlightenment” films, these movies addressed social concerns and frequently concluded with appeals for donations to relief organizations such as the Jüdisches Hilfswerk.52 A final film belonging to this genre is H. K. Breslauer’s chilling Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City without Jews, 1924), based on Hugo Bettauer’s dystopian “novel of tomorrow,” which is the book’s subtitle. The literary and filmic narratives are remarkably similar in content, detailing a state-decreed, forced expulsion of Jews. Whereas Bettauer unambiguously situated the story line in Vienna, the screenplay opted pre-dictably for the more neutral city of Utopia and a happy ending.

Die Stadt ohne Juden remains memorable not only for its unsettling the-matic prescience but also for its stylistic handling. In the first half of the


1920s Austrian production companies turned out a number of movies that served, if not as outright templates, then at least as reference points for the German expressionist films for which that nation’s silent cinema is primarily remembered.53 The Austrian films Die Schlange der Leidenschaft (The Snake of Passion, 1918, directed by Louise Kolm and Jakob Fleck), Paul Czinner’s Inferno (1920), and Friedrich Fehér’s Haus des Dr. Gaudeamus (House of Dr. Gaudeamus, 1921) are three early examples of this fantastical thematic tendency. The high point of the genre was reached with Robert Wiene’s Or-lac’s Hände (Orlac’s Hands, 1925). Wiene was most famous for his German production Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (D 1919/20) and created his later masterwork in Vienna for Pan-Film. The inimitable Conrad Veidt plays Orlac, a piano virtuoso crippled in a train accident. A botched transplant leaves Orlac with the hands of a murderer. Wiene uses expressionistic cinematic tech-niques to show Orlac’s struggle to control his increasingly terrifying physical and psychological urges. Nevertheless, despite the worldwide success of Ger-man expressionist films, Austrian productions failed to achieve a similar lasting international noteworthiness.

At the height of the Austrian film industry’s inflationary boom years in the early 1920s, the genre of the silent film epic became representative of the industry’s striving for recognition abroad.54 These films were termed “monu-mental” both because of their lengthy format and expense: they frequently spanned more than three hours, and the cast and crew often numbered sev-eral thousand, a situation made possible by the First Republic’s hyperin-flation and rampant unemployment.55 Modeled on American films such as D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Com-mandments (1923), as well as on Italian monumental cinema of the prewar era, films in this vein blended the grand style of the foreign biblical and historical epics with Viennese social dramas.56 As Robert von Dassanowsky has noted, the goal was “to create an entirely new Austrian national cinema style. It was as if the lost empire and its role as a leading world power would now be continued in the expanse and grandeur of the republic’s cinematic illusions.”57 The force behind Austrian monumental silent film was Sascha Kolowrat, whose Vienna-based Sascha-Film was the most successful Austrian production firm after the war. Aiming for easy exportability, Kolowrat first selected universal themes and then made the films

less specifically “Austrian.” This was done by adding rather than sub-tracting. To the mélange of the multicultural Viennese film essence, he contributed two elements: Hollywood epic sensibility and a fresh crea-tivity from Budapest. Although the vision was still Austrian given its influences from “baroque theater, the representation of the Habsburgs, literary-Romantic scripts, art nouveau and expressionist stage writing, a mixture that could only have come about in Vienna,” it was now trans-formed and universalized.58


In 1919 Kolowrat signed directors Mihály Kertész and Sàndor (Alexander) Korda, who would later direct the three most famous Austrian monumental films. Korda directed Samson und Delila (1922) for Vita-Film, and Kertész directed Sodom und Gomorrha (1922) and Die Sklavenkönigin (The Slave Queen, 1923–24), both for Sascha-Film.59 Die Sklavenkönigin and Sascha-Film’s later Die Rache des Pharaos (The Pharaoh’s Revenge, 1925) were nourished by the Egyptomania that followed the discovery of King Tutan-khamen’s tomb in 1922.60 As grand as these productions were, the mid-decade economic crisis that nearly crippled the Austrian film industry made the prohibitive costs of such large-scale productions impossible to sustain over the long term.

Monumental films led audiences on journeys back in time and space, while expressionist films sent them to futuristic, often gruesome fantasy worlds. However, as this survey has shown, many of the most popular films in the 1920s were cinematic representations of Vienna that were by turns critical of the First Republic’s socioeconomic woes and idealizing nostalgic narratives couched in the city’s music and history. In a thematic sense, then, Austrian silent film served as Polgar’s unifying bond for a diverse Viennese post-imperial citizenry: cinema screens flickered with fare for everyone, re-gardless of language, class, or ethnicity. At the same time, film remained a divisive political issue for the ruling Social Democrats in the interwar Aus-trian capital, and the film industry’s soaring and dwindling fortunes were an indicator of the economic state of the nation. Cinema, the most modern me-dium of the time, thus serves as a two-way mirror, permitting us to glimpse the underlying interwar economic, political, and sociocultural forces that shaped the industry, the nation, and the city of Vienna.

Notes

1 Alfred Polgar, “Geistiges Leben in Wien,” Prager Tagblatt 45, no. 268 (14 Novem-ber 1920): 4; reprinted in Alfred Polgar, Taschenspiegel, ed. Ulrich Weinzierl (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1979), 96–99; here 96. References to this essay will henceforth be acknowledged parenthetically in the text. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 2 Later critics have picked up on Polgar’s notion of “two Viennas.” Edward Timms, for example, has spoken of dual Habsburg Viennas, which “existed side by side, at times in open confrontation.” Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1986), 15. 3 Fritz Rosenfeld, “Sozialdemokratische Kinopolitik,” Der Kampf: Sozialdemokratische Monatsschrift 22, no. 4 (April 1929): 192–97; here 193. 4 See Anton Kaes, ed., Kino-Debatte: Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film, 1909–1929 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978). 5 Timms, Karl Kraus, 4. I am grateful to Deborah Holmes for drawing my attention to this point.


6 Robert Gaupp, “Der Kinematograph vom medizinischen und psychologischen Stand-punkt” [1912], in Medientheorie 1888–1933, ed. Albert Kümmel and Petra Löffler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 100–114; here 102. Béla Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films (1924; reprint, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 10; italics in original. 7 Siegfried Mattl, “Kulturpolitik,” in Handbuch des politischen Systems Österreichs: Erste Republik, 1918–1933, ed. Emmerich Tálos et al. (Vienna: Manz, 1995), 618–31; here 630. 8 I have borrowed this expression from Franz Antel and Christian F. Winkler, Hollywood an der Donau: Geschichte der Wien-Film in Sievering (Vienna: Verlag der Öster-reichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1991). 9 Following the classification proposed by Anton Taller’s comprehensive filmography, I designate as “Austrian” films created by production companies within the borders of the contemporary Austrian state, although numerous films designated as “Austrian” at the time of their release were actually produced in the former crown lands. See Anton Taller et al., “Österreichische Filmografie, 1906–1944,” in Das tägliche Brennen: Eine Geschichte des österreichischen Films von den Anfängen bis 1945, ed. Elisabeth Büttner and Christian Dewald (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 2002), 412–67. 10 Beginning in the 1960s, Walter Fritz was the first scholar to devote attention to Austrian film as an autonomous cinematic tradition. It is only in the past decade-plus, however, that a discrete subcategory of Austrian film studies has emerged in its own right. This development is largely a testament to the work of an active community of film scholars centered around the Filmarchiv Austria in Vienna. 11 See Daniela Sannwald, “Metropolis: Die Wien-Berlin-Achse im deutschen Film der 10er und 20er Jahre,” in Elektrische Schatten: Beiträge zur österreichischen Stummfilm-geschichte, ed. Francesco Bono, Paolo Caneppele, and Günter Krenn (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 1999), 139–48; and Daniela Sannwald, “Bilder der Großstadt: Wien und Berlin im Kino der zwanziger und frühen dreißiger Jahre,” in Wien — Ber-lin, ed. Bernhard Fetz and Hermann Schlösser (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2001), 117–34. 12 Neue Filmwoche 38 (1919): 1, quoted in Martina Feike, “Filmpublizistik in der ersten österreichischen Republik: Eine Untersuchung der österreichischen Filmzeitschriften der Stummfilmzeit von 1918 bis 1928” (PhD diss., Univ. of Vienna, 1985), 7. 13 When analyzing the economic underpinnings of the film industry, it is important to keep in mind a commonly overlooked disctinction in the fates of the film industry’s discrete branches: distribution companies struggled with economic pressures that sometimes had diametrically opposite effects on production firms, and vice versa. 14 Armin Loacker, “Die österreichische Filmwirtschaft von den Anfängen bis zur Einführung des Tonfilms,” Maske und Kothurn: Internationale Beiträge zur Theater-wissenschaft 39, no. 4 (1998): 75–123; here 97. 15 Francesco Bono, “Bemerkungen zur österreichischen Filmwirtschaft und Produktion zur Zeit des Stummfilms,” in Elektrische Schatten: Beiträge zur österreichischen Stumm-filmgeschichte, ed. Francesco Bono, Paolo Caneppele, and Günter Krenn (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 1999), 47–75; here 65. See also Loacker, “Die österreichische Filmwirtschaft,” 92. 16 Bono, “Bemerkungen zur österreichischen Filmwirtschaft,” 71.


17 Loacker, “Die österreichische Filmwirtschaft,” 91; Walter Fritz, Die österreichischen Spielfilme der Stummfilmzeit, 1907–1930 (Vienna: Österreichische Gesellschaft für Filmwissenschaft, 1967), 4. 18 Armin Loacker, “Werkstätten der Seh(n)sucht: Produktionsgeschichte und Produk-tionsstrukturen des monumentalen Antikfilms in Österreich,” in Imaginierte Antike: Österreichische Monumental-Stummfilme; Historienbilder und Geschichtskonstruktionen in Sodom und Gomorrha, Samson und Delila, Die Sklavenkönigin und Salammbô, ed. Armin Loacker and Ines Steiner (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2002), 21–62; here 22. 19 Loacker, “Die österreichische Filmwirtschaft,” 92. 20 Bono, “Bemerkungen zur österreichischen Filmwirtschaft,” 66. 21 Robert von Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005), 29; Walter Fritz, Kino in Österreich, 1896–1930: Der Stummfilm (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1981), 97. 22 Bono, “Bemerkungen zur österreichischen Filmwirtschaft,” 73. 23 Bono, “Bemerkungen zur österreichischen Filmwirtschaft,” 70. 24 Bono, “Bemerkungen zur österreichischen Filmwirtschaft,” 73. 25 Bono, “Bemerkungen zur österreichischen Filmwirtschaft,” 71. 26 Loacker, “Werkstätten der Seh(n)sucht,” 26; Bono, “Bemerkungen zur öster-reichischen Filmwirtschaft,” 70; Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema, 29. 27 Der Filmbote 27 (1924): 3; quoted in Loacker, “Werkstätten der Seh(n)sucht,” 26. 28 For example, Fritz Lang, Mihály Kertész (later known as Michael Curtiz of Casablanca fame), Billy Wilder, and G. W. Pabst all started their careers in Vienna. 29 Bono estimates that by the mid-1920s approximately two thousand foreign titles were imported annually into Austria; of those, two-thirds were American productions. “Bemerkungen zur österreichischen Filmwirtschaft,” 74. 30 Loacker, “Werkstätten der Seh(n)sucht,” 27; Bono, “Bemerkungen zur öster-reichischen Filmwirtschaft,” 74. 31 See Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York: Oxford UP, 1991). 32 During 2007’s Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival) the Filmarchiv Austria presented an important retrospective of socialist films in the First Republic entitled “Proletarisches Kino.” An edited volume accompanied the film series. See Christian Dewald, ed., Arbeiterkino: Linke Filmkultur der Ersten Republik (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2007). 33 A sampling of such articles — in this case all drawn from the Arbeiter-Zeitung — includes: Paul Wengraf, “Allerweltsverdummungstrust Kino,” Arbeiter-Zeitung 31, no. 294 (26 October 1919): 2–3; Anonymous, “Vorstadtkino,” Arbeiter-Zeitung 32, no. 18 (18 January 1920): 6; David Josef Bach, “Das Kino des Proletariats,” Arbeiter-Zeitung 34, no. 262 (1 October 1922): 6–7; and Ernst Weizmann, “Der Film und die Arbeitschaft,” Arbeiter-Zeitung 36, no. 120 (1 May 1924): 18. According to Gruber, the problem with such articles was that they “suffered from the ambiguity of recog-nizing the importance of film in general while denouncing films specifically as worthless trash. At the time, film commentaries were written by theater critics and feature writers, who judged films with the yardstick of high culture” Red Vienna, 130.


34 Wengraf, “Allerweltsverdummungstrust Kino,” 2; Rosenfeld, “Sozialdemokratische Kinopolitik,” 192. 35 Gruber, Red Vienna, 130. See also Rosenfeld, “Sozialdemokratische Kinopolitik.” 36 For the recent — and thus far only — publication devoted to Rosenfeld, see Brigitte Mayr and Michael Omasta, eds., Fritz Rosenfeld, Filmkritiker (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2007). 37 Rosenfeld, “Sozialdemokratische Kinopolitik,” 197. 38 Fritz Rosenfeld, “Die Freiheit des Films,” Arbeiter-Zeitung 39, no. 107 (18 April 1926): 23. 39 Multiple mid-decade attempts are cited in Theodor Venus: “‘Hinein in die Kinos!’ Sozialdemokratische Kino- und Filmpolitik von 1918–1934,” Medien-Journal 8, no. 2 (1984): 14–24; here 23. 40 Venus, “Hinein in die Kinos!,” 18; Elisabeth Büttner and Christian Dewald, Das tägliche Brennen: Eine Geschichte des österreichischen Films von den Anfängen bis 1945 (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 2002), 300. 41 See Hans Riemer, “Der Schmalfilm im Dienste der Arbeiterbildung,” Bildungsarbeit. Blätter für Sozialistisches Bildungswesen 17, no. 10 (October 1930): 111–14; here 112; Franz Grafl, “‘Hinein in die Kinos!’: Ein Beitrag zur Aufarbeitung der österreichischen Arbeiterfilmbewegung, 1918–1934,” Aufbruch und Untergang: Österreichische Kultur zwischen 1918 und 1938, ed. Franz Kadrnoska (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1981), 69–86; here 79. 42 Werner Michael Schwarz, Kino und Kinos in Wien: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte bis 1934 (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1992), 53; Gruber, Red Vienna, 133. 43 Schwarz, Kino und Kinos in Wien, 52. 44 Gruber, Red Vienna, 134. 45 Rosenfeld, “Sozialdemokratische Kinopolitik,” 195. 46 Gruber, Red Vienna, 128. 47 Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema, 31. 48 The Filmarchiv Austria has recently restored an eight-minute fragment of the film on a DVD that accompanies Günter Krenn, ed., Mozart im Kino: Betrachtungen zur kine-matographischen Karriere des Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, Edition Film + Text, no. 8 (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2005). 49 For more detailed studies of Viennese operetta and film, see Katja Uhlenbrok, ed., MusikSpektakelFilm: Musiktheater und Tanzkultur im deutschen Film, 1922–1937 (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1998), in particular the essays by Richard Traubner (“Operette als Stoff und Anregung: Entwicklungen im Musikfilm, 1907–1937,” 9–28) and Francesco Bono (“Glücklich ist, wer vergisst . . . Operette und Film: Analyse einer Beziehung,” 29–45). 50 J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1995), 62; see esp. chap. 5, “Out of Galicia”: 59–71. Frank Stern has even gone so far as to call Vienna “die Wiege des jüdischen Films” (the cradle of Jewish film). “Moses in Wien und Freud in Sodom: Jüdisch-Christliche Visualisierungen im Wiener Film,” Transversal. Zeitschrift für jüdische Studien 5, no. 1 (2004): 18–32; here 18.


51 Büttner and Dewald, Das tägliche Brennen, 127. 52 Büttner and Dewald, Das tägliche Brennen, 126–27. 53 This genre has alternately been called “proto-expressionism,” “semi-expressionism,” “Vorexpressionismus,” and “Caligarismus.” See Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema, 23, 31; Bono, “Bemerkungen zur österreichischen Filmwirtschaft,” 61, 63; Walter Fritz, Geschichte des österreichischen Films (Vienna: Bergland, 1969), 64–68; Walter Fritz, Im Kino erlebe ich die Welt: 100 Jahre Kino und Film in Österreich (Vienna: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, 1997), 80, 106; and Thomas Ballhausen and Günter Krenn, “Die unheimliche Leinwand: Zwei österreichische Beispiele für filmischen Expres-sionismus,” in: Medienimpulse 57 (September 2006): 35–39. 54 See Armin Loacker and Ines Steiner, eds., Imaginierte Antike: Österreichische Monumental-Stummfilme; Historienbilder und Geschichtskonstruktionen in Sodom und Gomorrha, Samson und Delila, Die Sklavenkönigin und Salammbô (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2002). 55 Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema, 27. 56 Bono, “Bemerkungen zur österreichischen Filmwirtschaft,” 68; Dassanowsky, Aus-trian Cinema, 26. 57 Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema, 26. 58 Dassanowsky, Austrian Cinema, 26. Dassanowsky is here quoting (and translating) Gyönghyi Balogh, “Die Anfänge zweier internationaler Filmkarrieren: Mihály Kertész und Sàndor Korda,” in Elektrische Schatten: Beiträge zur österreichischen Stumm-filmgeschichte, ed. Francesco Bono, Paolo Caneppele, and Günter Krenn (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 1999), 77–100; here 83. 59 The similarities in setting and chronological proximity of the release dates of these productions led Armin Loacker to call 1922 “the year in which Vienna became ‘the Near East.’” “Werkstätten der Seh(n)sucht,” 59. 60 For an analysis of this phenomenon, see Michael North, Reading 1922 (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), esp. 19–30. For a more detailed survey of Egyptomania in Aus-trian film see Ines Steiner, “Das ‘Alte Ägypten’ als vertrautes Fremdbild der Moderne in Die Sklavenkönigin,” in Imaginierte Antike, ed. Loacker and Steiner, 243–347.

7: Between Tradition and a Longing for the Modern: Theater in Interwar Vienna

Birgit Peter

HE INTERWAR PERIOD REMAINS one of the most neglected in the history of Austrian theater. For many years the only general summary available

was that found in the fourth volume of Nagl, Zeidler, and Castle’s Deutsch-Österreichische Literaturgeschichte (History of German-Austrian Literature), which appeared in 1937.1 Since the 1970s numerous monographs have been written on disparate aspects of the period, such as the revue and cabaret, or on individual protagonists of the theater scene. However, the most compre-hensive historical treatment to date remains Heidemarie Brückl-Zehetner’s 1988 doctoral dissertation “Theater in der Krise” (Theater in Crisis),2 in which she examines the financial difficulties of the interwar period as a com-mon denominator that affected a broad spectrum of theaters and entertain-ment venues. Economic crisis affected the entire theater and cultural scene, with all attempts to come to grips with it doomed to failure: increased ca-pacity building failed to bring any real relief, as did attempts to use existing personnel more efficiently.3

Despite the dearth of general studies on the interwar period, a relatively large number of works on cultural production under Austrofascism illumi-nate Viennese theater’s historical context in the period from 1934 to 1938. Austro-Marxist cultural politics and events are also relatively well documen-ted, as are the Viennese theater projects that created niches for themselves after 1934 beyond financial crisis and political repression, such as the pro-ductive cabaret scene and the “Theater für 49” (Theater for 49), small venues that seated fewer than fifty, thus avoiding the financial regulations and censorship affecting larger theaters.

Jewish and Yiddish theater in interwar Vienna have also been very well documented, although they were underrepresented in the secondary litera-ture for many years. Brigitte Dalinger’s 1998 study Verloschene Sterne (Ex-tinguished Stars) represented the first comprehensive historical survey.4 As Dalinger herself points out, as is so often the case with cultural production in the interwar period, research tends to focus on Jewish and Yiddish theater in Berlin as opposed to Vienna. The lack of attention paid to Jewish and Yid-dish theater is therefore to be seen against the background of the more general lack of research on the Austrian capital in the period rather than as a

T

162 ♦ BIRGIT PETER

specific omission. Jewish theater in both Yiddish and German was an integral part of the Viennese theater scene from the turn of the century to 1938. It celebrated its first successes in Vienna in the late nineteenth century and had developed into a varied and established phenomenon by the interwar period. Melodramas, revues, cabaret, and Jewish dramas were performed at various venues. Famous troupes, such as the “Wilnaer Truppe,” were invited to give guest performances. This rich and varied scene clearly reveals the tensions in Viennese theater between tradition and modernity, crystallizing around is-sues such as assimilation and the significance of the Eastern Jewish tradition for the construction of Jewish identity. While Jewish theater in Vienna con-tinued to be influenced by the Eastern European Yiddish tradition out of which it had grown, it also became increasingly political as a result of anti-semitism and Zionism.5 Its importance is revealed not only by the enthusi-astic reception of guest performers such as the “Wilnaer Truppe”6 but also by its interaction with other, more obviously mainstream aspects of Viennese theater as a whole, such as the translations of Schnitzler’s plays into Yiddish.7

The gap in research on interwar Viennese theater is most evident with respect to the immediate postwar period and the 1920s, and thematically with reference to the study of the many theater venues, their programs, and protagonists. To date, no comprehensive account of these exists, nor is there a reference work on the subject. Although there are monographs on indi-vidual theaters and venues, there are no surveys of this aspect of Vienna’s theatrical culture. Not only do huge quantities of archive material still re-main to be analyzed but there are also many unanswered questions concern-ing the sources already examined, such as theater magazines, playbills, liter-ary estates, memoirs, and oral histories. My research on Viennese theater in the interwar period has shown that Vienna’s theater and entertainment in-dustries displayed a wide range of common symptoms during this period. In addition to the effects of the economic crisis, the interwar years were further characterized by a continual conflict between the longing for a Viennese version of modernism, on the one hand, and the insistence on Viennese tra-dition, on the other, as well as a widespread if ill-defined search for “Aus-trianness.” This search for an Austrian identity in theater was not simply a matter of clearly competing ideological positions, although it may seem so at first glance. Not only were conservative aspects to be found in the longing for modernism but all of the above symptoms transcended political boun-daries. The continual invocation of “Wiener Theaterbegeisterung” (Vienna’s enthusiasm for theater) and the topos of Vienna as a “Theaterstadt” (city of theater) were not exclusive to the interwar period but rather ongoing Vien-nese preoccupations.8

To reconstruct the atmosphere of Vienna’s theater scene in the period between the wars I will refer to three popular arts periodicals of the time: Die Bühne (The Stage), which covered theater, literature, film, fashion, art, society, and sports;9 Der Merker, which covered theatrical and musical events;10

BETWEEN TRADITION AND A LONGING FOR THE MODERN ♦ 163

and the short-lived yet influential Blätter des Burgtheaters (Burgtheater Ga-zette), which was published from June 1919 until September 1920. The reviews and reports of such publications are often the only surviving record of many aspects of theater life. Combined with the fundamentally conser-vative yet remarkably detailed analysis provided by Nagl, Zeidler, and Castle’s Deutsch-Österreichische Literaturgeschichte, these sources reveal how tradition interacted with modern elements to produce some rather surprising theatri-cal constellations unique to Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s.

Vienna’s Enthusiasm for Theater and Vienna as “Theaterstadt”

The idea of Vienna as a city of theater seemed at the very least to be con-firmed during the interwar period by the sheer number of venues registered: theater was being performed at 1,120 locations in the city.11 The impression of theater’s popularity given by these numbers alone is further reinforced by the articles published in Die Bühne. The journal reflected the theater’s role in reconstructing the city’s self-image after the First World War, envisioning it as a “Theaterstadt” in which theatricality spilled over into everyday life. To choose just one example, an article about a Viennese porcelain firm reports how keepsakes of stage celebrities are manufactured as knickknacks:

Man ist jetzt nicht mehr auf Photos und Ansichtskarten angewiesen, man kann seine Lieblinge dank der Wiener Porzellanmanufaktur in die Vitrine stellen, auf einen Wandschrank oder auf ein Tischchen. Sie haben plastische Gestalt angenommen, sind reizend koloriert und werden viel-leicht einmal in ein paar Jahrtausenden ausgegraben, kulturgeschicht-lichen Aufschluß über Wien von 1930 geben, über seine Theaterkunst zumindest.12

[We are no longer reliant on photos and postcards. Thanks to Viennese porcelain manufacturing, we can now put our favorites in display cabi-nets, on shelves, or on side tables. They have taken on plastic form, are charmingly colored, and will perhaps be unearthed again in a few mil-lennia to shed light on Vienna in 1930 — or at least on its theater art.]

In 1922 the theater exhibition Die Komödie (Comedy) opened at the Hof-burg. It consisted of theater mementos from the collection of Hugo Thimig, an actor and director at the Burgtheater. These were later to form the basis for the theater collection of the Austrian National Library, which, like the periodical Die Bühne, was founded in 1924. That year also saw the first Musik- und Theaterfest der Stadt Wien (Vienna Music and Theater Festival), organized by the Vienna City Council, which included theater exhibitions as well. The success of these events was resounding and the interest of the population was such that countless theater bills and programs were sub-sequently donated to the Vienna City Library.13


In July 1930 the “Weltparlament der Schauspieler” (World Parliament of Actors) was convened in the Hofburg, an event that was duly covered by Die Bühne. Strategies were discussed for dealing with the economic and artistic crisis caused by the advent of the talkies. In keeping with the states-manlike surroundings — the meeting was held in the ceremonial hall of the Hofburg — political figures were also present.14 Topics for discussion in-cluded the changing status of acting as a profession in light of the new re-quirements posed by film and radio, new contractual arrangements and trade union protection, as well as the question of how the “Wesen des Theaters” (essence of theater) would be affected by “mechanisierter Kunstbetrieb” (mechanized art industry). As Die Bühne reported:

Der Schauspielerkongreß sucht nach Möglichkeiten, nach neuen Fingerzeigen, die dem alten Theater wieder zur bezaubernden Wirklich-keit seines Scheins helfen. “Das Theater ergibt sich vorübergehend, aber es stirbt nicht.”15

[The actors’ congress is looking for opportunities, for new pointers, to help old theater regain the enchanting reality of its illusion. “The theater has temporarily surrendered, but it is not dead.”]

Following the crises of the 1920s and the search for a new orientation, in the early 1930s Die Bühne finally presented Vienna once again as a “Theater-stadt,” in a photo-op series on the city’s newly founded acting school, the Max Reinhardt Seminar, entitled “Gesprächsthema” (a topic on everyone’s lips) and “Kulturelle Angelegenheit” (cultural affair),16 as well as in a report on summer guest performances by Elisabeth Bergner.17

Die Bühne’s representation of Vienna as a “Theaterstadt” can, however, also be understood as wishful thinking during the difficult interwar period. The theater situation at this time cannot be discussed without constant reference to the ongoing crisis Vienna faced at the time. For example, from 1918 to 1920 performance venues were confronted with temporary bans decreed by the Vienna City Council while still having to pay their employees’ wages.18 This affected all venues alike, even Vienna’s illustrious Burgtheater. In October 1918 the Burgtheater had to be closed for ten days due to the flu epidemic. It also remained closed for most of December due to coal shortages, was only open sixteen days in January 1919, and half of its per-formances had to be cancelled in February and March.19 Nevertheless, as Brückl-Zehetner states, the theater crisis of the interwar years was one of infrastructure, not of declining audiences. Neither influenza nor lack of heating could deter the Viennese from attending theater performances of all kinds.20


Vienna’s Burgtheater and the Austrian Myth The Burgtheater, which had been the leading German-language theater of the Habsburg Empire, was the most obvious focal point of Vienna’s image as a “Theaterstadt” and the search for a new Austrian identity following the First World War. Its repertoire during the interwar period was mostly con-servative in tone and took a backward-looking, historical approach to the idea of “Austrianness,” which mythologized rather than analyzing.21 Hermann Bahr, who had briefly been director of the Burgtheater during the First World War, was extremely aware of its importance as far as mythmaking was con-cerned. As he wrote during the interwar period, it seemed to him a natural part of the theater’s function:

Mythos war das Burgtheater von Anfang an, mythisch zu wirken ist sein Sinn. [. . .] Mythos ist sozusagen ein Zukunftsraum der Vergangenheit. [. . .] Das Burgtheater entstand als tröstende Mahnung an die mythische Kraft, die sich in unserer Geschichte stets von neuem bewährt hat. Der österreichische Mythos spricht aus der beliebten Versicherung des Volks-sängers, daß der Wiener nicht untergeht. Alle wahrhaft österreichische Kunst ist im Grunde eine Variation davon. Diesen Mythos immer von neuem durch Zeichen höchster Art zu beglaubigen und zu bekräftigen, ist der alte sich immer von neuem verjüngende Sinn des Burgtheaters und je reiner, je treuer die Direktion ihn erfüllt, desto würdiger zeigt sie sich ihrer hohen Sendung, desto würdiger ihrer erlauchten Ahnen, desto würdiger der hellen Zukunft, die wir ihr zuversichtlich erhoffen.22

[From the very beginning the Burgtheater was myth; having a mythical effect is its whole meaning. [. . .] Myth is, as it were, a future perspective of the past. [. . .] The Burgtheater was created as a comforting reminder of the mythical power that has proved itself over and over again in our history. The Austrian myth speaks through the well-loved reassurance of the folk singer that the Viennese will never perish. All truly Austrian art is basically a variation on this theme. The old meaning of the Burgtheater, which is constantly renewed, is that of bearing witness to and strengthen-ing this myth over and over again. The more purely and more faithfully the directors fulfill this task, the more worthy they show themselves of their exalted mission, the more worthy they are of their illustrious ances-tors, and the more worthy of the bright future we confidently wish for them.]

Despite the weight of tradition and myth shouldered by the Burg-theater, immediately after the First World War, it also briefly hosted an attempt at modernist innovation under the direction of Albert Heine. With the publication of the Blätter des Burgtheaters,23 Albert Heine presented issues of contemporary drama to a wider readership. As the Deutsch-Österreichische Literaturgeschichte stated, it published “recht bemerkenswerten Beiträge, die in ihrer Gesamtheit ein buntfacettiertes, repräsentatives Bild der jüngsten


Literaturbewegung in Österreich vermitteln” (quite remarkable articles that collectively offer a colorful, multifaceted, representative picture of the most recent literary movement in Austria).24 The authors of the Blätter des Burg-theaters — including Hermann Bahr, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, Franz Werfel, Gina Kaus, Franz Blei, Josef Nadler, and Joseph Gregor — pro-vided an insight into how the intellectuals of the Austrian First Republic saw the theater and drama, covering a wide spectrum of topics that ranged from cultural conservatism (e.g., Nadler and Gregor) to the search for an Austrian modernism (as developed by Robert Musil).

Heine’s attempt to make the Burgtheater into a site of modernist dis-course was not to everyone’s taste. The tenor of theater reporting in Der Merker on these developments in 1919 was generally negative. The pervad-ing mood clearly emerges from the following example, a commentary on the premiere of Georg Kaiser’s Sorina — one of the few attempts to experiment with the staging of expressionist drama at the Burgtheater:

Das Publikum des Burgtheaters ließ die Sorina schmählich durchfallen. Dieses Publikum des Premierenabends, aller Premierenabende jetzt im Burgtheater, es verdient nicht minder in hellster Beleuchtung gerückt zu werden. [. . .] Muß man von einem Kunstbeurteiler vor allem Würde und Respekt verlangen — so stellen wir in aller Form fest, dass der Würdelo-sigkeit und Respektlosigkeit der heutigen Parkettjury (inklusive Parterre, Logen und Galerien) nur noch ihre Urteilslosigkeit gleichkommt. E i n e n Grundsatz nur haben diese Grundsatzlosen, e i n e n Kompaß hat diese blitzdumme Anmaßung; Arthur Schnitzler sprach ihn aus: s i c h m i t a l l e n z u v e r h a l t e n, d i e K a r r i e r e g e m a c h t h a b e n.25

[Sorina was a miserable failure with the Burgtheater audience. This premiere audience, the audiences of all premieres now in the Burgtheater, should be brought out into the spotlight as much as the performances themselves. [. . .] If it is true that we must demand dignity and respect above all from those who judge art, then let us state here with all due form that the indignity and respectlessness of today’s stalls’ jury (includ-ing the parterre, boxes, and galleries) is equal only to their lack of judgment. These unprincipled people have only one principle; only one compass guides their stunningly stupid arrogance. Arthur Schnitzler ar-ticulated it: to keep in with all those who have made a career for themselves.]

This gloomy assessment came from the pen of Oswald Brüll, whose Burg-theater pamphlet “Letztes Burgtheater: Requiem für das Österreichertum” (The End of the Burgtheater: Requiem for the Austrian Way of Being) ap-peared in 1920.26 The aggressive tone of this publication underscores Brüll’s despair at the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire and the changes this effected in the Viennese and Austrian theater world. He and his successors projected onto the Burgtheater fantasies of “Österreichertum,” whose “künst-


lerisches Edelgehäuse” (noble artistic casing)27 it represented, rather than seeing it as a performance venue for international contemporary theater art.28

Moments of Modernism and Viennese Traditions As a review of the 1919 theater season recorded by Der Merker shows, other venues in Vienna were also experimenting with modernism in the period immediately following the First World War: the Volksbühne29 was showing Der Mandarin, by Paul Franck, and the Neue Wiener Bühne was performing the “Tendenzstück” (politically committed play) Mutterschaft (Motherhood), by Eugene Brieux. The latter, according to Merker critic Oskar Maurus Fontana, represented a genre that fought against the old-fashioned, obsolete elements in theater, “der echte Aufschrei eines sozialen Temperaments, dem die Schaubühne zur Kanzel wird” (the true protest of a social temperament, which turns the stage into a pulpit).30 He then went on to describe the “ur-blöder” (totally brainless) comedy being performed at the Deutsches Volks-theater plus two operetta productions, one at the Wiener Bürgertheater and the other at the Wiener Komödienhaus. As this single article shows, the theater reporting of Der Merker encapsulates the fundamental paradox or, rather, characteristic of Vienna’s theater scene. Contemporary drama shared the stage with popular entertainment, the classics, and operetta.

It is worth noting that the political upheaval of the interwar years was not necessarily reflected in theater, where themes popular before the First World War were still present. The repertoire itself remained more or less unchanged: the classics, salon comedies, and, above all, operetta.31 In their literary survey Nagl, Zeidler, and Castle wrote that the Viennese operetta embodied Viennese taste, which they described as a combination of “leichter, pikanter, frivoler Unterhaltung mit einschmeichelnder Musik und sinnlich erregendem Tanz” (light, sparkling, frivolous entertainment with captivating music and sensuous dance).32 Merker reviewer Hugo Fleischer took quite a different position: “Der weitschweifige und unbedingt zutreffende Kom-mentar zu Nietzsches Gleichung über die Wiener Operette: Wienerei — Schweinerei, wird von der modernen Wiener Operette mit Behagen beiges-teuert” (Modern Viennese operetta is more than happy to provide a detailed and highly appropriate commentary on Nietzsche’s equation on Viennese operetta: Vienneseness — filthy mess). Fleischer goes on to bemoan the tastelessness of the librettists and composers and their audience, “die unglaubliche Anspruchslosigkeit eines von tausend Kriegsnöten zermürbten Publikums” (an audience worn down by all the thousand deprivations of war, unbelievably easy to please).33 Nevertheless, operetta remained one of the most popular theatrical genres during the interwar period. In a reflection of the historical dramas on offer at the Burgtheater, operetta also pondered Austrian identity and propagated national myths. For example, the operettas


Im weißen Rössl and Sissy, which idealized the Habsburg court, were two of the most successful productions of the 1933 season in Vienna.

Although it could not be assured the same success as operetta, modern theater, understood as socially critical drama, was nevertheless performed throughout Vienna under several committed theater directors. For example, Emil Geyer, director of the Neue Wiener Bühne, the Modernes Theater, the Kammerspiele, and the Theater in der Josefstadt, brought Hauptmann, Strindberg, and Ferdinand Bruckner into the repertoire. Rudolf Beer was particularly important in this respect. He was appointed director of the Rai-mundtheater in 1922 and in 1924 also assumed responsibility for the Deutsches Volkstheater. His programming reflected the most consistently modern repertoire in Vienna. The Raimundtheater in particular was con-sidered one of Vienna’s most interesting theaters, “mit seinem sorgfältig ausgewählten Spielplan und einem Aufgebot an besten deutschsprachigen Schauspielern” (with its carefully selected program and a selection of the best German-speaking actors available).34 Beer, whom Nagl, Zeidler, and Castle describe as “bewusst extrem-modern” (consciously extremely modern),35 opened the 1921 season with works by Hauptmann, Bahr, and Büchner, fol-lowed by Kaiser, Werfel, Csokor (who also worked for Beer as dramaturg), Dehmel, and Wolf. Not content with contemporary and socially critical dra-ma, Beer also brought innovative staging and scenic concepts to Vienna. In 1921, for example, he put on Shakespeare’s Richard III, directed by Leo-pold Jessner using the “Jessnersche Treppe” (a multi-tiered stage). And in 1925 Alexander Tairoff’s Moscow Chamber Theater performed at the Deutsches Volkstheater. Nagl, Zeidler, and Castle record as the greatest suc-cess of the 1927–28 theater season a performance of Ernst Toller’s political revue Hoppla, wir leben! (Hoppla! That’s Life!) by the theater troupe the “Exltruppe,” led by Ferdinand Exl, supplemented by members of the Beer ensemble.36 The combination is somewhat surprising since the “Exltruppe” was better known for conservative Austrian folk theater and its “Verherr-lichung des erdverbundenen, völkischen Bauerntums” (glorification of earthy, nationalistic ruralism).37 It is symptomatic of the paradoxes of the period that this mixture of modernism and tradition was well received. The following year the Austrian premiere of Brecht and Weill’s Dreigroschenoper (Three-penny Opera) at the Raimundtheater was equally successful, running to 105 performances. Nagl, Zeidler, and Castle have nothing positive to say about this event:

Das bürgerliche Publikum ist gutmütig genug, sich die freche Verhöhnung in der von Bert Brecht als kommunistisches Agitationsstück aufgezogenen Dreigroschenoper mit den platten, aber wirksamen Songs von Kurt Weill [. . .] hundertfünfmal gefallen zu lassen”

[The middle-class audience is good-natured enough to tolerate the impudent mockery of Bert Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, turned into a


piece of communist agitation with hackneyed yet effective songs by Kurt Weill [. . .] one hundred and five times.]38

Beer’s aim of “sich in die lebendige dramatische Bewegung der Ge-genwart zu stellen” (placing oneself in the living dramatic current of today)39 was supported by the Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle (Social Democratic Arts Office), which regularly bought a block of tickets to his productions. In 1919–21 this support was denied the workers’ theater Neue Wiener Volks-bühne, which played the Arbeiterheimen (workers’ recreational centers) in Favoriten and Ottakring. According to a report in Die Bühne, this was because “da draußen im Wiener Arbeiterbezirk wird ganz bürgerlich Theater gespielt” (out there in the Viennese working-class suburbs they are playing very middle-class theater).40 The middle-class audiences of the Raimund-theater and the Deutsches Volkstheater were confronted with socially critical drama and experimentation, whereas working-class audiences were served up the harmless fare of conventionally performed popular plays, biographical sketches, and operettas.41

By the early 1930s, however, it seems that the modernist impulses impinging on Vienna’s theater scene had gradually run out of steam. The differing ideological and political positions that can be discerned among the various theater practitioners and reviewers — clerical, conservative, mon-archist, German nationalist, liberal, Social Democratic — nevertheless seem to have shared a common interest and passion for Austrian culture, above all as represented in music and theater. More modern treatments of themes involving youth, sexuality, antisemitism, and capitalism, which earlier had made use of new aesthetic and innovative technical ideas, had more or less disappeared by the mid-1930s. As Die Bühne reported on the beginning of the theater season in 1930:

Die Wiener Theaterleute haben keine revolutionären Pläne, sie diktieren dem Theater keine frischen Gesetze, sie haben keine umstürzlerischen Gedanken, sie wollen die alte Form des Theaters mit neuen Farben lebendig machen. Das Theater muß das Tempo der Zeit annehmen, es muß abwechslungsreich zwischen Ernst und Heiterkeit dahingehen, es darf nicht zu sehr auf Geistigkeit gestellt sein, weil das Publikum das vor ihm sitzt, sich aus zu verschiedenartigen, ungleichen Elementen zusam-mensetzt, sein Aktionsradius muss alle Schichten erfassen, von der Galerie bis ins Parkett, von den kleinen Leuten bis zu den paar Vermögenden, von den Intellektuellen bis zu dem saftigen Genießer. Es soll den Spiegel der Zeit zeigen, wie ihn das Publikum haben will. Das Theater als ethische Erziehungsanstalt, seine Kunst lehrhaft vorgetragen, seine Auf-gaben museal gelöst, das sagt der österreichischen Laune, dem öster-reichischen Oberflächenspiel, der österreichischen Gefühlsleichtigkeit nicht zu. “Neue Sachlichkeit,” wie sie von Berlin her propagiert wurde, “politisch aktiviertes Theater,” konnte sich hier nirgends festsetzen. Und zu keiner Zeit. Der Expressionismus war kaum ein paar Wochen vor-


übergehend auf Besuch. Wir haben ein gewöhnliches, aber gesundes Theaterklima.42

[Vienna’s theater people have no revolutionary plans; they do not dictate fresh laws to the theater; they have no world-shaking ideas; they want to liven up the old form of theater with new colors. Theater has to adapt to the tempo of the times; it has to alternate between earnestness and fun; it cannot afford to be too intellectual because the audience it faces consists of too many different, unequal elements; its effective radius has to reach all levels, from the balcony to the stalls, from the man on the street to the handful of wealthy patrons, from the academic to the downright hedon-ist. It should show the reflection of the times that the audience wants to see. A theater that presents itself as ethical education and performs its art in a didactic manner, discharging its tasks like a museum, cannot agree with the Austrian temperament, the Austrian love of appearances, Aus-trian lightheartedness. “Neue Sachlichkeit” [“new objectivity”] as propa-gated from Berlin, “politically activated theater” was not able to establish itself here. And at no time. Expressionism paid us a fleeting visit that lasted for little more than a couple of weeks. We may have a theatrical climate that is nothing out of the ordinary, but at least it is healthy.]

Synthesis in the Prater There was, however, one place in Vienna where all the heterogeneous strands came together, namely, in the Prater, the city’s largest amusement park. The former imperial hunting ground by the Danube had been open to the public since 1766. It did not take long before a vast array of recreational activities established themselves there, from bars and cafés to shooting galleries, ca-rousels, circuses, vaudeville acts, and theatrical productions. The great exhi-bition center known as the Rotunde (built in 1873 for the world exhibition) was also the venue for all manner of events. Some regularly took place as part of a particular theme. “Venedig in Wien” (Venice in Vienna, 1895) was the first of these enormous spectacles. This custom was taken up again in the interwar period with, for example, “Ein Abend am Bosporus” (An Evening on the Bosporus).43 The significance of this meeting place can be gleaned from the fact that in 1926 approximately 50,000 people visited the Prater on any given weekday and up to 150,000 on weekends. A business such as the Prater vaudeville theater, which was owned by the Leicht family, was a cul-tural and social institution, a venue where performers appeared free of charge, regarding it as an honor to be invited to perform there. The Prater was the scene of large-scale social and political representations, such as the Blumen-korsi (flower parades) popular under the Habsburgs, which were also con-tinued in the interwar period. In 1931 the Social Democrats hosted the Second International Workers’ Olympics in the Prater, the climax of which was a mass spectacle in the stadium built especially for the occasion. The


Austrofascists used the Prater for fireworks displays, in the course of which illuminated portraits of political leaders such as Engelbert Dollfuss were pro-jected onto the night sky.

Die Bühne devoted regular articles to the Prater — even dedicating a whole issue to it in June 1931.44 Alongside extracts from Felix Salten’s 1912 book Wurstelprater (named after the section of the park where fairground rides and amusement arcades predominated), this special issue also included travel reports and contemporary reportage. All of these documents combine to convey the uniqueness of this Viennese park:

Wien hört irgendwo mit dem Prater auf. [. . .] Der Prater bietet Milieus für alle Gelegenheiten des wienerischen Menschen. [. . .] Der Prater ist irgendwie für das ganze Leben voll Sinn und Amüsement. Er ist aus dem Gedächtnis nicht wegzudenken. Sicher gibt es in Wien keinen Menschen, der noch nie im Prater war45

[The Prater is the final word on everything Viennese. [. . .] The Prater offers a setting for all the doings of the Viennese. [. . .] Somehow, the Prater offers meaning and amusement enough to last a lifetime. It cannot be banished from the memory. There is surely no one in Vienna who has never been to the Prater.]

The enthusiasm and affection reflected in these testimonials is reminiscent of the mythic significance given to the Burgtheater. Both are part of Vienna’s enthusiasm for the theater, which continued to be used in the interwar period by the press and others to construct and cement the city’s self-image.


Notes

1 Deutsch-Österreichische Literaturgeschichte unter Mitwirkung hervorragender Fach-genossen, ed. J. W. Nagl, J. Zeidler, and E. Castle (Vienna: C. Fromme, 1897–1937). 2 Heidemarie Brückl-Zehetner, “Theater in der Krise: Sozialgeschichtliche Untersu-chungen zum Wiener Theater der Ersten Republik” (PhD diss., Univ. of Vienna, 1988). The studies of W. E. Yates and Judith Beniston contain important theses and details for the history of Austrian theater in interwar Vienna. See W. E. Yates, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Theater (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992) and Austrian Studies 14: Culture and Politics in Red Vienna (2006). For a more recent study that concentrates on one particular theater, see Robert Pyrah, The Burgtheater and Austrian identity: Theater and Cultural Politics in Vienna, 1918–38 (London: Legenda, 2007). 3 See Johann Hüttner, “Die Staatstheater in den dreißiger Jahren: Kunst als Politik — Politik in der Kunst,” in Verspielte Zeit: Österreichisches Theater der dreißiger Jahre, ed. Hilde Haider-Pregler and Beate Reiterer (Vienna: Picus, 1997), 60–76. 4 Haider-Pregler and Reiterer, eds., Verspielte Zeit, 12.


5 Brigitte Dalinger, “Verloschene Sterne”: Geschichte des jüdischen Theaters in Wien (Vien-na: Picus, 1998), 11. 6 Dalinger, “Verloschene Sterne,” 141–56. 7 Dalinger, “Verloschene Sterne,” 181, 192–93. See also Arthur Schnitzler, Tagebuch, 1922, vol. 3 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1993), 13. 8 The topos of Vienna as a “Musikstadt” (city of music) developed in a similar fashion. See Martina Nussbaumer, “Die Konstruktion Wiens als ‘Musikstadt’: Skizzen einer Spurensuche in der Wienbibliothek,” in Das Gedächtnis der Stadt: 150 Jahre Wien-bibliothek im Rathaus, ed. Julia Danielczyk, Sylvia Mattl-Wurm, and Christian Mertens (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 2006), 14–24. 9 Die Bühne: Zeitung für Theater, Literatur, Film, Mode, Kunst, Gesellschaft und Sport, Vienna. The journal was published from 1924 (year 1) to 1938 (year 15). 10 Der Merker: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Musik und Theater, concentrated on Aus-tria’s music and theater world and was published in Vienna from 1909 to 1922. 11 Anna Helleis et al., Abschlussbericht des FWF Forschungsprojekts Österreichische Theater-topographie, 1918–1938 (Vienna: Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft der Universität Wien, 2001). 12 “Schauspieler in der Vitrine,” Die Bühne 8, vol. 289 (2 October 1930): 18–19; here 18. The article gives the following examples of figurines available for purchase: Leo Slezak; Helene and Hermann Thimig; the dancer Tilly Losch; and the Munich-based actor Gustav Waldau, N.B.: Some issues of Die Bühne were given an exact date, while others were not. 13 Julia Danielczyk, “Die Wiener Stadtbibliothek, 1905–1938,” in Das Gedächtnis der Stadt: 150 Jahre Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, 96–147; here 101. 14 These included Ministerialrat Alfred Eckmann from the Bundestheaterverwaltung (Federal Theater Administration) and Nationalrat Karl Pick. 15 “Weltparlament der Schauspieler,” Die Bühne 7, vol. 283 (1 July 1930): 14–15; here 15. 16 Max Reinhardt, “Über das Wesen des Schauspielers,” Die Bühne 8, vol. 307 (first July issue in 1931): 37–38, 60; here 37. 17 “Elisabeth Bergner am Kobenzl und auf der Bühne,” Die Bühne 8, vol. 307 (first July issue in 1931): 34–35; here 35. 18 A more detailed account can be found in Brückl-Zehetner, “Theater in der Krise,” 80–88. 19 Rudolph Lothar, Das Wiener Burgtheater: Ein Wahrzeichen österreichischer Kunst und Kultur (Vienna: Augartenverlag, 1934), 432. 20 Lothar, Das Wiener Burgtheater, 80. Other commentators also saw signs not only of financial crisis but also a dearth of a crisis of repertoire. In 1924 Robert Musil published an essay on the “demise” of the theater, in which he analyzed these various difficulties and their interaction. See Robert Musil, “Der ‘Untergang’ des Theaters,” Der Neue Merkur [Stuttgart], 7, vol. 10 (July 1924): 826–42. 21 Julia Danielczyk and Hermann Böhm show how historical drama was used to this end, citing such authors as Josef Wenter, Friedrich Schreyvogl, Georg Rendl, Hans


Sassmann (Die österreichische Trilogie), whose works were performed at the Burg-theater. See Julia Danielczyk und Hermann Böhm, “Verzicht aufs Burgtheater: Akzep-tanz und Verweigerung am Beispiel Felix Brauns, 1885–1973,” in Burgtheater: Mythos, Eros, Imago, ed. Beate Hochholdinger-Reiterer and Birgit Peter, in the periodical series Maske und Kothurn: Internationale Beiträge zur Theaterwissenschaft 50, no. 2 (2004): 71–86; here 82. 22 Hermann Bahr, “Direktion des Burgtheaters” in Hundertfünfzig Jahre Burgtheater, 1776–1926: Eine Festschrift herausgegeben von der Direktion des Burgtheaters (Vienna: Krystall, 1926), 22–26; here 26. 23 It appeared briefly from June 1919 to September 1920. 24 Nagl, Zeidler, and Castle, eds., Deutsch-Österreichische Literaturgeschichte, 2133. 25 Oswald Brüll, “Burgtheater,” Der Merker 10, no. 10 (15 May 1919): 377–79; here 379. 26 Oswald Brüll, Letztes Burgtheater: Requiem für das Österreichertum (Leipzig: Ilf, 1920). 27 Brüll, Letztes Burgtheater, 96. See Birgit Peter, “Mythos Burgtheaterdeutsch: Die Konstruktion einer Sprache, einer Nation, eines Nationaltheaters,” in Burgtheater: Mythos, Eros, Imago, ed. Hochholdinger-Reiterer and Peter, 15–27; here 22. 28 In 1917 Helene Richter presented a completely different argument in her book Unser Bugtheater. Not published until 1918, parts of this book may have seemed outdated since it discussed the significance of the Burgtheater under the Habsburg monarchy. Nevertheless, it still contained many ideas developed by intellectuals from various political and ideological camps during the First Republic. According to Richter, the Burgtheater was to represent Austria’s German-language culture in such a way as to preserve its special international, cosmopolitan nature; see Unser Burgtheater (Vienna: Almathea, 1918), 30–31. In contrast, Brüll’s arguments are based on the inherent superiority of the German-speaking Austrians. In the course of the First Republic, ideas espoused by Richter were gradually supplanted by those of the German nationalists in their various manifestations, from “großdeutsch” to Austrian Catholic. 29 For further details on the Wiener Freie Volksbühne see Franz Hadamowsky, Wien — Theatergeschichte: Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs, vol. 3: Geschichte der Stadt Wien (Vienna: Jugend und Volk, 1988), 777–87. 30 Oskar Maurus Fontana, “Neue Wiener Bühne,” Der Merker 10, no. 1 (1 January 1919): 22–23. 31 Brückl-Zehetner, “Theater in der Krise,” 81. The two most frequently performed plays were Johann Nestroy, a Singspiel by Alfred Maria Willner and Rudolf Oesterreicher (113 performances) and Eine Ballnacht by Leopold Jacobson and Robert Bodanzky (103). By comparison, Wedekind’s Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box), a hit among the “literary” plays, was only performed 19 times. According to Brückl-Zehetner, “Sozialkritische oder gar politische Auseinandersetzungen mit dem neuen Staat oder mit der alten Monarchie dürfen vom Theater nicht erwartet werden” (81) (Social critique of the new state or of the old monarchy, let alone political critique, was not to be expected of the theater). 32 Nagl, Zeidler, and Castle, Deutsch-Österreichische Literaturgeschichte, 2047. 33 Hugo Fleischer, “Bürgertheater,” Der Merker 10, no. 1 (1 January 1919): 24.


34 Edda Fuhrich, “Schauen Sie sich doch in Wien um! Was ist von dieser Theaterstadt übriggeblieben?,” in Verspielte Zeit, ed. Haider-Pregler and Reiterer, 106–24; here 121. 35 Nagl, Zeidler, and Castle, eds., Deutsch-Österreichische Literaturgeschichte, 2134. 36 Nagl, Zeidler, and Castle, eds., Deutsch-Österreichische Literaturgeschichte, 2135. 37 See Eckart Früh, “Vom Wiener ‘Stürmer’ und antisemitischen Dränger im Theater der dreißiger Jahre,” in Verspielte Zeit, ed. Haider-Pregler and Reiterer, 322–34; here 327. 38 Brecht and Weill’s opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) was unable to repeat this success as a guest production in Vienna in 1932; see Nagl, Zeidler, and Castle, eds., Deutsch-Österreichische Literaturgeschichte, 2135. 39 Nagl, Zeidler, and Castle, eds., Deutsch-Österreichische Literaturgeschichte, 2134. 40 Quoted in Brückl-Zehetner, “Theater in der Krise,” 277. 41 Brückl-Zehetner, “Theater in der Krise,” 277. Efforts were made by Austro-Marxist cultural practitioners and theoreticians to work against this trend during subsequent years. The “Politisches Kabarett” (Political Cabaret, 1926–33) was founded to present political agitation and propaganda with wit and satire to a working-class audience. See Jürgen Doll, “Volkstheater gegen rechts: Zur Erneuerung des Alt-Wiener Volksstücks durch das ‘Politische Kabarett’ (1926 bis 1933),” in Verspielte Zeit, ed. Haider-Pregler and Reiterer, 215–32. After 1934 political and socially critical theater was also to be found in the multifaceted Viennese cabaret scene. This is one of the best researched areas of theater history during the interwar period, beginning with Ingeborg Reisner, “Kabarett als Werkstatt des Theaters” (PhD diss., Univ. of Vienna, 1961). 42 “Die neue Saison beginnt,” Die Bühne 7, vol. 288 (15 September 1930): 10–11; here 11. 43 See Birgit Peter, “Schaulust und Vergnügen: Zirkus, Varieté und Revue im Wien der Ersten Republik” (PhD diss., Univ. of Vienna, 2001), 9–27. 44 See Die Bühne 8, vol. 305 (first June issue in 1931): 2–41. 45 Bac, “Luft, Landschaft und Menschen des Praters,” Die Bühne 8, vol. 305 (first June issue in 1931): 6–7; here 6.

8: The Hegemony of German Music: Schoenberg’s Vienna as the Musical Center of the German-Speaking World

Therese Muxeneder

HE OEUVRE OF ARNOLD SCHOENBERG — whether as composer, painter, writer, teacher, theoretician, or inventor — represents one of the most

outstanding artistic achievements of twentieth-century modernism. The founder of the Second Viennese School was born in Vienna in 1874 and died in Los Angeles in 1951. These two key dates of origin and exile are worlds apart not merely geographically but also historically, artistically, and personally. Schoenberg was an autodidact who, in turn, was also a teacher, and both factors were equally important in his artistic makeup. His develop-ment as a composer epitomizes a whole century, marked as it was by the fun-damental paradigms of musical modernism: a progression away from hide-bound tradition toward freedom of expression and, eventually, classicistic modernism. All his life Schoenberg endeavored to avoid any kind of con-formity both in an artistic and personal sense. Nevertheless, he drew on past tradition in order to create another with his new musical idiom. He did not aim to achieve a “greater or lesser degree of beauty” in music in the conven-tional sense but instead was driven by a will to expression that could be described as “necessity.”1 In his youth the self-taught composer was ex-clusively a Brahmsianer (follower or admirer of Brahms) before his mentor and friend Alexander von Zemlinsky introduced him to Richard Wagner, for whom he also conceived an immense admiration: “This is why in my Ver-klärte Nacht the thematic construction is based on Wagnerian ‘model and sequence’ above a roving harmony on the one hand, and on Brahms’ tech-nique of developing variation — as I call it — on the other.”2

Until the composition of the symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande, op. 5 (completed in 1902), Schoenberg was undeniably a late romantic. Around 1908, with the radical change in style marked by the Second String Quartet, op. 10, he stood on the threshold of a new creative form that re-linquished any tonal center and brought about the emancipation of disso-nance. This new way of seeing music’s structure as an antidote to schematic and formulaic repetition corresponded to stylistic developments within ex-pressionism. The aim, as summed up by Schoenberg’s pupil Anton Webern

T

176 ♦ THERESE MUXENEDER

in a 1932 lecture, was “nichts wiederholen, es soll immer etwas Neues kom-men!” (never to repeat anything; something new should always appear).3

During the Viennese fin de siècle, Jugendstil, expressionism, and psy-choanalysis all developed more or less contemporaneously as progressive tendencies fostered by the political climate of the Habsburg Empire’s long drawn out decline. In retrospect, Schoenberg and his school stand out by virtue of their stylistic surefootedness and uncompromising interrogation of the self. Schoenberg’s pioneering thought — which has dominated the his-tory of twentieth-century music and remains innovative to this day — peaked around 1918 with his development of a new method of composition. His-torically speaking, this was an appropriate juncture for new departures, a time of unrest and the establishment of new political and social hierarchies in the Vienna of the First Republic. The “Methode der Komposition mit zwölf nur aufeinander bezogenen Tönen” (method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one anotherr) also became known as the twelve-tone method, or dodecaphony. As Alban Berg recorded, Schoenberg himself self-confidently accorded it hegemonic status, discerning its future signifi-cance in a way that was almost visionary:

Schon heute, an Schönbergs fünfzigstem Geburtstage, [kann man] ohne ein Prophet zu sein, sagen, daß durch das Werk, das er der Welt bisher geschenkt hat, die Vorherrschaft nicht nur durch seiner persönlichen Kunst gesichert erscheint, sondern, was noch mehr ist: die der deutschen Musik für die nächsten fünfzig Jahre.4

[So today, on Schoenberg’s fiftieth birthday, [one can] say, without having to be a prophet, that the work that he has presented thus far to the world ensures not only the predominance of his personal art but, what is more, that of German music for the next fifty years.]5

The twelve-tone method creates a new order by following the precept of equality between notes and their relationships to one another,6 abolishing any hierarchies on both the vertical and the horizontal planes of the score. The rejection of a dominant key had already been called for in the preceding period of free tonality, “ein Musizieren in Farben und Formen” (music mak-ing in colors and shapes).7 This is taken a step further in dodecaphony by using predetermined compositional material: the twelve tones of a chromat-ically complete octave are arranged in a fixed sequence to create a series of notes that becomes the foundation of a whole work. This basic series can be played as its own mirror image (“Umkehrungsform,” or inversion), in re-verse (“Krebsform,” or retrograde), or backward and upside down (“Kreb-sumkehrung,” or retrograde inversion). These four forms, multiplied by all of their twelve possible transpositions, provide a total of forty-eight modes as the basic material for a composition, although they do not all have to be used. No notes are repeated in any one series. Each series features particular structural qualities that open up a whole range of possibilities to the com-

THE HEGEMONY OF GERMAN MUSIC ♦ 177

poser and can lead to highly complex works. One of the rules of the method (with certain exceptions) is that it does not allow for the repetition of tones until the twelve-note sequence has been used in its entirety. Generally speak-ing, the initial inspiration for twelve-tone compositions came to the compo-ser in the form of thematic ideas. Schoenberg annotated his tables of series with “T” for “theme” rather than referring to them as “original series” or whatever. Nevertheless, the series’s structural function cannot be compared with that of a theme in a tonal composition since the former are determined by the intervals between tones rather than by fixed notes or pitch.

At first glance the ordering principles of the twelve-tone method appear very rigid. However, musical ideas in their traditional form still play a vital role in each work. The formal construction of twelve-tone compositions of-ten follows traditional principles, so much so that its inventor became known as a “konservativer Revolutionär” (conservative revolutionary).8 Indeed, Schoenberg’s earliest twelve-tone works include two compositions in which the new musical idiom is fused with old forms: the Suite, op. 25 (1921), and the Serenade, op. 24 (1920–23). The catalogue of his works lists a piano waltz (op. 23, no. 5, 26 July 1921) as the first twelve-tone composition. Nevertheless, the dissolution of tonality revolutionized existing musical con-ventions.9 The immediate harmonic result was an immense enrichment, in particular as far as autonomous dissonant chords were concerned. Schoen-berg’s method built a bridge between the classical concept of form and an atonal, dodecaphonic polyphony. What contemporaries derided as destruc-tive and “entartet” (degenerate) was precisely the opposite: an evolutionary way of thinking about music’s future that was built on stable historical foun-dations while maintaining full awareness of the present.

The development of the method in its concrete, practical details had been preceded by a phase involving a spiritual search for answers to philo-sophical questions, during which Schoenberg read mystical and theosophical texts and studied anthroposophy, occultism and spiritualism. Post-1900 Vienna — in particular the Viennese modernist avant-garde — frequently displayed elements of esoteric, theosophical religiosity that at times took on a Far Eastern tinge. Schoenberg’s oratorio Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob’s Ladder) focused on the basic questions of human existence and art as religion, above and beyond the composer’s work aesthetics. It can be considered the central composition of the “Weltanschauungsmusik” (philosophical music) that he wrote in 1908, including the free tonal Second String Quartet, op. 10, and the musical settings of the Stefan George poems “Litanei” (Litany) und “Entrückung” (Rapture). He wrote the text for the oratorio himself, complet-ing it in 1917 and publishing it with the Viennese house Universal-Edition. As early as 1912 Schoenberg had discussed with Richard Dehmel the idea for a scenic oratorio or monumental stage work:


Ich will seit langem ein Oratorium schreiben, das als Inhalt haben sollte: wie der Mensch von heute, der durch den Materialismus, Sozialismus, Anarchie durchgegangen ist, der Atheist war, aber sich doch ein Restchen alten Glaubens bewahrt hat (in Form von Aberglauben), wie dieser mo-derne Mensch mit Gott streitet [. . .] und schließlich dazu gelangt, Gott zu finden und religiös zu werden. Beten zu lernen!10

[For a long time I have been wanting to write an oratorio on the fol-lowing subject: modern man, having passed through materialism, social-ism, and anarchy and, despite having been an atheist, still having in him some residue of ancient faith (in the form of superstition), wrestles with God [. . .] and finally succeeds in finding God and becoming religious. Learning to pray!]11

Schoenberg’s pupils and supporters considered the text to represent the religious teachings of their prophetic master, and eagerly awaited its comple-tion. While it was being written, Anton Webern spoke of his certainty that Die Jakobsleiter would surely reveal to him “alles auf der Welt in neuem Lichte” (everything on earth in a new light).12 Schoenberg himself confirmed that the subject matter of Die Jakobsleiter was to be interpreted as a meta-phor for modern man’s struggle to believe, an illustration of contemporary issues:

Vielleicht war das Ärgste doch die Umstürzung all dessen, woran man früher geglaubt hat. [. . .] Was ich meine, würde Ihnen am besten meine Dichtung “Jakobsleiter” (ein Oratorium) sagen: ich meine — wenn auch ohne alle organisatorischen Fesseln — die Religion. Mir war sie in diesen Jahren meine einzige Stütze — es sei das hier zum erstenmal gesagt.13

[Perhaps the worst was, after all, the overturning of everything one has believed in. That was probably the most grievous thing of all. [. . .] You would, I think, see what I mean best from my libretto “Jacob’s Ladder” (an oratorio) [. . .] what I mean is — even though without any organiza-tional fetters — religion. This was my one and only support during those years — here let this be said for the first time.]14

The oratorio sets up a Gnostic, dualistic system. It tells of the redemp-tion of humankind, which is trapped in the material and is subject to worldly misery and degeneration. The process of redemption is described as rising toward the beyond and God’s eternal light. The search for God is sym-bolized in an exemplary fashion through archetypal figures: a “Berufener” (one who is called), a “Aufrührerischer” (rebel), a “Ringender” (one who wrestles or struggles), an “Auserwählter” (chosen one), a “Mönch” (monk), and, finally, a “Sterbender” (dying man) are sent by Gabriel to a place that is different than they had hoped or wished for. A symphonic intermezzo repre-sents the migration of souls, which return to life in ever-changing incar-nations, according to their merits. Although they are led by demons, genii, and angels, they can find no way out of the circle of continuing migration


until they are taught by Gabriel (at the end of the oratorio’s second part) to search for unity with God in prayer; redemption is only to be found by los-ing oneself in oneness with the deity. The mediating figure of the “Auser-wählter” is set the task of immersing himself in the wretchedness of the world in order to preach more elevated things to the poor and lowly — and suffering in the process. According to the text, he “leaves them his word.” The figure of this “chosen one” — possibly an alter ego of his creator — represents all prophetic figures, who see and leave behind them words and ideas. This messianic image corresponds to an aphorism that the composer later wrote about this period in his life: “Once, when serving in the Austrian Army, I was asked whether I was really ‘that composer, A.S.’ ‘One had to be it,’ I said, ‘nobody wanted to be, so I volunteered.’”15

Although Schoenberg made frequent statements during the early 1920s of his intention to finish it, Die Jakobsleiter never got beyond the planning stage. The penultimate attempt at completion was made in January 1945. At this point Schoenberg had been in exile in the United States since 1933 and was applying to the Guggenheim Foundation for a scholarship to finish Die Jakobsleiter, Moses und Aron, and some pedagogical works. He stipulated the time necessary to finish work on the oratorio as one to two years. In the end the application was refused and the work remained a fragment.

It is not just the content of the libretto that makes Die Jakobsleiter en-lightening as a record of Schoenberg’s thought during this period but also its music: the oratorio contains his first experiments with twelve-tone series, although they were not yet fixed according to rules. As Anton Webern later remembered:

Aber schon im Frühjahr 1917 [. . .] erklärte er mir, er sei “auf dem Wege zu einer ganz neuen Sache.” Mehr hat er mir damals nicht gesagt. [. . .] In der Musik zur “Jakobsleiter” sind die ersten Anfänge dieser Musik zu finden.16

[But as early as spring 1917 [. . .] he told me he was “on the way to an entirely new thing.” He didn’t say any more to me at that point. [. . .] The very first signs of this music are to be found in the setting of Jacob’s Ladder.]17

Schoenberg was convinced that he had a mission and was incapable of pan-dering to the trends and tastes of the time, of bowing to the demands of the masses. In his essay “Composition with Twelve Tones” he summed up the inner necessity of artistic creation as follows:

Whether one calls oneself conservative or revolutionary, whether one composes in a conventional or progressive manner, whether one tries to imitate old styles or is destined to express new ideas — whether one is a good composer or not — one must be convinced of the infallibility of one’s own fantasy and one must believe in one’s own inspiration.18


In speaking of the “infallibility of one’s own fantasy” he was thinking of the twelve-tone method and its creation within the social and political con-text of the waning Habsburg monarchy. During the last two decades of the empire, Vienna had been characterized by plurality, not only in terms of the eighteen ethnicities of its native inhabitants but also with respect to artistic production. After the fall of the monarchy in 1918, the city faced funda-mental changes as the administrative center of a new, primarily German, republic. Public life in Vienna showed more and more signs of the extremism that would one day lead to National Socialism, as well as an “Ästhetisierung der Politik” (aestheticization of politics),19 which facilitated the gravitation of political groups in Vienna toward National Socialist ideas. Austrian antise-mitism took root in the soil of the ruling Christian Social Party, encouraged by political Catholicism and German nationalist currents. As a Viennese lib-eral, a member of the educated upper-middle class, and not least as a Protes-tant with Jewish roots, Arnold Schoenberg also took up a German nationalist stance in the period immediately following the First World War. This seem-ingly simple term “German” had an immensely complex history and equally varied consequences due to a multiplicity of factors, including ethnic, lin-guistic, political, socioeconomic, historical, cultural, artistic, musicohistori-cal, and ideological. For Schoenberg, as for Richard Wagner before him,20 “German” was an artistic concept, and any claims he made for German su-premacy were meant culturally or artistically rather than in an economic or military sense. He used this idea from 1918 onward to position himself against the multiethnic, imperial Austrian patriotism that dominated the Viennese cultural scene before the fall of the polyglot empire. Schoenberg’s measure of the term had to do with a common culture rather than with political borders. It should therefore be seen as part of the tradition that began with Herder’s idea of a linguistic nationality and culture.21 Several documents have survived from the year 1918 that demonstrate Schoenberg’s belief in the hegemony of German music. For example, a very revealing let-ter to Richard Dehmel dated 20 June 1919 was written about half a year after the proclamation of the First Austrian Republic:

Sollen wir auch die Hegemonie in der Musik verlieren? Gewiss ist die Kunst Gemeingut aller Nationen. Aber wenn dies Gemeingut somit gleichmässig auf die Nationen verteilt werden sollte, dann haben wir, Deutschen, in der Musik eher etwas abzulegen, als anzunehmen. Aber die Sieger haben uns schon vor dem Kriege anders behandelt: sie haben uns angenommen das Viele, das ihnen fehlt, uns aber zehnmal soviel dafür angehängt, von dem Überflüssigen, das auch wir nicht brauchen. Ich bin nicht für Kunstpolitik, aber ich muss wiederholen, was ich seit Langem oft gesagt habe: wenn ich an Musik denke, so fällt mir nur die deutsche ein!22


[Are we to lose hegemony in music as well? Of course art is the common property of all nations. However, if this common property were to be distributed equally among the nations, then we Germans would lose out as far as music is concerned rather than gain. But even before the war the victors treated us unfairly in this respect: they took from us the abun-dance they lacked yet burdened us with ten times as much superfluity, which we also do not need. I am not in favor of cultural politics, but I have to repeat what I have often said before: when I think of music, only German music comes to mind!]

Schoenberg wished to avoid having to support other people’s cultural politics. To make himself independent, he tried to revolutionize the Vien-nese music scene with an innovative distribution form for his new music, which aimed to show the city’s musical potential above and beyond its conservative cultural institutions. The idea of “Vorherrschaft” (predomi-nance, supremacy) had already been used much earlier by Schoenberg to describe Vienna’s role as a city of music. For instance, a 1904 document relating to the Viennese Ansorge-Verein (an association for the promotion of modern art and culture) claimed that Vienna’s musical supremacy was being threatened by a lack of progressive thinking. In founding this association Schoenberg hoped that “doch Wandel zum Bessern geschehen könnte, dass sich in Wien doch ein Publicum für moderne Musik finden und erziehen liesse” (that a change for the better might nevertheless occur, that an audi-ence for modern music could be found and educated in Vienna).23 With the founding in 1918 of the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen (Society for Private Musical Performances) he managed to create an institution that came close to realizing his plan for several years. As Berg wrote to his wife, Helene, in 1918: “Schönberg hat wieder eine herrliche Idee: [. . .] einen Verein zu gründen, der es sich zur Aufgabe macht, Musikwerke aus der Zeit ‘Mahler bis jetzt’ seinen Mitgliedern allwöchentlich vorzuführen”24 (Schoen-berg has a marvellous idea [. . .] to start next season a society, setting out to perform musical works from the period “Mahler to the present”).25

Schoenberg developed the concept for the Verein für musikalische Privat-aufführungen following the success of ten public rehearsals in Vienna of his Chamber Symphony, op. 9. The Second Viennese School’s new form of per-formance also grew out of Schoenberg’s teaching activities at a seminar for composition hosted by Eugenie Schwarzwald’s innovative school located in the center of the city. In December 1918, at the first constituent meeting of the society, a committee, with Schoenberg as president, consisting of nine-teen members was chosen from among his Viennese pupils and friends. The association set new standards for concerts not just in its championing of new works but also in terms of its unconventional structure. The exact program for each concert was kept secret to make sure that all the concerts were equally well attended; works were repeated; the concerts were not open to the pub-lic; and applause or expressions of disapproval were banned, all in the in-


terests of “Künstlern und Kunstfreunden eine wirkliche und genaue Kenntnis moderner Musik zu verschaffen” (giving artists and friends of the arts a ge-nuine and exact knowledge of modern music).26 The works were to speak for themselves in an unpretentious and straightforward manner, and although the expert musicians prepared themselves very carefully, their sole purpose was to increase their audiences’ understanding of modern music. Schoenberg turned his back on what he saw as the corrupting influence of the public. As a result, the society banned all advertising.

At first the concerts were held in the banqueting hall of the merchants’ association in the Johannesgasse, then (until May 1919) in the Kleiner Musikvereinssaal (the smaller of the Musikverein’s concert halls), and (until mid-1920) in Vienna’s Konzerthaus. After a short period during which meetings were held at the Club Österreichischer Eisenbahner (Austrian Rail-way Employees’ Club) in the Nibelungengasse, from January 1921 onward the concerts were held in the rooms of the Schwarzwald School, located in the Wallnerstrasse, which had been designed by the modernist architect Adolf Loos. The association adopted the custom of arranging orchestral works for smaller ensembles. Inititally this was prompted by financial considerations: the members could not afford to have orchestral works performed due to the number of musicians needed, the higher fees for performers, and the rent for larger venues. Most of the musicians engaged to perform were young and chosen by audition. Graduated membership fees financed the concerts. In November 1919, after only one year, a repertoire list consisting of twenty-seven contemporary composers was published. Due to the rising inflation of the postwar period, beginning in autumn 1920 open concerts were per-formed alongside the regular closed club concerts for fund-raising reasons. Although these were intended to help fill the coffers of the society, its lack of finances eventually forced it to cease operation in 1922, the worst year of the inflation. Nevertheless, its spirit lived on in the performance methods of various ensembles and soloists, having become something akin to an ide-ology.27 The Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen served to confirm the Second Viennese School’s autonomous, self-sufficient approach to art and cultural politics. This was all the more remarkable in a city whose mu-sical life was still predominantly the preserve of aristocratic elites and a con-servative state bureaucracy.

In addition to teaching, writing, and organizing concerts, Schoenberg continued to work on the twelve-tone method throughout this period. He also sought to legitimize its importance as a new way of composing in terms of cultural politics. The publication and circulation of the method in the summer of 1921 among his select circle of pupils coincided with antisemitic incidents in which Schoenberg was directly involved. They seem to have en-couraged him to present his new method as a sign of conservative cultural revolution, with himself as the apologist of this revolution, proclaiming that he had created something “das der deutschen Musik die Vorherrschaft für


die nächsten hundert Jahre sichert” (which ensures that German music will reign supreme for the next hundred years). This statement, which was re-corded and passed down by his pupil Josef Rufer,28 has often been inter-preted as demagogic or even dictatorial. Schoenberg considered himself to be deeply rooted in German culture and his technical achievements as a composer were, in his eyes, fitting antidotes to the weakening of German music’s leading position due to Anglo-Saxon and French influences.29 Seen in this light, he cast himself as a continuation of the line Bach-Mozart-Beethoven-Wagner-Brahms-Mahler, with Vienna as the dominant musical center. In his theory of art “German music” plays the part of a motivating myth that helped mobilize his own creative potential, a normative category that intensified his creativity.

These statements, however, must always be weighed against the back-ground of the antisemitic incidents of June 1921. Schoenberg was the victim of persecution in the Salzburg holiday resort of Mattsee, where the parish council had sent out an appeal to everyone renting out rooms in the area

enthaltend das Ersuchen, den Ort Mattsee wie im Vorjahre so auch heuer “judenfrei” zu halten [. . .] damit unserem schönen Orte Mattsee die Folgen einer etwaigen Verjudung, den Mietern und Vermietern Schika-nen jeder Art durch die deutsch-arische Bevölkerung erspart bleibe.30

[containing the request to keep the parish of Mattsee as “Jew-free” this year as it was last year [. . .] so that our beautiful Mattsee is spared the consequences of becoming Jewish in any way, and the landlords and hoteliers are spared any harassment by the German-Aryan population.]

The parish council meeting had been preceded by a disagreement with Schoenberg’s sister-in-law, Bertel Ott, daughter of the mayor of Salzburg, who had been accused in the German nationalist radical press of “degrading” Mattsee to a “Filiale Zion’s” (an offshoot of Zion) by making the “schön gelegenen Markt an dem Gestade des Obertrumer See’s [. . .] zu einem Eldorado der Juden aus allen Zonen” (beautifully situated market town on the banks of Obertrumer lake [. . .] into an Eldorado for Jews from all over the place).31 The incidents in Mattsee, however, did not pass without critical commentary in other quarters of the press. For example, the liberal Viennese Neue Freie Presse, published letters insisting that “die Mehrzahl der dortigen Sommerfrischler [. . .] keineswegs mit den unerquicklichen Verhältnissen sympathisiert, wie sie sich durch den Terrorismus einzelner Elemente heraus-gebildet haben” (the majority of summer guests there [. . .] by no means sympathize with the unedifying state of affairs, which is the result of terror-ism by individual elements).32 These events, which became known as the “Mattsee-Ereignis” (Mattsee happening) sparked off a chain of reflection in Schoenberg on national, religious, and Jewish identity that, in turn, influ-enced the legitimization and ideological interpretation he gave to his new method of composing. The philosophical aspect of composition — viewed as


a form of creativity bestowed by God and the artistic fulfillment of divine will — took on a political and ideological aspect for Schoenberg in the con-text of the rise of National Socialism. As he wrote in 1933: “Ich selbst habe 100te Male das Gefühl gehabt und es auch ausgesprochen, dass mir meine Werke diktiert wurden, dass ich nur das Gefäss bin, dass ich nur eine mir auferlegte Angabe erfülle” (I myself have felt and said hundreds of times that my works were dictated to me, that I am merely the vessel, that I do nothing but fulfill the task that has been given to me).33

In a letter to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise dated 12 May 1934, Schoenberg disclosed that he began to reconsider his Jewish origins as a result of the antisemitism unleashed by the sociopolitical effects of the First World War, and that the Mattsee incidents acted as a further wake-up call:

1916, als oesterreichischer Soldat, mit Begeisterung zum Militär ein-gerückt, wurde ich mit einemmale inne, dass der Krieg nicht nur gegen äussere Feinde, sondern mindestens ebenso heftig gegen innere geführt wurde. Und zu diesen letzteren gehörten nebst allen anderen, die am Liberalismus und Sozialismus interessiert schienen, die Juden. Einige Jahre später hatte ich ein nettes Erlebnis im Salzkammergut, nahe von Salzburg: ich war vielleicht einer der ersten Juden in Mitteleuropa, der eine Austreibung mitzumachen hatte. Diese beiden Erlebnisse haben mich wachgerüttelt und mich den Wahn des Internationalismus (dem ich allerdings immer fremd gegenüber gestanden war) erkennen lassen, wie die Unmöglichkeit aller aus dem Liberalismus hervorgehenden Theorien: Pazifismus, Demokratie (gegen die ich mich längst gewendet hatte) aber insbesondere die Unhaltbarkeit der Assimilationsversuche.34

[In 1916, when I was an Austrian soldier who had joined the military with enthusiasm, I suddenly realized that the war was being conducted not merely against enemies from abroad but at least as vigorously those at home. And the latter comprised, besides all others interested in liberal and socialist causes, the Jews. A few years later I had a nice experience in the Salzkammergut, not far from Salzburg: I was possibly one of the first Jews in Central Europe to become the victim of an actual expulsion. Those two experiences shook me awake and led me to the realization that internationalism (something that was admittedly always alien to me) was nothing but a vain fantasy and that all the theories produced by liberal attitudes were ultimately futile: pacifism, democracy (which I had opposed for some time already) but in particular those untenable as-similation attempts].35

This fundamental rejection of the idea of assimilation (Schoenberg converted to Protestantism on 25 March 1898 in Vienna and reverted to his original faith on 24 July 1933 in Paris) resulted in a process of rethinking that was both political and religious. Contemporary sociopolitical events put an end to the period in which Schoenberg was mainly concerned with theosophical and esoteric reflections on an aesthetic level. They virtually forced the com-


poser to thematize Jewish identity, although this did not find its sublimation in art until he had left Austria and started work on his magnum opus Moses und Aron and the Zionist drama Der biblische Weg (The Biblical Way). As a Jew Schoenberg was compelled to adopt an ambivalent stance on the ques-tion of nationality, and the perceived incongruity between his roots in Ger-man culture and his search for a Jewish identity led to an existential conflict.36 In the 1920s Schoenberg was increasingly confronted with the fact that the terminology he had been using for so long — “German music” and, indeed, simply “German” — were now being adopted as propaganda terms by the Na-tional Socialists. To be able to continue using these terms at all, he was forced to take up a radical and peculiar position within this particular tradition. “German” became increasingly ambivalent both in its musical or, rather, musical-political dimension, on the one hand, and its racialist sense, on the other.37 Culture as a way of legitimizing German national consciousness or, rather, nationalist pathos (a relic of the nineteenth century in its bourgeois liberal incarnation) was being used by many different parties and groups as a cornerstone for identity formation. Schoenberg was under no illusion con-cerning any of these and knew that “his” party did not yet exist. In a letter to Albert Einstein dated 1 January 1925 he made no secret of the fact that in reality his rediscovered and strengthened Jewish identity had to remain an abstract quality:

Während ich aber nun im Ausland mindestens als der führende Musiker gelte, ist man unbegreiflicherweise in Deutschland gerne bereit auf die Vorherrschaft in der Musik zu verzichten, wenn man nur damit verhin-dert, daß sie an meinen Namen anknüpft. Darin, in dem Hass gegen mich, sind Juden und die zuständigen Hakenkreuzler eines Sinnes.38

[While I am considered, at least abroad, to be the leading German com-poser, for some inexplicable reason in Germany they are ready to re-linquish predominance in music, if by that they can successfully hinder linking my name to it. In that, in their hatred of me, the Jews and the Swastika bearers are of one mind].39

All of Schoenberg’s utterances on the hegemony of German music show that for him the religious and the national were combined with the artistic in such a way that art subsumed and dominated the former two aspects. The fact that the German nation had originally been more of an artistic, cultural idea than a legal or state concept only served to strengthen his arguments:

Jedes Volk kann die Hegemonie in der Kunst erwerben. Das scheint nicht einmal von der wirtschaftlichen oder militärischen Uebermacht ab zu hängen. [. . .] Nur eine Macht scheint hier bei der internationalen Durchsetzung ausschlaggebend zu sein: die Macht des Genies, die Macht des Gedankens, die Kunst der Darstellung. Wie sehr nun aber Kunst Rassischen und Nationalen verhaftet ist, wie überzeugend diese aus ihr sprechen, wie untrennbar eins mit dem andern verknüpft ist, so zeigt sich


aber doch, sobald ausgeprägte nationale Kunst zur Hegemonie gelangt, dass die gesamte übrige Kulturwelt nur ein Bestreben kennt: dieser na-tionalen Kunst nachzueifern, ohne dabei zu bedenken, ob und inwieweit ihr Vorbild erreichbar ist. [. . .] Es ist also merkwürdig, dass noch nie-mand beachtet hat, dass in meiner Musik, die vom Ausland unbeeinflusst auf deutschem Boden entstanden ist, eine Kunst vorliegt, die, wie sie den Hegemoniebestrebungen der Romanen und Slawen aufs Wirksamste ent-gegentritt, durchaus den Traditionen der deutschen Musik entsprungen ist. [. . .] Ich maße mir das Verdienst an, eine wahrhaft neue Musik ge-schrieben zu haben, welche, wie sie auf der Tradition beruht, zur Tradi-tion zu werden bestimmt ist.40

[Any people can acquire hegemony in art. It seems not even to depend on dominant power in the economic or military field. [. . .] There seems to be only one power that regulates international success: the power of genius, the power of the idea, the art of representation. However, as soon as some highly developed national art achieves a position of hegemony, one sees the strong hold exerted on art by race and nationality, how convincingly these are expressed by art, and how inseparably the one is tied to the other; for then, all the rest of the cultural world tries to do just one thing — emulate the national art in question, without stopping to consider whether it is an attainable model, or if so, to what degree. [. . .] Remarkably, nobody has yet appreciated that my music, produced on German soil, without foreign influences, is a living example of an art able most effectively to oppose Latin and Slav hopes of hegemony and derived through and through from the traditions of German music.]41

Today we are left with the historical paradox that the “heil’ge deutsche Kunst” (sacred German art) of which Hans Sachs sings at the end of Die Meister-singer von Nürnberg (The Master Singers of Nuremberg) was preserved by music that the Nazis later condemned as degenerate. Viennese modernism, embodied paradigmatically in the music of Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School, had a lasting effect on the century that followed, exerting an almost unprecedented influence in all areas of art. As early as 1921 Schoenberg had already predicted that the Nazis’ censorship would not be able to prevent this. Having just completed his first twelve-tone piece for piano (op. 23, no. 5), he wrote to Alma Mahler:

Die Deutscharier, die mich in Mattsee verfolgt haben, werden es diesem Neuen (speciell diesem) zu verdanken haben, dass man sogar sie noch 100 Jahre lang im Ausland achtet, weil sie dem Staat angehören, der sich neuerdings die Hegemonie auf dem Gebiet der Musik gesichert hat!42

[The German Aryans who persecuted me in Mattsee will have this inno-vation (especially this one) to thank for the fact that even they will still be respected abroad for 100 years, because they belong to the very state that has just secured for itself hegemony in the field of music!]


The Second Viennese School under Schoenberg is inextricably linked with the idea of ensuring that German culture remained predominant in Europe. The combination of intellectual reflection and compositional practice played a vital role in its constitution. Schoenberg had to be convinced that Vienna was the right setting to write the next chapter in music history, a fitting home to found his school and launch a new compositional aesthetic, and conse-quently a place where music tradition could be redefined.


Notes

1 Arnold Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve Tones,” in Style and Idea: Selected Writings, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 216. 2 Arnold Schoenberg, “My Evolution,” in Stein, ed., Style and Idea, 80. 3 Anton Webern, Wege zur Neuen Musik, ed. Willi Reich (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1960), 60. 4 Alban Berg, “Warum ist Schönbergs Musik so schwer verständlich?,” Sonderheft der Musikblätter des Anbruch: Arnold Schönberg zum fünfzigsten Geburtstage, 13. September 1924, vol. 6 (August–September 1924): 341. 5 Willi Reich, The Life and Work of Alban Berg, trans Cornelius Cardew (New York: Da Capo Press, 1982), 204. 6 Schönberg wrote many essays and lectures on this method, some of which are collected in Stein, ed., Style and Idea. However, he left it to his pupils to publish the first teaching manuals on the twelve-tone method. See Hanns Jelinek: Anleitung zur Zwölftonkomposition nebst allerlei Paralipomena: Appendix zu “Zwölftonwerk” op. 15 (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1952 [Part One], 1958 [Part Two]). See also Josef Rufer, Die Komposition mit zwölf Tönen, Stimmen des XX. Jahrhunderts, 2 (Berlin: Max Hesses Verlag, 1952. 7 The phrase appears in a letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Otto Kallir dated 5 June 1945, in Arnold Schoenberg Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 8 Willi Reich, Arnold Schönberg oder der konservative Revolutionär (Vienna: Fritz Molden, 1968). 9 See Erwin Stein, “Neue Formprinzipien,” in Sonderheft der Musikblätter des Anbruch: Arnold Schönberg zum fünfzigsten Geburtstage,287. 10 Letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Richard Dehmel dated 13 December 1912, in Dehmel Archive, University of Hamburg. 11 Arnold Schoenberg, Letters, ed. Erwin Stein, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987), 35. 12 Letter to Arnold Schoenberg dated 13 June 1917, Arnold Schoenberg Collection. 13 Letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Wassily Kandinsky dated 20 July 1922, Arnold Schoenberg Collection. 14 Arnold Schoenberg and Wassily Kandinsky, Letters, Pictures, and Documents, ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch, trans. John C. Crawford (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 74.


15 Arnold Schoenberg, “To become recognized only after one’s death,” Music Survey 2 (1950): 180. 16 Anton Webern, “Der Weg zur Komposition in zwölf Tönen,” in Wege zur Neuen Musik, ed. Willi Reich (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1960), 47. 17 Anton Webern, The Path to the New Music, ed. Willi Reich (London: Universal-Edition, 1975), 44. 18 Arnold Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve Tones,” in Stein, ed., Style and Idea, 218. 19 The phrase is borrowed from Manfred Wagner, Kultur und Politik — Politik und Kunst (Vienna: Böhlau, 1991). 20 See, e.g., Richard Wagner, “Deutsche Kunst und Deutsche Politik,” in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 8 (Leipzig: Siegel, 1907), 96–97. 21 Johann Gottfried Herder expounded on this concept in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91). 22 Letter from Arnold Schönberg to Richard Dehmel dated 20 June 1919, Arnold Schoenberg Collection. 23 Letter to Heinrich Schenker from January 1904, signed Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander von Zemlinsky, Oswald Jonas Memorial Collection, University of California, Riverside. 24 Letter from Alban Berg to his wife, Helene, dated 1 July 1918, Music Collection, Fonds 21, Berg, Austrian National Library, Vienna. 25 Alban Berg, Letters to His Wife, ed. and trans. Bernard Grun (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971), 225. 26 See the printed statutes of the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen, Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna. 27 For the history of the association see the following: Schönbergs Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen, Musik-Konzepte 86, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1984); Judith Karen Meibach, “Schoenberg’s ‘Society for Musical Private Performances,’ Vienna, 1918–1922: A Documentary Study” (PhD diss., Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1984); Reinhard Kapp, “Schönbergs ‘Verein’ und die Krise der musikalischen Öffentlichkeit,” in Fremdheit in der Moderne, ed. Rudolf Flotzinger (Vienna: Passagen-Verlag, 1999), 23–68; Regina Busch, Thomas Schäfer, and Reinhard Kapp, “‘Der Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen’: Arnold Schönbergs Wiener Kreis / Arnold Schönberg’s Viennese Circle. Bericht zum Symposium / Report of the Symposium, 12.–15 September 1999,” ed. Christian Meyer, Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center 2 (2000): 77–83. 28 Josef Rufer, Das Werk Arnold Schönbergs (Basel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1959), 26. It is very interesting that this position was not expounded in public after 1921 (with the exception of Alban Berg’s essay “Warum ist Schönbergs Musik so schwer verständ-lich?,” published in the Schönberg-Festschrift for 1924). Although Schoenberg dealt directly with the topic in his foreword to the choral satires op. 28, entitled “Nicht mehr ein Deutscher” (No Longer a German), written in January 1926, his pointed formu-lations on the subject of hegemony were subsequently omitted from the printed version: “Man bekämpft mich als deutschen Komponisten und in mir die deutsche Kunst, deren Hegemonie man abschütteln möchte” (People attack me as a German


composer and in me they attack German art, whose hegemony they would like to shake off). Manuscript and typescript, Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna (T 04.46). 29 “Damit ist also für Schenker das deutsche Genie zuende und das ist es ja, was die Franzosen und Engländer (zum Teil) auch glauben machen möchten! Weil Schenker ihnen sagt, dass die Deutschen seit Brahms (Wagner u[nd] Liszt sind ohnedies ausgeschlossen) kein Genie mehr hervorgebracht haben, meinen sie, dass die Hege-monie in der Musik nun auf die Franzosen oder Engländer übergehen werde!” (Thus, according to Schenker German genius is done for and that is exactly what the French and English — or at least some of them — would like to think! Because Schenker tells them that the Germans have not produced a genius since Brahms — he doesn’t even bother to mention Wagner and Liszt — they think that musical hegemony will now pass to the French or the English!). Schoenberg’s observations appear in the margin of an article by Heinrich Schenker, “Von der Sendung des deutschen Genies,” Der Tonwille 1 (1921), 18,; Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna, 30 “Mattsee und die Judenfrage,” Salzburger Chronik, 5 July 1921, 2. 31 “Die Judenkolonie in Mattsee,” Volksruf, no 27 (2 July 1921), 2. A more objective account of the events was published under the title “Der Taufschein des Kom-ponisten,” Neue Freie Presse, 30 June 1921, 5, a facsimile of which is reproduced in Arnold Schönberg, 1874–1951: Lebensgeschichte in Begegnungen, ed. Nuria Nono-Schoenberg (Klagenfurt: Ritter, 1992), 192. 32 “Der Taufschein des Komponisten,” 9. 33 Arnold Schoenberg, “Hitlers Kulturbolschewisten,” Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna [T 02.16]. 34 Letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise dated 12 May 1934, Stephen S. Wise Collection, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. 35 Alexander L. Ringer, Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Jew (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 153. 36 See Martina Sichardt, “Deutsche Kunst — jüdische Identität: Arnold Schönbergs Oper ‘Moses und Aron,’” in Deutsche Meister — böse Geister? Nationale Selbstfindung in der Musik, ed. Hermann Danuser and Herfried Münkler (Berlin: Edition Argus, 2001), 370. 37 See Hermann Danuser, “Arnold Schönberg und die Idee einer deutschen Musik,” in Das Deutsche in der Musik. Kolloquium im Rahmen der 5. Dresdner Tage der Zeit-genössischen Musik vom 1. bis 10. Oktober 1991, ed. Marion Demuth (Leipzig: Dresdner Tage der Zeitgenössischen Musik, 1997), 30. See also Constantin Floros, “Die Wiener Schule und das Problem der ‘deutschen Musik,’” in Die Wiener Schule und das Haken-kreuz: Das Schicksal der Moderne im gesellschaftspolitischen Kontext des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1990), 35–50. 38 Letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Albert Einstein dated 1 January 1925, Einstein Center, Boston University. 39 E. Randol Schoenberg, “Arnold Schoenberg and Albert Einstein: Their Relationship and Views on Zionism,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 10, no. 2 (Novem-ber 1987): 155. 40 Arnold Schoenberg, “Nationale Musik,” 24 February 1931, Arnold Schoenberg Cen-ter, Vienna [T 35.39]. See also the essay “Musik” in Richtlinien für ein Kunstamt, ed.


Adolf Loos (Vienna: Richard Lanyi, 1919), 10–11; letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Alban Berg dated 6 December 1920, Vienna: Music Collection, Fonds 21, Berg; letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Emil Hertzka dated 10 March 1923, UE Archive, #274, Vienna Library. Additional sources also include the manuscripts “Nicht mehr ein Deutscher” (No Longer a German), written ca. January 1926; “Ich und die Hege-monie in der Musik” (Hegemony in Music and Myself), January 1928; and “Nationale Dichtung” (National Poetry), 8 September 1932 — all in the Arnold Schönberg Cen-ter, Vienna. 41 Arnold Schoenberg, “National Music,” in Stein, ed., Style and Idea, 169, 173. 42 Letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Alma Mahler dated 26 July 1921, Marina Mahler Collection, Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna.

Part IV

Literary Case Studies

9: Anticipating Freud’s Pleasure Principle? A Reading of Ernst Weiss’s War Story “Franta Zlin” (1919)

Andrew Barker

N HIS TREATISE SITTENGESCHICHTE DES WELTKRIEGS (A Moral History of the World War, 1930) Berlin sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld noted how

belles lettres had been far readier than clinical medicine to examine the im-pact of wartime injuries on the sexual and psychological life of the victims.1 Some well-remembered examples of that readiness are works by Ernst Toller (Hinkemann, 1924), Sean O’Casey (The Silver Tassie, 1927), and D. H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928), all of which deal with soldiers rendered sexually impotent by their wounds. Much less well known is Ernst Weiss’s story “Franta Zlin,”2 first published in the Munich periodical Genius in 1919.3 Although “Franta Zlin” has only rarely been the subject of scholar-ly investigation (and is therefore typical of Ernst Weiss’s oeuvre as a whole),4 it is a work of great and occasionally shocking power, which Marcel Reich-Ranicki recently included in his extended collection of German literature provocatively entitled Der Kanon.5

In this radically compressed third-person narrative of fewer than twenty pages Weiss confronts the reader with scenes of suicide, rape, pillage, mur-der, and the unmanning of Zlin, a thirty-year-old Viennese goldsmith and married man who, in the course of his military service (between autumn 1914 and summer 1915) mutates from “sanfter Mensch” (gentle man) into monster. Although this metamorphosis may reflect Nietzschean notions of the brute in man, more than likely it reflects the author’s artistic and per-sonal relationship to Franz Kafka.6 In October 1950, ten years after Weiss’s suicide in Paris before the invading Nazis, Thomas Mann wrote to New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf declaring Weiss to be one of the few writers who may justly be compared to Kafka.7 Nearly thirty years earlier (May 1921) in the Berliner Börsen-Courier Joseph Roth had reported on a public reading of “Franta Zlin” at the Rowohlt Verlag by Weiss’s lover, the actress, dancer (and novelist) Rahel Sanzara. Impressed by the story’s unremitting emo-tional intensity yet unable to spell its title correctly, Roth observed: “Viel-leicht ist trotz Barbusse und Frank in keiner der vielen Antikriegsgeschichten die Bestialität der vaterländischen Mörderei eindringlicher in menschliches

I

194 ♦ ANDREW BARKER

Bewußtsein gehämmert worden als in ‘Franta Slin’” (Despite Barbusse and Frank perhaps in none of the antiwar stories has the bestiality of patriotic murder been hammered home more insistently than in “Franta Slin”).8

Although it is already a highly compressed narrative, “Franta Zlin” is further divided into ten numbered chapters, lending it the superficial appear-ance of a very condensed novel. Given the dramatic, episodic nature of the writing, a more fitting comparison may be with the “Stationendramen” favored by expressionist writers of the day. Weiss was often dubbed an ex-pressionist during the early part of his career, but while the sensationalistic subject matter clearly aligns “Franta Zlin” with the literature of expression-ism, its generally detached, often naturalistic style does not. In its title at least “Franta Zlin” recalls the way in which Arthur Schnitzler uses the name of the central character of his psychological case studies as the title for the story or novel: Leutnant Gustl, Frau Berta Garlan, Fräulein Else, Therese: Chronik eines Frauenlebens. Indeed, Albert Ehrenstein, writing in the Ber-liner Tageblatt in 1925,9 recognized not Kafka but Schnitzler as Weiss’s “stylistic godfather.”10 Not only did Weiss share Schnitzler’s Jewish and medical background (he worked for a time with Schnitzler’s brother, Julius, a prominent Viennese surgeon), but his work is often grounded in a similar Habsburg milieu and displays abundant evidence of his interest in psychol-ogy in general and sexuality in particular. This latter aspect may well have been the source of Roth’s disdainful remark to Félix Bertaux in 1929 that Weiss was still mired in puberty.11

Published hard on the heels of the Habsburg collapse (the actual date of composition is unknown), “Franta Zlin” is an indictment of the dual mon-archy’s military establishment and, by extension, of the empire itself. A simi-lar critique is evident in Weiss’s novels Tiere in Ketten (Animals in Chains, 1918) and Mensch gegen Mensch (Man against Man, 1919). A sociopolitical assessment of “Franta Zlin,” such as Roth suggested in 1921 with his poin-ted reference to “patriotic murder,” is therefore amply justified by the evi-dence not just of this story but of other works by Weiss dating from this period. Unlike Roth, however, even when Weiss was critical of the Habsburg state, he was never a writer of the left. Eventually, through later novels such as Der arme Verschwender (The Poor Spendthrift, 1936) and Der Verführer (The Seducer, 1938), written after immigrating to France in 1934, Weiss, like Roth, contributed to the retrospective romanticization of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which Claudio Magris later dubbed the “Habsburg Myth.”12 Here, however, there can be no doubt that Weiss, a Moravian-born Jew with a freshly printed Czechoslovakian passport in his pocket, uses im-aginative literature to comment negatively on the recently defunct empire, thereby challenging some long-respected taboos, both personal and societal.

Tellingly, the setting of the story covers the entire range of the former empire, from the Carpathians in the east to Vorarlberg in the west. The cen-tral figure and antihero Franta Zlin is a Viennese “Kleinbürger” (petit bour-

ANTICIPATING FREUD’S PLEASURE PRINCIPLE? ♦ 195

geois) with a revealingly non-Germanic name (Zlin is a shoemaking town in today’s Czech Republic; Franta is the diminutive form of František). Other nationalities mentioned in passing are Croats, Hungarians, Italians, and — repeatedly — Jews. Jews are always presented as victims, be they Galician peasants or middle-class Viennese, yet Weiss depicts a society composed of multiple victims: men as casualties of war and women as casualties of both war and men, thus recalling Nietzsche’s dictum in Also sprach Zarathustra: “Der Mann soll zum Krieger erzogen werden und das Weib zur Erholung des Kriegers; alles andere ist Torheit” (The man should be brought up as a warrior and the woman for the warrior’s recuperation; everything else is madness).13

Weiss also reveals a probable debt to the thought of Otto Weininger in his stereotypical depiction of woman as the incarnation of sexuality, be it Zlin’s wife, Mascha, the Galician Jewish peasant he rapes, or the Viennese prostitute he tries to murder. A Weiningerian misogyny is certainly apparent in the scathing cameo Weiss paints of the nurse in the field hospital who looks after Zlin following his emasculating shrapnel wound. No Edith Cavell, to be sure, she gleefully passes on to the other wounded soldiers the nature of Zlin’s injury. Far from displaying solidarity or sympathy, they mock his truncated manhood, maliciously asking him for the tab end of a cigarette, a “Tschik” (91). The nurse’s parting words to Zlin as he leaves the hospital are to inquire whether he has already written to inform his poor wife about what has befallen him (92). Given the evidence both here and in a work like Andreas Latzko’s Menschen im Krieg (Men in War, 1917), it becomes clearer why in his analysis of the First World War Magnus Hirschfeld devoted an entire chapter to the nursing profession and its tarnished reputation.14

Zlin is invalided out of the army on 11 June 1915, a black day in the Austrian war effort, when sixteen thousand men were taken prisoner at Zu-rawno in Galicia. He comes home to a Vienna — which Weiss describes in spare yet telling detail — as an uncaring and vindictive metropolis where civil society is on the point of collapse.15 That Zlin meets his own violent death at the hands of an escaped Russian POW in Vorarlberg in July 1916 can be seen as Weiss’s less than oblique reference to the perceived threat from the East, an old fear become real with the westward spread of Bolshevism after the October Revolution of 1917.16 Indeed, when “Franta Zlin” was published there in 1919, Munich was the capital of the Bavarian Soviet Republic.

However obvious the sociohistorical aspects of “Franta Zlin” may be, the full measure of the story can only be gauged by including psychomedical factors. This is not merely because of the nature and consequences of Zlin’s mutilation but because Weiss belonged to the group of medically trained writers prominent in early-twentieth-century Austrian and German writing. Like the autobiographical novel Mensch gegen Mensch (also dating from 1919), “Franta Zlin” may well have relied directly on the professional experiences of the author himself on the eastern front. It is thus quite feasible that Weiss


would have come across the sort of injury portrayed in the story and known in the medical literature dealing with the effects of wartime castration.17 Al-though Zlin’s injuries make sexual intercourse impossible, Weiss makes it clear he is not castrated in the strict sense of the term. Zlin’s libido remains defi-antly intact.

Although there is no evidence that Weiss studied under Freud during his medical training in Vienna, in “Franta Zlin,” as in other works, he reveals a more than passing interest in psychoanalysis, “die junge jüdische Wiener Psy-chiaterschule” (the modern Jewish Viennese school of psychiatry), as he called it in his last novel, Der Augenzeuge (The Eyewitness, 1938–63).18 It is known that when Weiss published “Franta Zlin” in the spring of 1919, Freud was working on his lengthy essay Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle), which was eventually published in 1920. There he examines the relationship between sexuality and violence that is patently also at the heart of Weiss’s story. Indeed, aspects of “Franta Zlin” seem to parallel, if not an-ticipate, the major developments in Freud’s thought subsequent to the First World War, in which case the story provides further justification for Freud’s lament to Schnitzler that works of art so often anticipate his own hard-won scientific findings.19

In his review of “Franta Zlin” Joseph Roth provides his readers with an obvious Freudian allusion in the course of a plot synopsis that is as signifi-cant for what it excludes as for what it includes. Roth begins by referring directly to Zlin’s wounding at the end of chapter 4:

Wißt ihr, wer Franta Slin ist? Ein Soldat, der im Feld einen Unterleibs-schuß erhält und das Geschlecht verliert. Invalid, am imvalidesten zu-rückgekehrt, seine junge Frau langsam in den Tod treibt, weil ihre Gegenwart ihm Bitternis, Qual, Vorwurf, täglichen Tod bedeutet. Der dann mit einem Mädchen von der Straße ins Hotel geht und seine verkrüppelte Geschlechtlickeit in ohnmächtiges Morden wandelt; Geschlechtsdrang in Tötungsdrang umsetzt. Er prügelt das Mädchen halbtot und entflieht, gemeinsam mit einem aus dem Gefangenenlager ausgebrochenen russischen Kriegsgefangenen. Im Wald wird Franta Slin, der Perlen und Geld (Kriegsbeute) bei sich führt, von dem Russen er-mordet. In seinem letzten Traum erlebt er noch die ersehnte Befreiung. Er träumt von der polnischen Jüdin, die er in Feld vergewaltigt hatte. Das ist die Geschichte von Franta Slin.20

[Do you know who Franta Slin is? A soldier who is wounded in the field in his lower torso and loses his sex organ. An invalid, back home a total invalid, slowly drives his wife to her death because her very presence means bitterness, torture, resentment, daily death. He then goes to a hotel with a streetwalker and turns his crippled sexuality into blank, murderous violence; turns his sex drive into a killing drive. He batters the girl half-dead and runs off, accompanied by an escaped Russian POW. In the forest Franta Slin, bearing pearls and money (war booty), is murdered


by the Russian. In his last dream he experiences his longed-for liberation. He dreams of the young Polish Jewess he had raped in the field. That’s the story of Franta Slin.]

Significant here is the formulation “Geschlechtsdrang in Tötungsdrang umsetzt,” revealing Roth’s early assimilation of one of the main thrusts of Jenseits des Lustprinzips, where, in his response to the carnage of war, Freud grafted onto his previous notion of the libidinal pleasure principle (Eros) its dualistic counterpart, the destructive death drive (Thanatos). The interaction of Eros and Thanatos was now seen as the source of all human activity, with psychiatric symptoms being the result of misdirection or inadequate dis-charge of libido. In “Franta Zlin,” published before Freud’s study, Weiss provides a graphic example in literary form of the consequences of that mis-directed or inadequately discharged libido. However, by starting almost half-way through the story, and only referring briefly to earlier sections at the very end, Roth’s review fails to reveal any of the narrative foregrounding that would make full sense of his passing yet revealing acknowledgment of Freud’s study. In particular, the metamorphosis of Franta Zlin from “sanfter Mensch” to murderer by proxy is not ascribed by Weiss solely to the loss of Zlin’s ability to have sex. He is at pains to show how Zlin’s turn to violence has al-ready begun well before he suffers his horrendous and humiliating yet not life-threatening amputation.

The story opens in autumn 1914 with Zlin, a batman like Hašek’s Good Soldier Schweyk, being forced to look on as the general shoots his brains out following the Austrian defeat at the first battle of Rawaruska. In the first of many interlinking motifs, the damage to Zlin’s genitalia is already foresha-dowed in this opening chapter. Fleeing in horror from the dead general’s entourage, Zlin is almost castrated when, having sought refuge under a horse-drawn cart, his coattails are caught in the spokes as it moves off: “Ein furcht-barer Schmerz erweckte ihn. [. . .] Später erst bemerkte er Blut und böse Schmerzen bei jedem Schritt” (85; A terrible pain woke him up. . . . Only later did he notice blood and awful pain with every step he took). Directly before being hit by the shrapnel that destroys his genitalia, Zlin touches “den noch von früher her durch Blut versteiften Stoff” (90; the blood-stiffened cloth) when he puts his hand in his trouser pocket and rolls between his fin-gers a pearl he had “accidentally” acquired from a Jewish family fleeing the battlefield. Despite rudimentary efforts at restitution, Zlin had been unable to restore the Jews’ property to them, and this will ultimately lead to his death at the hands of the psychotic Russian, Wassily. It is typical of Weiss’s allusive and suggestive technique — in a story equally notable for its graphic descriptions of the body and its functions — that the goldsmith Zlin’s essen-tially passive acquisition of the pearls is placed in direct juxtaposition to the loss of his manhood. Unlike the direct interaction of combatants in hand-to-hand fighting, shrapnel is not directed at any specific individual or area of


the body; it is part of that randomness and depersonalization that accom-panies the increased use of technology in modern warfare. The contrast be-tween the active infliction of pain and the passive suffering of it — as well as the interaction between the two — lies at the heart of this story.

Retreating to Cracow following the general’s death, Franta Zlin arrives there on 13 November 1914. Not only here but at several junctures in the story Weiss indicates a very specific calendar date, thus heightening the im-pression that the text is as much a factual report as it is a work of the im-agination. In this it foreshadows the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) of the later 1920s, when the story was republished by Ullstein Verlag in Ber-lin.21 Ten days prior to Zlin’s fictitious arrival in Cracow, in the aftermath of the same calamitous defeat Georg Trakl had taken his own life on 3 Novem-ber 1914 at the military barracks there. There may even be an allusion to Trakl’s last poem “Grodek” as Zlin makes his futile attempt to restore the money and pearls to the Jewish refugees: the description of their horse-drawn cart disappearing into the night “von roten Wölkchen im Hauch be-strahlt” (90; lit up by little red clouds in the gloaming) may recall Trakl’s evocation of the “rotes Gewölk” (red ball of cloud) in which “ein zürnender Gott wohnt” (a raging god dwells).22

Franta Zlin is repeatedly — and, in light of events, incongruously — de-scribed as “sanft” (gentle). Weiss is at pains to show how, once the sanctions of peace and civilization have been lifted, the potential demon can emerge in even the mildest of human beings. Given the apparent similarities with Freud’s work on the connection between impeded sexuality and violent behavior, it is especially significant that already in the first chapter Weiss should include such a careful reference to the power of Franta Zlin’s peacetime libido: “Nach zweitägiger Wanderung fühlte Franta sich in einem Zustand solcher Erschöpfung, wie wenn er mit seiner Frau sechsmal zusammengekommen wäre” (85; After wandering around for two days Franta felt himself in a state of such exhaustion, as if he had made love to his wife six times in a row).

Although Zlin’s brutalization had already begun with the trauma of the general’s suicide and the accidental near-castration by the cartwheel, there is nothing in the opening chapter to prepare the reader for the apparently un-premeditated violence of Zlin’s sexual assault on a “junge dicke Judenfrau” (86; fat young Jewess) in chapter 2. This occurs as she stands wailing beside the cadaver of her family cow, crudely slaughtered to provide food for the troops: “Franta, der immer ein sanfter Mensch gewesen war, konnte von dem Fleisch nichts essen” (86; Franta, who had always been a gentle man, could not touch the meat). However, such scruples soon count for nothing as he forces himself upon the woman, whose head falls onto the flanks of her dead beast. Are readers to assume that his near-castration has heightened Zlin’s sexual need, given the absence of the marital comforts he patently revels in? Or is he merely acting in a soldierly tradition going back millennia? The manner of the narration here certainly stresses the depersonalized nature


of the experience from Zlin’s viewpoint. Afterward, Weiss resorts to the most abject cliché when describing Zlin as having acted in a trance or dreamlike state: “und als er nach kurzer Zeit erwachte [. . .]” (86; And when, after a short while, he awoke [. . .]). It is a prominent feature of the narration, at least initially, that Zlin is either a passive observer or acts in such a way as to suggest that he is not morally responsible for his actions. There is certainly no indication of shame or remorse as he commandeers the peasants’ bed for the night. Meanwhile the rape victim, her husband, and their young child are left to cower on the floor. Weiss could not make it clearer that war, even when executed by one of the historic “civilized” nations of Europe, induces actions in human beings that (pace Roth’s reference to bestiality) would be inconceivable in animals.

Chapter 3 is set in an ancient snowbound forest in the Ruthenian Car-pathians. There, far from the heat of battle, Zlin is charged with delivering a herd of cattle to the regimental kitchens. He delays his arrival to assist in the birth of a calf. In lyrical prose unlike anything else in the story Weiss shows Zlin partaking in an act of humanity, not brutality or death. Motivically, however, he links the passage to the rape of the young Jewish woman beside the carcass of her butchered cow. The brutality of the rape, during which Zlin feels the “warme Feuchtigkeit” (86; warm moisture) of the nursing mother’s milk seep between his fingers, is here contrasted with the sensation of “süße Wärme, tropfende Feuchtigkeit” (88; sweet warmth, dripping mois-ture) coming from the udder as he tries to make cow and calf comfortable. Further echoes of the rape are heard when Zlin, returning to his regiment with the cattle, comes across a smoldering village near the Eastern Galician shtetl of Turka. Here he encounters a Jewish family fleeing from the battle, their possessions piled high on a horse-drawn cart. The adjective “ausge-mergelt” (89; emaciated) applied to the Jewish farmer, whose wife and bed Zlin had appropriated in chapter 2, is here used to describe the Hasidic refugee in his bushy fur hat.23 Once again Franta Zlin appropriates for him-self the Jews’ possessions — a bag containing money and pearls that quite literally has fallen off the back of their cart. One incident in particular will form the basis of a repeated motif in the story: as the pearls are strewn on the ground, one of them lodges in a cow’s cloven hoof, only then to be ex-tracted by Zlin. When, belatedly, he reaches his regiment, he is sent straight to the trenches as punishment. He arrives there exhausted, Weiss’s language paralleling almost exactly that used to describe his satiated state after mul-tiple acts of sexual intercourse: “Er kam in einem solchen Zustand der Er-schöpfung in den Unterstand, daß er nichts mehr von sich wußte” (90; He arrived in the dugout in such a state of exhaustion that he was barely con-scious). Whereupon he suffers the injury ensuring that he himself will never be capable of procreation.

Franta Zlin’s active involvement in the war may be over by December 1914, but his physical and psychological suffering has barely begun. And


with his own suffering begins the further dispensation of pain to others. In the field hospital, an environment about which Weiss had intimate knowl-edge, Zlin experiences sympathy from the male doctor treating his wound, but otherwise he finds himself an object of contempt rather than pity. Bereft of intact male genitalia, he perceives himself as humiliatingly feminized: “Er schämte sich [. . .] seine Notdurft wie ein Weib verrichten zu müssen” (91; He was ashamed [. . .] to have to relieve himself like a woman).24 Now in-continent, Zlin cannot help touching the dressing on his wounds, drenched in “warm hauchende Feuchtigkeit” (91; warm-smelling moisture). This for-mulation, familiar from similar locutions used during Zlin’s rape of the Jew-ish peasant and his care of the calving cow, reflects the abdication of moral responsibility in the narrating discourse.

In the summer of 1915 Zlin returns home to Vienna, to his wife, Mascha, and to his former employer, not saying a word to either about his muti-lation. Nor does he mention to Mascha the cache of money and pearls that could alleviate their material deprivation. The Austrian state clearly felt no further sense of duty toward either Zlin or his dependents. The radical change in the behavior of her once uxorious husband understandably re-duces the blonde and buxom Mascha to despair. In one of the most clearly Freudian passages in the story, Weiss shows Zlin now obtaining quasi-sexual pleasure from his loot rather than his wife:

Perlen und Geld hatte er verborgen, trug sie in ein noch von der Schlacht bei Rawaruska her blutgetränktes Sacktuch eingehüllt. Die Perlen wurden etwas rötlich; als er sie aber zwischen Zunge und Gaumen rollte (unsag-bares Zittern durchrann ihn wie einstige Entzückung), kamen sie weiß, wie neugeboren wieder heraus. (92–93)

[He had hidden the pearls and money, carried them wrapped in a blood-soaked cloth bag from the battle of Rawaruska. The pearls grew slightly reddish; but when he rolled them between his tongue and palate (un-speakable tremors ran through him like former rapture) they came out white, as if newborn.]

Zlin’s depression, though never identified as such, leads him to further dissimulation toward his wife, whose self-abasement stands in stark contrast to the nurse in the field hospital. With economical but telling detail Weiss sketches in the deprivations of life in wartime Vienna, its soup kitchens and long lines of hungry citizens. In order to make ends meet, Mascha lets her-self be exploited by ruthless domestic employers before turning to petty crime. Her victims are yet another Jewish family, but Weiss makes no attempt to make pro-semitic capital out of this. On the contrary, this Jewish family is mean, vindictive, and exploitative. On the other hand, at her trial on the Day of the Epiphany Mascha both defends herself in the face of her employers’ parsimony and betrays the casual, everyday antisemitism of the Viennese working class: “Am 6. Januar 1916 war die Verhandlung. Mascha sagte, sie


hätte drei Monate Dienst bei der Herrschaft gemacht und ihr treu gedient, obwohl es Juden waren, aber im ganzen nicht mehr als siebzehn Kronen Lohn bekommen” (95; The trial was on 6 January 1916. Mascha said she’d been in service with them for three months and had served them faithfully even though they were Jews, but had not earned more than seventeen crowns in total).

Weiss portrays a world in which Zlin, himself already a victim, creates yet more victims before himself becoming one again for the last time. His coldly moralistic and legalistic attitude toward Mascha’s “crime” drives her to a suicide he engineers and that could just as easily be construed as murder. With the loss of Zlin’s powers of sexual expression — but not desire — every trace of conventional ethical responsibility has also disappeared. After Mascha’s selfless death (she uses the pistol her husband has provided), Zlin feels “er-rettet” (98; saved), especially since he escapes police prosecution. Weiss fur-ther underscores the relationship between Zlin’s murderous act, the damage to his sexual organ, and the compensatory libidinous role of the looted Jewish treasure:

Franta ging aus zu seiner Arbeit, voll Freude auf die Nacht. Endlich keine Angst mehr um das zerstörte Geschlecht. Keine Scham wegen der Ver-stümmelung. Das Goldgeld, die dicken Münzen, die herrlichen Perlen, endlich alles ihm allein!

Noch wußte er nicht, was damit beginnen, aber bloß die Perlen ansehen, sie auf der bloßen Hand rollen lassen, wie kleine Schrotkörner so schwer, in den Mund nehmen, zum Zittern in seiner Wollust. (98)

[Franta left for work looking forward to the night. Finally no more fear about his destroyed member. No shame on account of the mutilation. The gold sovereigns, the thick coins, the wonderful pearls — finally all his, his alone.

He still didn’t know what to do with them except just look at the pearls, roll them in his bare hands, like heavy little pellets, put them in his mouth, quivering with ecstasy.]

Having given up his job as a goldsmith for unskilled work in the gas-works, Zlin even achieves a measure of solipsistic happiness: “Bis zum Som-mer fühlte Franta sich gut und glücklich. Perlen und Geld behielt er” (99; Until the summer Franta Zlin felt well and happy. He kept the pearls and money). He dreams of a postwar world where he will buy a small house in Vienna, or beside the Turka Pass, the source of his dubiously acquired booty.

In a story full of scenes of sexual violence, Weiss reserves one of the most disturbing incidents until near the end. In it he again examines the relationship between impeded libido and violence that was exercizing Freud during this same period. In a scene with echoes of Jack the Ripper’s attack on Lulu in Wedekind’s play Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1904), an alcohol-besotted Zlin, egged on by Wassily, vents all his anger and frus-


tration on a hapless Viennese prostitute.25 Hurling her to the ground, he rips off his clothes and looks down at his mutilated but excited member: “Sein verstümmelter Leib erstand zum ersten Mal vor seinen Augen” (101; His mutilated body arose for the first time before his eyes). He then talks to the unconscious prostitute about himself, using the second rather than the first person. Nothing better illustrates the schizoid alienation of Zlin from what he sees as his “real” self than this self-conscious switch of personal pronouns. The identification of the male self with his genitalia is here made conclusively clear: “Da, sieh her, so war ich nie! So war ich nie! Da, sieh her, Vicky! Alles hat es herausgehaut aus mir. Franta! Alles hat es herausgehaut aus dir!” (101; Look here, I was never like that! Never! Look here, Vicky! It’s drummed it all out of me. Franta! It’s drummed it all out of you!).

Bending over the whore’s prostrate body, Zlin continues in the second person as he rediscovers his moral identity, admitting guilt over the death of his wife and accepting that he is beyond redemption: “So hast du deine Frau erschlagen [. . .] so hast du sie langsam zu Tode erwürgt! Franta! Nicht zu retten mehr!” (101; That’s how you killed your wife [. . .] that’s how you slowly strangled her to death! Franta! Can’t be saved!). His sexual needs unassuaged either by the assault or his confession — “Ungesättigt das wüt-ende Geschlecht” (101; The raging sex drive unsatiated) — Zlin passively submits to his death at the hands of Wassily, “den Mörder, sein Ebenbild” (102; the murderer, his spitting image).

Untypically for this story, the bludgeoned reader is spared the details of the murder. Instead, Weiss presents Zlin’s departing dream, which echoes the emasculated aesthete’s final dream at the end of Hofmannsthal’s Märchen der 672. Nacht (Tale of the 672nd Night, 1895). However, whereas the jewel-loving Kaufmannssohn (merchant’s son) reflects on his life with bitter regret, Zlin’s self-exculpating dream is full of sexual activity. Amid many dis-turbing scenes, this is probably the most unpalatable, with Zlin reliving not his marital bliss but the rape of the “junge dicke Judenfrau,” who in the dream is transformed into the Jewish woman whose pearls he appropriated. Just as thoughts of the pearl lodged in the hoof had flashed through Zlin’s mind before he assaulted the prostitute (the vaginal associations seem par-ticularly clear), in Zlin’s last dream the Jewish woman “suchte auf dem Boden zwischen den gespaltenen Hufen der wandernden Tiere” (102; searched on the ground between the cloven hooves of the wandering beasts) before in-itiating a sexual encounter with the inert Zlin: “Er lag gelähmt in rosarotem Licht” (102; He lay paralyzed in the pink light). In this grotesque reverie the rapist has become the passive figure. The victim of his sexual assault now be-comes the instigator of Zlin’s last, orgasmic fantasy, where he is made whole again:

und mit einem Male war Franta ganz hoch beseligt, ganz steil getürmtes Geschlecht, ganz kreisend geballter Mann, hineingewühlt in die weiche


Fülle des Fleisches. [. . .] Starr gefesselt, glücklich unbewegt, in Ewigkeit gebadet, war er umgeben rings von der letzten befreienden Erfüllung bis zu tiefst gesättigter Lust. Mit seiner Hand, wie unter das liegende Mut-tertier einst, fühlte er vor, sein eigenes ausströmendes Blut empfand er als ausblühende Glut, als Befreiung ohne Schrei, und in stärkeren Kreisen löste er sich ganz in der niederfließenden Überwältigung. (103)

[Suddenly Franta was all bliss and happiness, all steeply towering mem-ber, all tight, circling man, wallowing in the soft fullness of flesh. [. . .] Bound tight, happily still, bathed in eternity, he was encircled by one last liberating fulfillment, deepest satiated desire. As once under the re-cumbent mother beast, he reached forward with his hand, sensed his own spurting blood as dying heat, as silent liberation, and in ever-widening circles gave himself up to the forces pouring down over him.]

This appalling parody of a Wagnerian “Liebestod” posits the supreme amorality of the male sex drive. Only in the final paragraph does cold reality intrude, the narrative baldly concluding with the burial of a now anonymous Franta Zlin “am 30. Juli 1916, zwei Jahre nach Beginn des Weltkrieges, in Sankt Anton in Vorarlberg als Unbekannter, von Unbekannten ermordet” (103; Unknown, murdered by unknown perpetrators, on 30 July 1916, two years after the outbreak of the World War, in St. Anton in Vorarlberg).

In its final pages “Franta Zlin” has thus moved far indeed from its start-ing point as an indictment of the Austro-Hungarian war effort in the tradi-tion of Andreas Latzko’s Menschen im Krieg. In the course of a narrative revolving around a proletarian Viennese Everyman, the author has revealed the rottenness of the empire at war, an ancient social and cultural edifice from which all behavioral and moral cohesion has seemingly disappeared. Indeed, in many ways Franta Zlin is a literary realization of Karl Kraus’s grim prediction that the behavior of the returning soldiers would make the war itself seem like “ein Kinderspiel” (child’s play).26 As in so many of Ernst Weiss’s later works, culminating in his celebrated portrait of the demented Adolf Hitler in Der Augenzeuge, the sociopolitical aspects of the story, though important and revealing, ultimately only function as a backdrop to the au-thor’s consuming interest in the psychopathology of the individual, which both parallels and even prefigures the work of Freud in the immediate aftermath of the First World War.

Notes

1 Magnus Hirschfeld, Sittengeschichte des 1. Weltkriegs (Hanau am Main: Karl Schustek, 1964), 341. For the general significance of literature as a means of understanding the First World War see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975). 2 All quotations refer to Ernst Weiss, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 15: Die Erzählungen, ed. Peter Engel and Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 84–103.


Earlier the story appeared in Gesichtete Zeit: Deutsche Geschichten, 1918–1933, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Munich: Piper, 1969). A French translation appeared in Ernst Weiss, Cortège de démons: nouvelles choisies, trans. Brigitte Vergne-Cain and Gerard Rudent (Amiot, France: Lenganey, 1992). In 1989 the story was adapted for German TV under the title Franta. 3 Genius: Zeitschrift für alte und werdende Kunst, 1, ed. C. G. Heise, H. Mardersteig, and K. Pinthus (Munich: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1919). 4 See, however, Janusz Golec, “Einige Anmerkungen zu Ernst Weiss’ Erzählung Franta Zlin,” Lubelskie Materialy Neofilologiczne 17 (1993): 35. 5 Marcel Reich-Ranicki, ed., Der Kanon: Die deutsche Literatur, vol. 7: Erzählungen: Robert Musil bis Franz Werfel (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2003). The editor’s notion of what constitutes German literature is not shared by all commentators. 6 In 1913 Kafka helped Weiss through the final stages of his first novel Die Galeere (The Galley). For his part, Weiss was instrumental in dissuading Kafka from marrying Felice Bauer. In so doing he probably changed the course of world literature. 7 Quoted in M. A. Orthofer, “Ernst Weiß: A Preliminary Survey,” http://www .complete-review.com/quarterly/vol2/issue4/eweiss.htm#tmann (accessed 24 April 2006). 8 Joseph Roth, review of “Franta Slin,” by Ernst Weiss, Berliner Börsen-Courier, 12 May 1921; reprinted in Joseph Roth, Werke, vol. 1: Das journalistische Werk 1915–1923, ed. Klaus Westermann (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989), 558. Writing to the noted French scholar Félix Bertaux in 1929, Roth betrays an intense personal dislike of Weiss: “Ernst Weiß, von dem Sie schreiben, ist eher eine Erscheinung typique, wenn Sie Prag und die Juden aus dem alten Österreich besser kennen würden. Er ist ein Mensch aus dem Ghetto. [. . .] Es scheint mir, daß dieser Mensch unfähig ist, gelähmt und kindisch, aus der Pubertät nicht heraus und mit Wonne darin verharrend. [. . .] Sein bestes ist die Novelle ‘Franta Slin’” (“Ernst Weiss, of whom you write, is rather a typical figure, if you knew more about Prague and the Jews of Old Austria. He is a person from the ghetto.[. . .] It seems to me that this person is incompetent, paralyzed and childish, not yet out of puberty and blissfully happy about it. [. . .] His best work is the novella ‘Franta Slin’”). Quoted in Peter Engel, ed., Ernst Weiss (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 321–22. 9 Quoted in Klaus Peter Hinze, “Ernst Weiss,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 81, Austrian Fiction Writers 1875–1913, ed. James Hardin and Donald G. Daviau (Chicago: Gale, 1989), 294. 10 Albert Ehrenstein, “Ernst Weiß,” Berliner Tageblatt, 11 July 1925, 2ff.; reprinted in Engel, Ernst Weiß, 68. 11 The remark is mentioned in Hinze, “Ernst Weiss.” 294. By this time Roth himself had acquired a good grounding in the literature of psychiatry as a result of his wife’s long-term mental illness. 12 Claudio Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos in der österreichischen Literatur (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2000). 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1964), 70. 14 Hirschfeld, “Erotik in der Krankenpflege” [Eroticism in Nursing], Sittengeschichte des 1. Weltkriegs, 121–38.


15 See Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). 16 See Klaus-Peter Hinze, “‘Und das mir, dem Antikommunisten’: Die politische Haltung des Romanciers Ernst Weiß,” Text + Kritik 76 (1982): 46–58. 17 Hirschfeld, Sittengeschichte des 1. Weltkrieges, 341–65. 18 Ernst Weiss, Der Augenzeuge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 94. 19 Sigmund Freud, “Briefe an Arthur Schnitzler,” ed. Heinrich Schnitzler, Neue Rundschau 66 (1955): 95. 20 Roth, review of “Franta Slin,” by Ernst Weiss, 558. 21 Ernst Weiss, Dämonenzug: Fünf Erzählungen (Berlin: Ullstein, 1928). 22 Georg Trakl, Gedichte, ed. Hans Szklenar (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1964), 120. 23 See “Memorial Book of the Community of Turka on the Stryj and Vicinity Turka, Ukraine, 49°09' / 23°02'” www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/turka/turka.html (accessed 24 April 2006). This is a translation of Sefer zikaron le-kehilat Turka al nehar Stryj ve-ha-seviva, ed. J. Siegelman et al. (Haifa, 1966). 24 Hirschfeld describes a similar case, dated July 1915, in a chapter on genital mutilation and war eunuchs. See “Die Verwundeten und Kranken” [The Sick and Wounded] Sittengeschichte des 1. Weltkriegs, 342–43. 25 Similar scenes are presented in visual form in Otto Dix’s portraits of murdered prostitutes; see, e.g., various works entitled Lustmord dating from 1922. 26 Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 406–12 (1915): 141.

10: Facts and Fiction: Rudolf Brunngraber, Otto Neurath, and Viennese Neue Sachlichkeit

Jon Hughes

HE VIENNESE NOVELIST Rudolf Brunngraber (1901–60), whose first novel Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert (1933; freely translated as A Twen-

tieth-Century Tragedy)1 forms the focus of this essay, remains an undeser-vedly forgotten figure in twentieth-century Austrian literature. Although his commercially successful publishing career spanned the turbulent decades between the early 1930s and the late 1950s, it has seldom attracted scholarly interest.2 His debut novel, according to Claudio Magris a “masterpiece,” is only a partial exception.3 It is revealing that this innovative literary text, a remarkable novel of the Great Depression in Austria, plays a marginal role in two entirely distinct lines of scholarly inquiry. On the one hand, it is fre-quently aligned with contemporary novels, many of which were written in response to the economic crisis, of the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) — a phenomenon usually associated with Germany of the Wei-mar Republic. On the other hand, the text is just as often understood as a distinctly Austrian novel, indebted to the theories and practices of Viennese polymath and Wiener Kreis (Vienna Circle) member Otto Neurath, the in-fluence of whose statistical methods and socialist-humanist ideas is discern-ible in both the form and content of the novel. When examined side by side, these responses to the text reveal the originality of a work that is worthy of fuller and more differentiated appraisal. This essay explores these parallel ave-nues of reception, assessing the novel’s supposed status as an example of Neue Sachlichkeit as well as reflecting on relevant political, literary, and in-tellectual currents in Vienna of the early 1930s.

Passing references to Brunngraber’s debut novel are, in fact, fairly com-mon, but the text itself is seldom discussed in any detail. The fact that Brunngraber’s work cannot comfortably be classified or categorized un-doubtedly contributed to a gradual decline in his stock as a writer. He began his career as an idealistic socialist, the chair of the Vereinigung sozialistischer Schriftsteller (Union of Socialist Writers) in Austria, but compromised these beliefs after 1938, when he became a member of the infamous Reichsschrift-tumkammer (Reich Chamber of Literature).4 In the 1950s Brunngraber’s

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work was marked by a type of cultural pessimism and anti-technological skepticism, which, although not untypical in writers of his generation, never-theless represents a remarkable change from the energy and idealism of his early years.

During the interwar years Brunngraber saw himself as a highly modern writer of a “new” type of novel, embedding character-driven narrative in documentary material of a type unusual in fiction: primarily historical, scien-tific, sociological, and economic data, for the most part presented in the form of statistics. He styled himself a “Dichter-Soziologe” (poet-sociolo-gist), a chronicler not simply of individual stories but of the manner in which everything, in the twentieth century more than ever before, is connected.5 His “Tatsachenromane” (fact novels) may not have proven to be profoundly influential, but their distinctive approach to narrative, most particularly as illustrated by Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert, is nevertheless evidence of sub-stantial literary innovation that compels us to rethink the development of a particularly Viennese Neue Sachlichkeit during the interwar years.

Traditional explanatory models for the development of the modern novel have tended to understand the genre as a synthesis of the “universal” concerns of art with a more immediate sensitivity to society and its struc-tures. Ronald Taylor, in an assertion that is entirely consistent with such models, argued in 1980 that the modern novel tends to rely on “a fusion of three realms: the social, as the ‘real’ setting from which the material and moral lives of the characters receive their meaning; the psychological, [. . .]; and [. . .] the universal — source of the power of the book to make us see the general in the particular by lending the events and personages a para-digmatic significance.”6 Taylor’s account reflects an approach that privileges the epic ambitions of canonical grand narratives and contains a value judg-ment: the final category of the “universal,” clearly, is emphasized as the source of a text’s power.

However, the description also makes an important observation: that novels in general attempt to ground their material in the verifiably “real.” This desire became particularly pronounced in German-language prose fiction after 1918, when reportage and a fetishization of the factual, char-acterized by Anton Kaes as “Der dokumentarische Impuls,” became metho-dological touchstones.7 Sabine Becker asserts that “die dokumentarische Schreibweise [bestimmt] den für die Literatur der Weimarer Republik para-digmatischen Wandel von einer ästhetisch-autonomen Kunst zu einer für gesellschaftspolitische Ziele funktionalisierten Gebrauchsliteratur in entschei-dendem Maße [mit]” (the documentary style is jointly and decisively re-sponsible for the turn, paradigmatic for the literature of the Weimar Republic, from aesthetic-autonomous art to socially and politically functionalized lite-rature for “use”).8 Both Kaes’s and Becker’s analyses apply to some of the better known novels of the period; for example, the narrator’s oft-cited state-ment (frequently misquoted as the author’s statement) in the preface to

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Joseph Roth’s Die Flucht ohne Ende (Flight without End, 1927), which at-tained the status of a badge of honor to which novelists were to aspire: “Ich habe nichts erfunden, nichts komponiert” (I have invented nothing, and composed nothing).9

The simplistic equation of facts with the truth (or the perception of such an equation) was, however, also the subject of criticism, with commentators including Siegfried Kracauer, Alfred Döblin, and Roth himself arguing in favor of a more sophisticated literary response to the challenges presented by “reality” in an age of social upheaval and change. Kracauer’s programmatic statement, in the introduction to his study of the white-collar middle classes, Die Angestellten (The Employees, 1930), is of particular interest with respect to Brunngraber’s novel. Kracauer argues for an approach to writing that allows for the integration of apparently disparate parts to create a meaningful whole:

Die Wirklichkeit ist eine Konstruktion. Gewiß muß das Leben beobach-tet werden, damit sie erstehe. Keineswegs jedoch ist sie in der mehr oder minder zufälligen Beobachtungsfolge der Reportage enthalten, vielmehr steckt sie einzig und allein in dem Mosaik, das aus den einzelnen Beobachtungen auf Grund der Erkenntnis ihres Gehalts zusammen-gestiftet wird.10

[Reality is a construction. Of course, life has to be observed in order for this reality to be achieved. In no way, however, is it to be found in the more or less random series of observations in reportage; it is contained exclusively in the mosaic that is constructed from the individual obser-vations, based on the recognition of their content.]

Though Kracauer is here reacting to Neue Sachlichkeit as a simplistic trend, his work can be understood as a product of the same mood and the same desire for a literature in which there was a place for “Wirklichkeit.” With this in mind, it is entirely plausible to see Brunngraber as a Viennese represen-tative of Neue Sachlichkeit, for rarely has a novelist more consciously set out to foreground a sense of the “real” than he does in Karl und das 20. Jahr-hundert. From the outset, the text attempts to achieve a balance — but cer-tainly not a seamless fusion — between the demands of the microcosm of a local plot and a mass of accompanying statistics and information intended to evoke the macrocosm of global change. The central narrative, which charts protagonist Karl Lakner’s struggles in Vienna during the early twentieth century — the “am bislang gewalttätigsten Zeitalter dieser Erde” (most vio-lent epoch yet experienced on this earth) — is firmly anchored in the key social, technological, and political “facts” that Brunngraber saw as determin-ing people’s lives.11

The opening paragraph introduces us to the name of the protagonist, Karl Lakner, but not to his character. Instead, the account of his life is pre-faced by a substantial introductory chapter in which the omniscience of the narrator is exploited to immediately suggest the determinacy of individual


“fates.” The chapter consists solely of an account of events, for the most part taking place in the United States, which will, in effect, direct the course of Karl’s life. Chief among these events is the development of a rationalized ap-proach to business management by Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose name, through the associated concept of Taylorism, had already gained iconic status and notoriety in the early twentieth century.

Als Frederick W. Taylor (Philadelphia) 1880 als Erster konsequent den Gedanken der Rationalisierung faßte, war der Wiener Karl Lakner noch nicht unter den Lebenden. Das entschied sich zu seinem Nachteil. Denn er hätte ebensogut damals schon achtzig Jahre alt sein können. [. . .] Das Schicksal hatte ihn mit achtzehnhundert Millionen anderen ausersehen, am bislang gewalttätigsten Zeitalter dieser Erde teilzuhaben. (11)

[When, at Philadelphia in 1880, Frederick W. Taylor became the first consistent advocate of “scientific management,” being one element of what in Europe we now call “rationalization,” Karl Lakner had not yet been born in Vienna. So much the worse for him. He might just as well have been eighty years old at that time. [. . .] Fate held him in reserve, with some eighteen hundred million others, to live through the most turbulent epoch yet known to history. (9)]

There are echoes of the Bildungsroman in the narrative structure of the novel, which charts Karl’s childhood and efforts to improve himself through edu-cation and work. However this introductory paragraph already makes it very clear that free will and individual decisions are little more than theoretical details that have no effect on the global macrophenomena that supersede all else: the “destiny” of the majority is predetermined to a large extent. In the seven chapters that follow, the novel tracks Karl through what Brunngraber evidently intends us to see as an entirely plausible, perhaps even a typical life. We receive a compressed account of a childhood in poverty in a working-class district of Vienna, in which Karl’s devotion to his mother is of central importance. His early romantic dreams of a career as an artist are crushed by hard economic reality, although he is determined not simply to become what he calls throughout a “Handlanger” (lackey, 72).12 He trains as a teacher de-spite the financial difficulties this creates. Yet before he can find a job, Karl’s career is interrupted by the First World War, in which he serves with distinc-tion, only to find himself unemployable in an economically ravaged postwar Vienna. With his parents dead, Karl spends ten years as an archetypal exam-ple of the “lost generation” of war veterans, reminiscent in many respects of the characters that recur in works by near contemporaries such as Joseph Roth, Erich Maria Remarque, Erich Kästner, and others. Without career and lacking direction, he wanders Europe, spending years in Sweden doing odd jobs, and returns to Vienna shortly before the Wall Street crash of 1929.

The penultimate chapter documents Karl’s final years of unemployment, homelessness, and poverty as he fulfills the fate that the opening chapter

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suggests was in any case determined some ten years before his birth. The novel concludes with a moment of sickening realization: “daß er das Un-glück hatte, in das zwanzigste Jahrhundert geboren zu werden und daß ihm nichts helfen kann, es sei denn, dieses Jahrhundert hülfe vorerst sich selbst” (245; his chief misfortune had been to be born at the close of the nineteenth century and to grow up in the twentieth; he knew, now, that nothing could help him unless the century learned how to help itself out of its dilemma, 322). Karl’s suicide in February 1931 is presented indirectly, in the form of a short newspaper report, and is juxtaposed with another report announcing that the monetary value of the chemicals and minerals in the human body comes to four marks exactly. The narrator never allows the reader to lose sight of Karl’s fate, and the chronology of Karl’s life is punctuated through-out by the aforementioned documentary material. The links between the data and Karl’s life become clearer as he grows older, but the manner in which the two strands are intertwined from the start suggests to the reader that in this story Karl’s life will not be his to control. The abrupt transition from micro- to macronarrative in the following sequence of sentences de-scribing a brief, seemingly idyllic period in which the young Karl is in the countryside to recover from rickets, is entirely typical:

Das kleine Weib nahm wieder eine Haue und ging in die schrägen Weinberge mit und der kleine Kerl rutschte im Hof zwischen den Hühnern umher. Japan führte gegen China seinen ersten imperialis-tischen Krieg, in Amerika begann man elektrisch zu pflügen, elektrisch zu rechnen und elektrisch zu heizen. Auf dem Hof um den kleinen Kerl aber roch es nach Sommer und Honig. (28)

[The little woman went to work in the vineyards, while Karl rolled about in the yard among the chickens. Japan was at war with China — the island empire’s first imperialistic war. In the United States the use of electric power was spreading — for driving ploughs, for heating, and what not. But where Karl played among the chickens the air smelt of summer and of honey. (32)]

As this quotation demonstrates, the intermedial influence of cinematic mon-tage editing of the type pioneered by the Soviet director-theorists in the 1920s is discernible throughout the text; its impact frequently relies upon ironic juxtaposition and implied association (what Eisenstein sees as an “at-traction”). Brunngraber’s postnaturalistic approach to narrative is thus self-consciously constructed, discouraging total immersion in the story. Even at the basic narrative level, significant figures are depersonalized and emptied of traditional markers of character by a coldly observant omniscient narrator (the mother, for example, is routinely reduced to “das kleine Weib,” the lit-tle woman). The intention, it would seem, is a heightened level of “objectiv-ity,” linking the text with the style of Neue Sachlichkeit attributed to writers


such Hans Fallada, Erich Kästner, Erik Reger, Gabriele Tergit, Joseph Roth, and Irmgard Keun.

Ironically the novel’s plot exposes the inhumanity of excessive “Sachlich-keit,” but does so, as Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler observes, by adopting “ein von demselben Pragmatismus bestimmter Stil” (a style determined by the same pragmatism).13 This style has nevertheless ensured that Brunngraber’s novel is sometimes bracketed with a literary group associated not with Aus-tria but with Germany of the mid to late Weimar Republic, and in particular with intellectual debates that had their focus in Berlin, its liberal publishing houses, and literary responses to that city. Fallada, Kästner, Roth, and Keun may not have originated in Berlin but their work of the late 1920s and early 1930s is decisively shaped by their experience of the German capital, its press, and the cultural debates conducted in the pages of publications such as the Berliner Tageblatt, Der Querschnitt, Die Literarische Welt, Die Welt-bühne, and Die Neue Rundschau.

Brunngraber is exceptional in having no ties to Berlin or Weimar Ger-many in this period; His novel, though published in Germany,14 is set for the most part in the same working-class Vienna in which Brunngraber was born, the only exceptions being the two central, partly autobiographical chapters documenting Karl’s war service on the eastern front and in Italy, and the years he spends seeking work in Sweden. Brunngraber himself, apart from a period working in various capacities in Scandinavia during the 1920s, was based in Vienna for his entire career. Is Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert there-fore to be considered, as Ernst Fischer suggests, an “österr[eichischer] Beitrag zur Literatur der ‘Neuen Sachlichkeit’” (Austrian contribution to the litera-ture of the “New Objectivity”)?15 Brunngraber was clearly responding to transnational phenomena and to many of the same influences and ideas as German and German-based authors. His text certainly reveals a similar desire to transcend the sentimentality and subjectivity of expressionism, and to respond to the demands of a rapidly changing, industrialized society. At the same time, it is important to note that in certain key respects it diverges from the formal and stylistic patterns of German novels of this period.

Situating Brunngraber’s work has been rendered particularly difficult by the slow evolution of research into literary Neue Sachlichkeit.16 It has had to differentiate its object of study from the Neue Sachlichkeit of the visual arts, which is customarily, though arguably inaccurately, treated as the original application of the term and inspiration for the “objective” approach to other arts. Academic interest for many years has been stifled, in part by the manner in which, as we have seen, the term was subject to critique and rejection even in the period of its greatest influence. Influential, damning verdicts on the “documentary” in literature were published by Marxist thinkers includ-ing Brecht, Lukács, Bloch, Benjamin, and others. Although they differed in many of their fundamental beliefs about the value and function of literature, they shared with many liberal commentators a belief that, by suppressing

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subjectivity and individual judgment, contemporary literature risked becoming both superficial and resignatory.17 These arguments have been augmented by Helmut Lethen’s suggestion that the political neutrality (“Entideologisie-rung” [de-ideologization]) and passive “Opferperspektive” (victim’s perspec-tive) of some Neue Sachlichkeit texts helped prepare the ground for Hitler.18 This rather unfair contention, which functionalizes literature in a problem-atic way, would be more convincing if the definition of Neue Sachlichkeit accommodated works by, for example, Arnolt Bronnen and Ernst Jünger.

More recently, a systematic attempt has been made to move toward a discussion of Neue Sachlichkeit as a definable aesthetic classification. Sabine Becker’s research, for example, presents it in terms of clear literary categories and attempts in so doing to define a broadly consistent “canon” of neusach-lich literary texts; too often the term has been applied as a flexible catchall description of almost any cultural product of the 1920s and early 1930s.19 Becker identifies some twenty-five novels, published between 1927 and 1933, to which the term may fruitfully be applied.20 She attempts to isolate the qualities these novels share and outlines some fifteen related categories, some of which do indeed apply to Brunngraber’s novel, although crucially a number certainly do not.21 The novel shares at least four distinct qualities with texts meeting Becker’s key criteria for novels of the Neue Sachlichkeit, such as Hans Fallada’s Kleiner Mann — was nun? (Little Man — What Now?, 1932) or Erich Kästner’s Fabian (1931): it is a Zeitroman (novel dealing with contemporary society) that makes conspicuous use of “authentic” material, and facts;22 it is intended to reflect everyday life for the majority;23 it employs a deliberately reserved or “sober” language;24 and it dispenses with the “[f]a-bulierende und artistische Ausgestattung” (plot-orientated, self-conscious artistry) typical of much popular fiction.25 A closer examination of these points of contact between Brunngraber’s novel and those of his German contemporaries — which might be said to form a “canon” of the Neue Sach-lichkeit — not only helps contextualize it as an interwar Viennese narrative but also allows us to relativize the categorical claims that have, as we shall see, been made about the influence of Neurath upon Brunngraber.

Like Kleiner Mann — was nun?, Fabian, and a number of socially criti-cal Zeitromane of the early 1930s, Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert foregrounds the importance of a career for characters who may also be understood as rep-resentative social types.26 Like Fallada and Kästner, Brunngraber is concerned with the impact of the Great Depression on the middle class of employees, on those people who have done all they can to “better” themselves through education and hard work, but who are powerless in the face of economic forces beyond their control. A sense of social outrage informs these texts, and there are clear parallels between the concluding sections of Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert and Kleiner Mann — was nun?; in both texts joblessness is perceived by the protagonists not just in terms of economic hardship but as a socially stigmatized, almost shameful state. Fallada’s protagonist recognizes


that: “Armut ist nicht nur Elend, Armut ist auch strafwürdig” (Poverty is not only misery; poverty is also worthy of punishment).27 This is echoed in Karl’s discovery “daß ihn die Arbeitslosigkeit zum Halbkriminellen stempelt” (218; that being [. . .] out of work made him a semi-criminal, 285).

Karl, it is clear from the outset, is intended as a sort of Everyman, and Brunngraber shares with a number of his better-known Berlin counterparts a concern that might be characterized as socialist-realist in spirit if not in ex-ecution: to be representative and to reflect everyday life as experienced by the majority. The urban setting of the novel, though not necessarily typical of Austria as a whole, clearly reflects a mode of living that, in the industrial-ized nations, was increasingly becoming the norm. The cultural specificity of Vienna is less important, then, than the fact that as a city it was subject to the same influences as other urban centers around the world. Stereotypically Viennese reference points are avoided: the representation of Vienna focuses exclusively on the squalor and hunger of the poor in Vorstadt (suburban) districts such as Hernals and Favoriten. The city is a threatening, punishing place in the novel: “Da fühlt er sich von der Stadt wie von einem tausen-darmigen Henker bedroht” (227; The town had him in its grip as if it had been an executioner with a thousand arms, 297). A significant moment comes with Karl’s admission that part of his problem is that he, like many, has no reliable sense of a predictable routine (“Alltag,” 227). There are par-allels with attempts made in a number of other depictions of urban and industrial conditions in this period, in, for example, works by Fallada, Erik Reger, Ernst Erich Noth, or in the much-admired social realism of the American novelist Upton Sinclair, to bear witness to and document the harsh economic realities of contemporary life and their potential human and po-litical consequences.

These observations help to explain Brunngraber’s use of deliberately re-served or “sober” language, which is intended to be comprehensible and clear. There is often conscious irony in the contrast between the neutral tone of the distanced narrative voice, and the desperate situation being described:

Am nächsten Auszahlungstag erhält Karl wieder nichts. Ich habe keinen Zahlungsauftrag, sagt der Kassier hinterm Schalter, während er nach der Quittung von Karls Hintermann greift. Nun ist zu erwähnen, daß Karl seither auch seinen Winterrock, genau gesagt seinen Ulster, versetzt hat. Er geht abermals wie in einer Betäubung auf das große Tor zu. Draußen regnet es. Karl beginnt zu rennen, um noch vor zwölf Uhr in der Industriellen Bezirkskommission zu sein. (218)

[When pay-day came round again there was nothing for Karl. “I have no instructions to pay you anything,” said the cashier, reaching out beyond Karl for the receipt of the man who followed him. Meanwhile, Karl had had to pawn his overcoat to get food. Once more in hopeless perplexity

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he went out through the great gates. It was raining. He had to run in or-der to reach the Industrial Departmental Committee before noon. (286)]

This employment of fairly simple sentence structure and minimally descrip-tive statements, which attain power through their accumulation, is typical for Brunngraber.

The simple syntax and reserved register is in keeping with a narrative that eschews the patterns typical of popular fiction — suspense and revela-tion, reversals of fortune and the like — in favor of documenting what the narrator terms, repeatedly, “das Unentrinnbare” (43; the inevitable, 52), the protagonist’s slow descent into poverty and despair. There are points of comparison here, again, with the story arcs of terminal decline in Fabian, Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Artificial Silk Girl, 1932), and Re-marque’s Der Weg zurück (The Way Back, 1931), although it is telling that whereas the unemployed male protagonist of Fallada’s novel is ultimately saved from suicidal despair through the love of his family, Karl Lakner has no such anchor, and kills himself.

Despite these points of comparison, however, Brunngraber’s novel dif-fers in a number of stylistic, narratological, and structural aspects from the majority listed by Becker. Many novels of the Neue Sachlichkeit employ what the technophile Erik Reger termed “Präzisionsästhetik” (an aesthetics of precision), an approach that reflects the influence not just of technology but also of journalism.28 Becker suggests that this proximity to journalistic prac-tice — with many authors simultaneously working as journalists — has two consequences: firstly, the replacement of the traditional omniscient narrator through an observing reporter-narrator (Reger’s “Vivisekteur der Zeit,” vivisectionist of the age), who may or may not be a character in the text, and, secondly, the incorporation of documentary material into fictional texts in a form of montage.29 The opening sentence, as already observed above, makes immediately clear that Brunngraber’s text does indeed employ an om-niscient narrator, who, by seeing both the life of Karl in Vienna and disparate events happening simultaneously around the world (and thereby seeing the influence the latter will have on the former) plays a fundamental role in the novel.

The apparent parallels between Brunngraber’s technique and the type of aggressive, non-naturalistic film editing made famous by Eisenstein in par-ticular have inevitably shaped the novel’s reception, inviting comparison not just with the cinema but with contemporary literary responses to the cinema and to montage. Becker argues, as have others, that Karl und das 20. Jahr-hundert displays “die offene Form der Montage” (the open form of mon-tage).30 However, although comparison is certainly justified, Brunngraber’s montage technique for the most part serves a different purpose from that exemplified in the literary work of Erik Reger, Edlef Köppen, and above all in Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). In Döblin’s text the polyphonic


discourse of the metropolis (restlessly presented through advertising slogans, newspaper reports, random conversations, and the like) not only provides a colorful context for Franz Biberkopf’s story but becomes an end in itself, an autonomous element within the narrative, the textual realization of the mod-ern urban environment as a synesthetic, mass phenomenon. Only in the final chapter, when a destitute Karl stands before a display of news photographs, listens to public radio broadcasts, and peruses advertising slogans does Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert feature such polyphony. In other words, it is only when the protagonist is actually confronted with a form of montage that the narrative presents one. Whereas Döblin’s cinematic technique enriches yet also relativizes the story of Franz Biberkopf, the narrator of Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert is, strictly speaking, only concerned with Karl, the protagonist. The juxtaposition of his story with statistics and apparently unrelated infor-mation is intended to demonstrate that to understand why things happen in Karl’s life, to isolate the causes of the effects that become visible in him, one must look beyond Karl. Karl himself, we are told repeatedly, is unable to see the world in terms of these connections: “Der kleine Mann sieht heute ge-meinhin noch weniger als in früheren Zeiten das Ende der Fäden, an denen er hängt” (163–64; The ordinary man is no more able to-day than he was of old to see the other end of the rope to which he is clinging, 214). The nar-rator thus explores the connections for him so that the reader, at least, will understand not merely the consequences but the root causes of problems.

In this way, the novel embodies a hypernaturalistic approach to history and narrative that seeks, above all, to show the interconnectedness of things. The opening chapter, which describes events before Karl’s birth, is part of a single narrative thread, constructed not just to tell his story from birth to death but to allow us to understand this story in context. The underlying logic, which presents a narrative of world history primarily in terms of eco-nomic interests, is impeccable if tendentious: Karl’s unemployment, despair, and death in 1932 may be traced back to Taylor’s ideas about the rationali-zation of industry, their implementation in American and eventually global business, and the resultant sacrifice of jobs and job satisfaction at the altar of profit and consumption. The First World War is presented as an avoidable calamity, initiated and unnecessarily prolonged by the mutual interests of the arms industries. The chaos of its aftermath is seen as a direct consequence of the ill-conceived Treaty of Versailles, the collapse of trade and industry in what the narrator terms the “Krüppelstaat Österreich” (205; the crippled State of Austria, 268), and, ultimately, the worldwide economic crisis caused by an excess of production. All of this is not just implied, but spelled out in text-book detail. In this respect, then, the novel differs markedly from texts (such as Fallada’s) in which, as Becker notes, only self-contained “kurze Lebens-abschnitte” (brief sections of a life) are presented, with neither the prehistory nor the future development of a character forming part of the narrative.31

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The holistic conception of Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert, by contrast, demands precisely such an expansive chronological framework. The narrator must also consider the larger, global picture in order to document the key stages in Karl’s childhood during the fin de siècle, and the subsequent pro-cess of gradual disillusionment and realization that his opportunities in life are limited by external factors, such as his alcoholic, abusive father’s financial irresponsibility. The manner in which this is done, with history conceived as an escalating process of systematic and continuous exploitation of the vul-nerable by the powerful, clearly reflects a socialist outlook. Indeed, the analysis of power relations in terms of economic interests, with its critique of the consequences of rationalization and the dangerous concentration of eco-nomic power in the hands of a limited number of trusts, cartels, and concerns, is entirely consistent with and almost certainly influenced by Austro-Marxist thinking in the 1920s. In the “Linzer Programm” (Linz Program) published in 1926 by the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (SDAPÖ; Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria) and usually credited to Otto Bauer, we find a prescient analysis of capitalism expressed in precisely these terms: “Jede Vervollkommnung der Maschinerie, jede Rationaliserung des Produk-tionsprozesses, die die Ergiebigkeit der Arbeit steigert, macht zugleich Arbeitskräfte entbehrlich und stürzt dadurch Arbeiter und Angestellte in das Elend der Arbeitslosigkeit” (Every step toward perfecting machinery, and all moves to rationalize the production process in order to increase work pro-ductivity at the same time are making workers disposable and in the process plunging workers and employees into the misery of unemployment).32 De-spite this aggressive critique of rationalization, the party saw itself during the 1920s as a representative of a confrontational modernity “im Bunde mit allen Tendenzen der ‘Neuen Sachlichkeit’” (in keeping with all the tenden-cies of the “New Objectivity”) above all in the reforms it carried out in Vienna. In its advocacy of modern, functional housing and active, “hygienic” lifestyles it took a stand, as Alfred Pfoser has argued, against the “bürgerliche Schnörkelwelt” (bourgeois world of ornament) of the Habsburg monarchy, and the “Vergangenheitskult” (cult of the past) of the Catholic Church.33 One might also remark, however, that SDAPÖ’s commitment to Klassen-kampf (class struggle) is not reflected in the bleak determinism of the Karl’s situation, from which there appears to be no prospect of escaping. Repeat-edly, Karl’s naïve assumptions about life and fate — and in particular his certainty that with determination one can “sich durchsetzen in der Welt” (62; push [. . .] one’s way through life, 76) — are revealed to be flawed, not just through Karl’s limited perspective but through the more expansive perspective offered by the narrator. This observation does not, however, demand that we therefore view Brunngraber’s novel through the lens of Lethen’s critical appraisal of what he terms the passively objective “weißer Sozialismus” (white socialism) of German bourgeois writers. With the multi-layered narrative in mind, it makes more sense to view the novel as a text


designed to activate the reader, and in so doing to enlighten and to educate; this quality, although it arises through the text’s calculated “Sachlichkeit,” is certainly not typical of literary Neue Sachlichkeit.

The points of convergence between Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert and contemporary novels such as Kleiner Mann, was nun? or Fabian must be noted with caution, for there are at least as many discrepancies. The key dif-ference lies in the underlying conviction, evident in both the form and con-tent of Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert, that to understand some particular thing it cannot be viewed in isolation, but must be seen in a larger context, a network of relations and connections. This analytical approach to narrative contrasts markedly with the far narrower focus typical of Berlin “social” novels. Where, as in Döblin, Vicki Baum, or Keun, a more expansive sense of the city is built into the narrative, this is often generated through the ran-dom encounters and exhilarating coincidences of city streets and hotel lob-bies. Randomness plays no role in Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert, in which there is a far greater sense of time, of the weight of history, and of the point-lessness of romanticism. Like Fabian, the eponymous “moralist” of Kästner’s novel of urban alienation and unemployment, Karl feels out of place in the postwar world, as if he belonged to an “überholte[r] Menschenschlag” (150; Karl [. . .] found himself a back number, 196), but unlike in Fabian, we witness this as the end point in a process, at the start of which Karl believes, like his father, in “Gott, Kaiser, Fortschritt und Ordnung” (41; God, the Emperor, Progress, Law and Order, 50). In this sense it is no accident that Vienna is the primary setting for the novel. Through the prism of Karl’s life we witness Vienna’s passage from imperial capital, convinced of its impor-tance in the world, to provincial outpost at the mercy of global economics.

If the text is therefore to be understood as an analytical, Austrian varia-tion on the literature of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the explanation for this distinctive approach relates, in part, to Brunngraber’s Viennese background. I have already noted the apparent influence of Austro-Marxist thought on the underlying political analysis of the world evident in the text. However, it is Brunngraber’s association with the polymath writer, educationalist, philo-sopher, and scientist Otto Neurath, and in particular with the latter’s Gesell-schafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Social and Economic Museum, or GWM) in Vienna, that is most often highlighted in discussions of the novel, par-ticularly in Austria.34 There is no question that Neurath was an influential figure in Brunngraber’s life and that Brunngraber’s work at the museum, the encouragement given him by Neurath, and his absorption of Neurath’s so-called Wiener Methode (Vienna Method) of statistical analysis were crucial inspirations for Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert. By the late 1920s Neurath was a firmly established figure in the intellectual life of interwar Vienna, known for his original ideas, which integrated disparate fields of expertise, and for his pas-sionate political conviction that these ideas could effect social change.

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An academic whose studies had combined economics and ancient his-tory, Neurath had worked as an economist during the First World War before participating in the failed Munich Räteregierung (Soviet-style govern-ment) in 1919. The combination of an economist’s analytical and statistical understanding of the world with a desire to communicate and educate in the most efficient way inspired the founding of the GWM in 1925. The museum showcased Neurath’s ideas, realized in collaboration with a team of re-searchers and other creative minds, and put into practice an original visual means of describing and analyzing contemporary reality. The “Wiener Me-thode der Bildstatistik” (Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics) was devel-oped with the German socialist artist and designer Gerd Arntz, rationalized through Neurath’s contact with Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap in the Vi-enna Circle, and tested during the radical overhaul of Vienna’s education system under Otto Glöckel. It was intended not so much to simplify in-formation about the world as to organize it in a comprehensible manner, allowing above all comparative overviews of the connections between em-pirical facts (“the interconnectedness of knowledge”), and prompting discus-sion.35 The idea was to empower, so that workers, for example, would not only be able to educate themselves through statistics, but would also be able to employ them to understand capitalist society as a whole and better their situation: “Erst mit dem Instrument der Statistik geling[t] es, die kapitalis-tische Gesellschaft in ihrer Ganzheit zu erfassen und sie anzuklagen” (Only with the instrument of statistics is one able to grasp capitalist society as a whole and to accuse it).36 At the heart of Neurath’s obsessive pursuit of facts, then, was a passionate desire to help the masses. He was aware that statistics had the potential to make the realities of everyday life they are intended to describe seem remote or abstract; this was the opposite of his intention. Writing in 1928, he stated: “Die statistische Denkweise entfernt nicht vom lebendigen Menschen, sie führt zum lebendigem Menschen hin. [. . .] Alles, was der bildhaften Veranschaulichung gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhänge dient, dient [. . .] letzten Endes der Menschlichkeit” (The statistical way of thinking does not distance us from the living human being, but leads us to-ward the living human being. [. . .] Everything that serves to visualize social connections through images ultimately serves humanity).37

The similarities to the methods employed by Brunngraber are apparent, and their development can be traced in his biography. Neurath seems to have recognized in Brunngraber something of his own combination of the creative, analytical, and political. In the late 1920s, he encouraged Brunn-graber (at that stage a practicing commercial artist) to consider writing a modern, “social” novel, dramatizing, as Fuchs puts it, “die Abhängigkeit des Individuums von den großen Zusammenhängen in Technik, Wirtschaft und Politik” (the individual’s dependency upon the broad connections between technology, economics, and politics).38 At the same time, Brunngraber began to work as a “soziologisch interessierter Volontär” (sociologically interested


intern) at the GWM, in which research capacity he had the practical oppor-tunity to educate himself intensively in economics and sociology. During this period, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he also worked as a Bildungs-referent (educational adviser) for the Social Democrats in Vienna. He was thus able to combine a practical commitment to education and socialist ideas; a conviction of the power of global trends in technology and eco-nomics to influence our lives; and the practical experience at Neurath’s GWM of using statistics as a means to demonstrate this. The narrative method of Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert translates these elements into prose, and as such has been described by Gerhard Kaldewei as “das zweite Zeugnis des Neurathschen Ideengebäudes” (the second testimonial to Neurath’s ideas) after the GWM.39 It is, however, debatable whether it is legitimate to consider the novel solely as a sort of literary extension of Neurath’s ideas, of interest only insofar as Neurath’s own work is. To interpret the novel as a mere “product” of another writer’s ideas both downgrades the status of Brunn-graber as author of the text and discourages the exploration of other inter-national contexts and interpretations.

That said, there are indeed passages in the text in which Brunngraber’s narrator inserts statistics in a manner that bears the stamp of Neurath’s pictorial statistics, with the intention not merely of informing in a neutral manner but of drawing a comparison or of translating abstract figures into something concrete. Perhaps the best example of this is to be found in the novel’s account of the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The nar-rator provides a figure for the financial cost of the war: a fifth of the total wealth in the world has been spent — 126 billion dollars spent by the Allies, 61 billion by the Central powers. This figure is then translated into a hypo-thetical list of things the money might have been spent on, such as homes and schools. The list may well derive from the GWM, and would certainly not have been out of place there. However, whereas Neurath remained con-vinced of the translation of complex data into simple, easy-to-understand visual stimuli, employing an icon-based symbolic language that was intended to be internationally comprehensible (later christened ISOTYPE), this ap-proach could hardly be applied in a novel — or at least one for adults.40 Schmidt-Dengler suggests “daß gerade in diesem Roman das von dem Lehrer Neurath gebotene Prinzip der statistischen Welterfassung problema-tisch wird”41 (that in this novel in particular Neurath’s principle of under-standing the world through statistics becomes problematic). What he means, in an echo of the canonical approach to the history of the novel touched on above, is that the statistical data lacks a human element, and that a novel requires “das Individuum” as a mediator for this data. Although fair up to a point, this criticism seems to assume that the novelist’s task should have been to “fuse” these two levels in the manner described by Ronald Taylor (see the beginning of this essay) and, in a sense, misses the point: in Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert Brunngraber attempts not just to humanize the

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statistics by providing Karl as a sort of case study of their relevance but also, crucially, to narrativize them. In this the novel is at its most original. The statistics are not juxtaposed, montage-style, with Karl’s story, but, as I pre-viously argued, are in fact a part of that story.

One can, then, justly claim that Brunngraber’s novel is an example of Austrian Neue Sachlichkeit, and that its Austrianness to a large extent derives not just from its Austrian setting but from the narrative adaptation of Neurath’s educational statistical methods. It should also be understood as part of an ongoing global response to the impact of rationalization, and in particular to the theories and methods of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford. Their prominence in the narrative reflects the iconic status and indeed noto-riety of their methods, which aimed to boost efficiency and to save compa-nies time and money, but which arguably also resulted in job losses, worker alienation, and a cycle of consumption and overproduction resulting in the Wall Street crash of 1929. If Taylor and Ford epitomize the twentieth century, Karl is an anachronism, an idea reinforced in the design of the first edition (to which Brunngraber, the former commercial artist, must surely have consented), on the cover of which the word “Karl” is set in gothic type whilst “und das 20. Jahrhundert” is set in a modern roman font. His costly and time-consuming commitment to becoming a teacher rather than a manual worker, his perversely impractical attitude toward time, his reluc-tance to accept money from others: all suggest Brunngraber conceived him as a sort of anti-Taylorist hero. Despite this, the novel’s response to Taylor-ism is ambivalent, for Taylor’s ideas about efficiency and communication, perhaps ironically, almost certainly helped shape Neurath’s theories. The novel employs a narrative form that echoes what Bruce Robbins has said of the way Taylorism generated narratives as part of its effort to “professionalize efficiency systems”: “A story of the professionalization of narrative — how narrative is refitted as a knowledge base — is also a narrative of profession-alization.”42 Martha Banta makes a related point when she observes that stories that seek to challenge management practices often turn out to employ the “same devices” as these practices.43 Brunngraber’s authoritative, rational-ist narrator is obsessed with the validity of empirical data and of the connec-tions between things. He aims, to use John Dewey’s phrase, to “state things as interconnected parts of a mechanism.”44 It is hard not to conclude this about Brunngraber’s novel: a text aiming to expose the brutality of the twentieth century is, perhaps inevitably, very much a part and product of that century.


Notes

1 Although the published translation is sometimes rather free, it is from this version that I have drawn the English translations of quotations from the text: Rudolf Brunngraber, A Twentieth-Century Tragedy, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Lovat Dickson, 1933). Subsequent references to this edition appear in parentheses following the quoted text. All other translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 2 See Christoph Fuchs, “Rudolf Brunngraber, 1901–1960,” Literatur und Kritik 317–18 (September 1997): 103–9; here 103. Fuchs notes that Brunngraber’s sales exceeded one million and that his novels were translated into eighteen languages. 3 Claudio Magris, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Harvill, 1997), 72. 4 There is no published biography of Rudolf Brunngraber; persistent inconsistencies give reason to doubt some of the biographical data provided in published sources that are in some way concerned with his work. Bearing this in mind, perhaps the most useful and accessible summary of the key facts of Brunngraber’s life and career is that provided by Fuchs in his article “Rudolf Brunngraber,” upon which I have relied for the biographical details included here. 5 Fuchs, “Rudolf Brunngraber,” 103. 6 Ronald Taylor, Literature and Society in Germany, 1918–1945 (Brighton, England: Harvester, 1980), 113. 7 This is the title of a chapter in Weimarer Republik: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur, 1918–1933, ed. Anton Kaes (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983), 319–45. See also David Midgley’s thorough account of the problematic turn toward “reality” in literature in his Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918–1933 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), esp. 14–56. Sabine Becker systematically analyzes the various dimensions of “neusachliche[r] Ästhetik” in Neue Sachlichkeit, vol. 1: Die Ästhetik der neusachlichen Literatur, 1920–1933 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), esp. 196–230. 8 Becker, Die Ästhetik der neusachlichen Literatur, 196–97. 9 Joseph Roth, Werke, vol. 4, ed. Fritz Hackert and Klaus Westermann (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989–91), 391. 10 Siegfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten: aus dem neuesten Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 16. 11 Rudolf Brunngraber, Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Steidl, 1999), 11. Subsequent references to this edition appear in parentheses following the quoted text. 12 This term is inconsistently translated in the published translation; its meaning is perhaps best conveyed as “humdrum lot” (72). 13 Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, “Statistik und Roman: Über Otto Neurath und Rudolf Brunngraber,” in Arbeiterbildung in der Zwischenkriegszeit: Otto Neurath — Gerd Arntz, ed. Friedrich Stadler (Vienna: Löcker, 1982), 119–24; here 122. 14 First edition: Rudolf Brunngraber, Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag, 1933).

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15 Ernst Fischer, “Brunngraber, Rudolf,” in Walther Killy Literaturlexikon: Autoren und Werke deutscher Sprache (Berlin: Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, 1998), 2855–57; here 2856. 16 Sabine Becker’s monograph, with an accompanying volume of primary materials, is the most recent and comprehensive study of Neue Sachlichkeit treated as a specifically German phenomenon. See also Becker’s useful, systemtic overview of neusachlich novels in Becker, “Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman,” in Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman: Neue Interpretationen zum Roman der Weimarer Republik, ed. Sabine Becker and Christoph Weiss (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 7–26. Other studies worthy of mention here include: Helmut Lethen, Neue Sachlichkeit, 1924–1932: Studien zur Literatur des “weissen Sozialismus” (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1970); and Midgley, Writing Weimar, 14–56. 17 See Bertolt Brecht’s notes on the Neue Sachlichkeit in Brecht, Werke: Große kom-mentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. 11, ed. Werner Hecht et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 352–56; Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit: Erweiterte Ausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), 212–28; Georg Lukács, “Reportage oder Gestaltung” (1932), in Lukács, Werke, vol. 4 (Neuwied, Germany: Luchterhand, 1971), 35–68; Walter Benjamin, “Linke Melancholie,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 279–83. Becker has collected many of the key critical responses to Neue Sachlichkeit in the second volume of her 2000 study. 18 See Lethen, Neue Sachlichkeit, esp. 93–94, 175. 19 See, in particular, the reception history and introductory discussion in Becker, Die Ästhetik der neusachlichen Literatur, esp. 27–45. 20 Becker, “Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman,” 9. Brunngraber’s novel is included in this list, but omitted from her 2000 monograph. 21 Becker, Die Ästhetik der neusachlichen Literatur, 97–256. 22 See Becker, “Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman,” 10; idem, Die Ästhetik der neusachlichen Literatur, 149, 205 and following citations. 23 See Becker, Die Ästhetik der neusachlichen Literatur, 153. 24 See Becker, Die Ästhetik der neusachlichen Literatur, 116. 25 Becker, “Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman,” 11. See also Becker, Die Ästhetik der neu-sachlichen Literatur, 242–49. 26 See Becker, “Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman,” 10. 27 Hans Fallada, Kleiner Mann — was nun? (Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 2000), 412. 28 Walter Enkenbach [pseud. Erik Reger], “Die Erneuerung des Menschen durch den technischen Geist oder: Das genau gebohrte Loch,” in Becker, Neue Sachlichkeit, vol. 2: Quellen und Dokumente (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 87–89; here 87. 29 Becker, “Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman,” 12. 30 Becker, “Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman,” 12. 31 Becker, “Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman,” 13. 32 “Programm der Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschösterreichs: Beschlos-sen vom Parteitag zu Linz am 3. November 1926,” in Austromarxismus: Texte


zu”Ideologie und Klassenkampf,” ed. Hans-Jörg Sandkühler and Rafael de la Vega (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1970), 378–402; here 378–79. 33 Alfred Pfoser, Literatur und Austromarxismus (Vienna: Löcker, 1980), 44. 34 See Schmidt-Dengler, “Statistik und Roman”; see also Gerhard Kaldewei, “‘Karl und das 20. Jahhundert’: ein Roman von Rudolf Brunngraber (1932) als epische Form der statistisch-pädagogischen Denkweise Otto Neuraths,” in Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur mit Geographie 36, no. 2 (1992): 82–92. 35 Elisabeth Nemeth, “Otto Neurath’s Vision of Science between Utopia and Encyclo-pedia,” in Encyclopedia and Utopia: The Life and Work of Otto Neurath, Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, 4, ed. Elisabeth Nemeth and Friedrich Stadler (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1996), 7–13; here 7. 36 Fuchs, “Rudolf Brunngraber,” 105. 37 Otto Neurath “Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf,” in Neurath, Gesammelte philosophische und methodologische Schriften, ed. Rudolf Haller and Heiner Rutte, vol. 1 (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1981), 227–93; here 280. 38 Fuchs, “Rudolf Brunngraber,” 103. 39 Kaldewei, “‘Karl und das 20. Jahhundert,’” 85. 40 ISOTYPE is an acronym of the International System of Typographic Picture Education. Neurath’s conviction of the value of pictorial representation of statistics derived from his observation of the impact and immediacy of the cinema and modern advertisements. See Angela Jansen, “Isotype and Infographics,” in Nemeth and Stadler, eds., Encyclopedia and Utopia, 143–56; here 144. 41 Schmidt-Dengler, “Statistik und Roman,” 122. 42 Quoted in Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Production in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), 14. 43 Banta, Taylored Lives, 16. Banta also observes: “Embedded within these texts are narratives that follow the tradition of the Bildungsroman, in which the hero approaches truth gradually through empirical means” (17). 44 Quoted in Banta, Taylored Lives, 16.

11: The Viennese Legacy of Casanova: The Late Erotic Writings of Arthur Schnitzler and Franz Blei

Birgit Lang

CCORDING TO PAUL ENGLISCH, that meticulous historian of erotic lite-rature, Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) and Franz Blei (1871–42) were

both eroticists, a reputation they still possess to the present day. The two Vienna-based writers did indeed have a passion for the depiction of erotic motifs. Arthur Schnitzler, who is best known for his socially critical accounts of fin-de-siècle bourgeois Vienna, did so most famously in his play Reigen (La Ronde, 1897).1 The less well known Franz Blei, recognized today for his satirical portrayal of his fellow writers in Das grosse Bestiarium der modernen Literatur (The Grand Literary Bestiarium, 1920), edited numerous volumes of erotic world literature and translated writers as prominent as Oscar Wilde and André Gide. Both Schnitzler and Blei participated in the clandestine erotic culture that flourished in Vienna before the First World War, which was characterized by censorship and taboos. Their literary careers continued well into the First Austrian (and Weimar) Republic. Most studies of erotic literature, however, do not extend beyond the First World War period.2

This essay will examine the later erotic writings of Schnitzler and Blei in order to demonstrate that toward the end of the First World War, and in anticipation of radical political change, both writers turned to Casanova for inspiration, thus creating a second wave of Viennese Casanova adaptations that featured the aging womanizer and his engagement with youth. In con-trast to the immediate fin de siècle, in which Casanova had served as an iden-tification figure for young bourgeois men, Schnitzler and Blei now used the Casanova figure to voice a generational critique of society. Although neither Schnitzler’s nor Blei’s underlying political expectations turned out to be ac-curate, this essay will reveal how the legacy of Casanova played out in the works they published during the First Austrian and Weimar Republics.

Franz Blei, Arthur Schnitzler, and Erotic Literature Franz Blei and Arthur Schnitzler were perhaps the most famous Viennese writers to display an interest in the depiction of erotic motifs during the fin

A

THE VIENNESE LEGACY OF CASNOVA ♦ 225

de siècle. Their erotic oeuvre was aimed at a middle- and upper-class audi-ence, and took the form of theater plays or novellas. These works were often published in private editions, which was typical for erotic literature of the time.3 Neither writer saw the erotic aspect of their works primarily as a means of selling more copies and — at least in the period prior to the First World War — neither focused solely on erotic motifs. For Schnitzler and Blei ero-ticism was the expression of a personal philosophy through aesthetic means.4 This is not to say that both did not occasionally profit from the scandalous reception of their work, but they were also subjected to censorship, slander, and even occasional persecution.

Despite their common investment in matters erotic, comparing Franz Blei and Arthur Schnitzler nevertheless seems slightly incongruous, so vast are the differences between the two writers. Schnitzler was a renowned play-wright and novelist and had been part of the literary establishment for dec-ades. He remains a famous writer to the present day, whereas Blei’s success was more short-lived. As Murray G. Hall has stated, “Franz Blei ist heute bestenfalls denjenigen näher bekannt, die sich eingehend mit Autoren wie Robert Musil [. . .] und anderen beschäftigen oder viel in literarischen Zei-tungen und Zeitschriften [. . .] schmökern” (At best Franz Blei is known to readers who are engaged in studying authors such as Robert Musil [. . .] and others or who bury themselves in literary newspapers and magazines).5 De-spite some recent reissues of Blei’s works, this verdict still holds true.6 Blei was a satirist, notable for his role as a literary mediator and commentator of Vienna’s literary circles. While Schnitzler also wrote for a general public, many of Blei’s works written before 1918 belonged to the more exclusive arena of private publications. As Paul Englisch noted concerning the acces-sibility of such works, “Die Zahl der Bücherliebhaber, die sich diesen Luxus gestatten können, ist indessen gering” (The numbers of bibliophiles who can indulge in such luxury are few [279]).

Politically the two writers also stood on different ground. Schnitzler’s position was typical for a middle-class bourgeois Jew. Carl Schorske sees Schnitzler as a representative of a waning political liberalism.7 Blei, however, was influenced both by communism and a brand of radicalized Catholicism. This odd blend would move Karl Kraus satirically to nickname Blei “Abt der roten Garde” (the red abbot).8

In addition to these substantial differences, neither writer liked the other. Blei’s description of Schnitzler in Das grosse Bestiarum der modernen Litera-tur is hardly flattering:

Der Schnitzler. Schnitzler ist der Name eines seinerzeit bei allen Wiener Damen und süßen Mädeln wegen seines melancholischen Feuers sehr beliebten Rennpferdes in der Freudenau, Stallbesitzer Fischer. Man setzte aus Sympathie auf Schnitzler, auch wenn man wußte, daß er nicht einmal auf Platz kommt. Weil Schnitzler so beliebt war [. . .] ist man im

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Jockeiklub übereingekommen, Schnitzler, wenn und solang er rennt, immer Dritter sein zu lassen.9

[The Schnitzler. Schnitzler is the name of a racehorse in the pleasure mead Freudenau [Viennese race track], from the Fischer stable [Schnitzler’s publisher], well loved in his day by all Viennese ladies and sweet maids because of his melancholic fire. Because Schnitzler was so well liked [. . .] the jockey club has agreed to have Schnitzler always come in third, that is, if and as long as he competes].

In his autobiography Blei mentions Schnitzler only in passing, whereas Her-mann Bahr and Hugo von Hofmannsthal both have separate sections de-voted to them.10 Blei only referred to Schnitzler when he defined the “süßes Mädel” as “so eine Art Fausts Gretchen, das das Leben nicht schwerer nahm als es war und es sich nie nahm, außer in Schnitzler’s Liebelei” (a sweet maid similar to Faust’s Gretchen, who never took life harder than it was and never took her own life except in Schnitzler’s [play] Liebelei) [155]).

Schnitzler, for his part, was equally unflattering about Blei. In his diaries he referred to Blei several times as a “Hochstapler” (con man or fraud), along with other disparaging remarks.11 When Schnitzler met him at the house of Alma Mahler-Werfel, he remarked in his diary on the presence of “Werfel, Gütersloh, Blei und ein paar andere junge Menschen der äußersten Linken” (Werfel, Gütersloh, and Blei, plus a couple of other young people from the far-out left).12 Although Schnitzler here commented on their political differences, it was not Blei’s politics but rather his general conduct that appalled him. In 1919 Schnitzler objected to the unauthorized publica-tion of his signature in a Munich newspaper in connection with a protest against the alleged execution of Ernst Toller after the fall of the Bavarian Räterepublik (Soviet Republic).13 Not so Franz Blei, according to Schnitzler:

Blei (und Genossen) danken in der Ztg. dem “mutigen Anonymus” der ihre Unterschriften unter jenen Aufruf gesetzt hatte. [. . .] Die Depriva-tion dieses Literatenvolks (Gütersloh, Werfel — Moissi, die Roland, Ehrenstein auch dabei) dies Gemisch von Opportunismus, Snobismus, Verlogenheit und Schamlosigkeit ist ganz einzig.14

[Blei (and comrades) thank the “courageous anonymous writer” in the newspaper who had signed this petition for them. [. . .] The depravity of these literary types (Gütersloh, Werfel — Moissi, Mrs. Roland, Ehren-stein among them) and the mishmash of opportunism, snobbism, men-dacity, and shamelessness is unparalleled.]

Only days after this incident the two men met at a performance of Blei’s Logik des Herzens (Logic of the Heart, 1916), but Blei’s efforts to appease Schnitzler — whether serious or not — failed.15


The Anticipation of Change: Casanova in the Aftermath of the First World War

It should not come as a surprise that the Jewish liberal Schnitzler and the Catholic revolutionary Blei disagreed politically, and yet they anticipated the political future in similar ways. At the end of the First World War both wri-ters thought a Bolshevik revolution likely, although they judged the out-come of such an event entirely differently. Blei notes in his autobiography:

Im Jahr 1915 hatte ich geschrieben: “Der Krieg hat den schleppenden Gang einer Schwangeren. Er trägt die Frucht eines neuen Wesens in sich, dem Wiege und Windel nicht passen werden, wie auch immer man sie ihm bereitet.” Das Buch — es hieß “Menschliche Betrachtungen zur Politik” — wurde von der Zensur eines deutschen Oberkommandos verboten, trotzdem das gemeinte Wesen nicht genannt war, als welches diese Revolution gemeint war, Aufstand der Zahl und Aufruhr der Seele.16

[In 1915 I wrote: “The war walks with the dragging step of a pregnant woman. It carries the fruit of a new being within itself, which neither cradle nor diaper will accommodate, no matter how they are prepared.” The book, entitled “Human Observations on Politics” was censored by the German supreme command, despite the fact that the said being was not named, as revolution was meant, rebellion of the masses and revolt of the soul.]

The notion of the First World War as a crisis that would bring about a new generation was shared by many intellectuals. Some saw it as a kind of purifi-cation, especially at the beginning of the war, the most prominent example being Thomas Mann in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, 1918), but the perception also fit the communist narrative of the war as a sign of the capitalist crisis that would precede a revolution.17 Schnitzler predicted a revolution as well, but, as was also the case with war, he was only too aware of the human suffering it would cause and its effects on everyone involved. He was highly conscious of the possible violent side effects of radical change and expressed his fear of imminent antisemitic po-groms in his diaries.18

The political changes both authors assumed would follow the First World War were reflected in their erotic writings. Both turned to Casanova to exemplify their views: Franz Blei in a play entitled Casanova (1918) and Arthur Schnitzler in his novella Casanovas Heimfahrt (translated as Casa-nova’s Return to Venice, 1918) and his play Die Schwestern oder Casanova in Spa (The Sisters, or Casanova in Spa, 1919).19 Blei’s and Schnitzler’s late adaptations form a “second wave” in the Viennese literary treatment of this subject matter since both — despite their differences — were able to give the story a new, generational spin.

228 ♦ BIRGIT LANG

Casanova had always been a well-liked character in fin-de-siècle Vienna, and his reception in the early twentieth century spans two decades (1899–1919). In her study Carina Lehnen highlights the importance of the Casa-nova motif around 1900 and stresses its popularity in Viennese literary circles, with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Casanova plays Der Abenteurer und die Sängerin (The Adventurer and the Singer, 1899) and Cristinas Heimreise (Cristina’s Journey Home, 1910)20 as the most famous examples.21 She sug-gests that the reason for Casanova’s frequent appearance in the fin de siècle was a reaction to changing notions of masculinity. Casanova’s powers of seduction made him a more appealing identity figure for young bourgeois men of the time than the brute force of Don Juan (320–21).

The most common depictions in Vienna during this period are of Casa-nova as a man in his prime. His ability to seduce women of varying classes and disparate origins allows him to come into contact with the entire social scale, from the highest to the lowest. In comedy this usually makes him a con man or a gambler who tricks foolish husbands and makes love to their wives. Darker versions describe the disruption he causes, sometimes with a positive outcome and a chance for individual characters to develop further, as in the case of the eponymous main character in Hofmannsthal’s Cristinas Heimreise. Secondary literature, of which Thomas Koebner’s description is representative, has highlighted the ambivalent nature of Casanova represen-tations in the Viennese fin de siècle:

Ein aufgehelltes Genre-Bild vom erotischen Bruder Leichtfuss, der mehr närrisch als weise ist, ein Porträt, dessen Schmelz sich allenfalls als rissig erweist; und ein verdunkeltes Bild vom Ruhm und Ruin eines Mannes, der sich über dem Abgrund in der Schwebe halt.22

[A prettified genre portrait of the womanizer who is more foolish than wise, a picture whose surface turns out to be full of cracks; and a dark portrayal of the renown and ruin of a man hovering over the abyss.]

Schnitzler’s and Blei’s original interest in Casanova also dated from the fin de siècle. Blei published various articles on Casanova and translations of the Italian’s works before writing his own play.23 Among them were two chapters of Casanova’s autobiography, which first appeared in German in Blei’s jour-nal Der Amethyst in 1906. This autobiography was later to become an im-portant inspiration for Schnitzler’s novella Casanovas Heimfahrt.24 In 1908 Schnitzler had started a one-act Casanova play on the theme of jealousy that was to form the basis of Die Schwestern. He did not, however, proceed with it until he had read Heinrich Conrad’s comprehensive new edition of Casa-nova’s memoirs in 1913.25

By the time Blei and Schnitzler returned to the Casanova motif, the First World War had begun. Rather than remaining a figure with which young bourgeois men could identify, I would like to suggest that the aging Casa-nova now represented an older generation that had led society into political


destabilization. Revisiting the Casanova motif from the perspective of the aging dandy permitted both writers to reflect on what was perceived as the end of an era and its implications for their own generation and the next.

Blei: The Revolutionary Casanova Blei’s play Casanova is set in France and comprises ten scenes of unequal length, some being only a few lines long while others go on for pages. The play is usually interpreted as portraying the lighter side of the Casanova le-gend.26 Indeed, the behavior of the eponymous hero of Blei’s Casanova seems totally in keeping with earlier adaptations. He scorns all the other men in the play, seduces their wives and lovers, gambles, and has to flee perse-cution at the end. The play, which has a fraudulent lottery at its heart, fo-cuses on Casanova’s relations with three different parties. Brinvilliers and his lover Ninette are open-minded and do not ask each other about their respec-tive affairs. Her affair is with Casanova, whose real name is never mentioned except in the title. He is traveling under two false names, the Chevalier von Saint Gal and Baron Weidenstam — the latter the namesake of Hofmanns-thal’s Casanova figure and one of many references to the author Blei so admired.27 Then there is the young Marquis Jacques de Cahusac, who is madly in love with Theres Brillant, a ballet dancer. She has left him because he is too possessive and jealous of her alleged other lovers yet refuses to marry her. He does not understand that love can be determined by financial motives. “Liebe ist schließlich auch eine Vermögensfrage” (Love is also a matter of wealth) is Brinvilliers’s response when he hears of Jacques’s fate.28 Casanova’s only single lover is the revolutionary Esther, who will follow him to the Netherlands during his hurried escape.

In Blei’s version Casanova is an aging man yet has lost neither his youthfulness nor his sexual appetite. Women still fall for him, although he has to charm them with his eloquence at times. Why, then, does Blei choose to portray Casanova in his mature years? First, Casanova’s age allows Blei to introduce a class-based explanation for his role as a troublemaker. To ac-complish this Blei sets his play in financially unstable times. This is unusual since Casanova’s character already implies change. He is commonly por-trayed as a “Störenfried” (disturber of the peace),29 an outsider, a trouble-maker, one who is on the move geographically as well as emotionally and obeys different laws than those of the communities he enters. As a conse-quence, the latter appear fixed, stable, and often inflexible. In Blei’s play, however, it is not Casanova who brings about change. Rather, the ex-perienced trickster enters a financially and politically unstable situation and makes the most of it, further destabilizing the situation. While most of the other characters struggle, Casanova thrives. This allows him to justify retro-spectively the mischief he has caused in his lifetime as an act of revenge by

230 ♦ BIRGIT LANG

the poor against the upper classes. In other words, Blei makes him into a natural-born revolutionary:

Jetzt ist es mir ganz deutlich geworden, was hier meines, unseres Amtes ist. Wir von unten herauf, wir aus den Dörfern und Nestern der Armut, wir ohne Namen und ohne vergoldete Wiege, wir vollziehen in dieser Stadt einen höheren Auftrag. [. . .] Und Rache ist der Antrieb. Lügen wir, wenn wir lügen? Wir geben nur unserer Sehnsucht Worte. Stehlen wir? Wir halten nur mit starken Händen, was schwachen Händen entfällt. [. . .] Daß ich der Chevalier von Saint Gal bin, weil ich mich so nenne kraft des Rechtes auf die Buchstaben des Alphabets, — damit habe ich den Adel abgeschafft.30

[It seems obvious to me now what my — our — duty is. Those of us who come from below, from the villages and dens of poverty, without names and golden cradles, fulfill a higher task in this city. And revenge is the motive. [. . .] Do we lie when we lie? We only give a name to our desires. Do we thieve? We only hold with strong hands what slips from weak hands. [. . .] That I call myself Chevalier de Saint Gal I do by virtue of my right to the letters of the alphabet — hence I have abolished the aristocracy].

Casanova’s thirst for revenge makes him ruthless and a human catalyst for a capitalist crisis, which also impacts the economy of love. Casanova is portrayed as more experienced than the younger generation, blending easily into the new gender-troubled world and enjoying himself equally with all types of women. The younger generation, however, reacts differently to the changes in the economy of love. Esther, Casanova’s young lover, will follow him to the Netherlands disguised as a young man (for her protection). Al-though she breaches moral and gender roles, she is barely mentioned in the text. The relationship between Ninette and Brinvilliers complies with some conventions of the French or Viennese comedy, complete with affairs on both sides. Theirs is the typical love triangle of a settled couple, which leaves the audience only too aware of the mixture of independence and dis-satisfaction that characterizes the pair.31 The fact that they are not married indicates a progressive change in this classic comic model. However, the im-pact of this change is weakened when Brinvilliers suggests a possible mar-riage at the end of the play.

Blei devotes most of his attention to the conservative characters in the play: the susceptible Theres and Casanova’s seemingly unadventurous son. The family relationship is revealed when Casanova appears ready to swindle Jacques while gambling. When the latter stakes his mother’s brooch, Casa-nova realizes he is cheating his own offspring. For a brief moment Casanova is moved to protect Jacques from the harshness of life and offers him advice in matters of love. His statement “Die Frau kann nicht lieben” (a woman is not capabable of loving) is meant to convince Jacques to cheat on Theres


and to not take love so seriously, but Jacques merely feels justified in his lovesick misogyny. The imminent discovery of Casanova’s lottery fraud does not allow for any sentimental feelings. Jacques also ignores Casanova’s hints that he is his father, refusing to believe him at the only point in the play where Casanova speaks the truth. Shortly before his departure Casanova seduces the stubborn Theres through sheer eloquence — with words rather than by means of his looks — and later arranges her marriage to his son.

Blei portrays Casanova as a catalyst of change. Long experienced in dealing with tumultuous situations and — in Blei’s version — motivated by revenge on behalf of the lower classes, Casanova seduces and teaches the young — or deceives those who do not embrace revolutionary change, such as Jacques and Theres. While the two younger characters strive for security, Casanova’s character mocks them both. Theres sleeps with him, which seems to be a harbinger of infidelity for the marriage she hopes will bring her fi-nancial stability. Jacques’s half-conscious realization of his heritage also does not bode well for marital bliss. In this sense Blei uses Casanova to reveal mechanisms of power and is not sympathetic to the plight of the young. However, the vulnerability of youth is restricted to young conservatives, who are opposed to change and strive for stability.

Schnitzler: Casanova’s Ridicule and Downfall While Blei portrays Theres and Jacques in an aloof manner from the begin-ning, Schnitzler’s portrayal of the young generation in Die Schwestern and in Casanovas Heimfahrt is more subtle. This is not to say that Schnitzler por-trays the young generation in a positive way. They are either highly impres-sionable or unable to listen, locked in a general struggle against the hypocrisy of the older generation. However, his criticism is also directed at the aging Casanova and his generation. The question of accountability or, rather, lack of it lies at the heart of Schnitzler’s portrayal.32

Schnitzler’s play Die Schwestern is set in the eighteenth century and un-folds in a rundown guest house in Spa. The main characters in the play are Casanova, who is later joined by his girlfriend, Teresa; the alleged Baron Santis and his wife, Flaminia; and Andrea and Anina, a young couple who have run away from home. In Ferrara marriage seemed out of the question because of Anina’s lowly background. Having escaped parental rule, they plan to get married. However, when the jealous Andrea goes off to drink and gamble with other men and leaves Anina to herself, for the first time she is unfaithful to him. She does not go looking for another man, but when Casa-nova, who is many years her senior, enters her bedroom she does not resist him. She later tells all to Andrea and the frank dialogue that ensues between the lovers leaves the audience in no doubt as to the details of the affair — and Anina’s compromised virtue. Anina sums up their predicament: “Verlaß mich, wie’s dein Recht, und wie’s vielmehr | Nach solcher Zwiesprach’ deine

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Pflicht geworden” (Leave me, for after such discussion it is your right, or, rather, your duty).33

The situation further deteriorates once both understand that Casanova was not actually pursuing Anina but confused her room with Flaminia’s. Anina initially matches her words and her actions and wants to run away with the older man regardless of the mix-up and Casanova’s disinterest in her. Both women feel wronged, while for Casanova the man is the real vic-tim. He learns about the situation from Baron Santis, who merely wants to recount what he thinks to be an anecdote (719). Once Casanova catches on to the situation, he changes his verdict:

Betrogen alle drei: Der Jüngling zweifach, Einfach die Frau’n, auf ihre Weise jede. So glich sich alles aus, und ich erkläre: Ungültig war das ganze Abenteuer. (722)

[Deceived all three: the youth doubly, the women once, each in her own way. So the scores are leveled, and I declare the whole adventure to be annulled.]

It is Andrea who finds his answer unsatisfactory:

ANDREA: Das sagt sich leicht. Doch Sie vergessen leider: Noch stehn die Damen da mit blanken Dolchen.

CASANOVA: Doch in der Dichtung nur. Denn in den Höh’n Des philosophischen Problems, mein Freund, Gibt’s weder Dolch noch Leidenschaft, noch Mord. Die Rechnung ist gelöst — geh’n wir zu Tisch

ANDREA: in kindischem Trotz ihm den Weg versperrend Gelöst ist das Problem, ich lass’ es gelten. Wie aber, frag’ ich, endet die Novelle? Wo, was einmal gescheh’n, nicht nach Belieben Als ungescheh’n sich abtun läßt, in der, Da sie des Lebens treues Abbild ist, Erinn’rung nicht verlischt; Irrtum und Wahrheit Sich wunderbar verschlingen, Leidenschaften Ins Nah und Ferne weiterwirken, wo — In der Novelle just so wie im Leben — Es nicht an Dolchen fehlt, die blitzen, töten, Und Waffen and’rer Art. (722)


[ANDREA: That is easily said, but unfortunately you forget: the ladies still stand there with shiny daggers drawn.

CASANOVA: But only in literature. For on the heights Of the philosophical problem, my friend, There is neither dagger nor passion nor murder. The riddle has been solved. Let’s go to dinner.

ANDREA: blocking Casanova’s way in childish defiance The problem is solved. I concede your point. But how, I ask you, does the novella end? There, what has happened cannot Be dismissed just as one likes, and Since it is the true representation of life, Memory cannot be extinguished; error and truth Intertwine miraculously, passion’s effects Continue near and far, and — In the novella and life alike — There are many daggers which shine and kill, And weapons of other kinds.]

His words are not heard and his burning questions are not answered, for Casanova is preoccupied by thoughts about dinner. In their final stroll through the park, Casanova and Andrea see Flaminia and Anina from afar. By virtue of her gender (according to Casanova) Anina is willing to reunite with Andrea after their breakup and to move on even if this means befriend-ing Flaminia and her husband. Andrea, watching Anina and Flaminia stroll-ing through the gardens, is startled by the intimacy the two women share. The stage directions read “blickt hinaus, zuckt zusammen” (735; looks out [of the window], startled). He complains bitterly “Ja, welch ein Bild!” (In-deed, what a sight!), to which Casanova replies:

Ein schönes, Freund. — Und könnten Männer je So Brüder sein wie alle Frauen Schwestern — Auf Andreas Bewegung In tiefster Seele alle Schwestern sind — Fürwahr, das Leben wär’ ein leichter Ding.

[A beautiful sight, my friend. — And if men were ever Able to be brothers as women are sisters — In reply to Andrea’s start They are sisters in the depths of their souls — In truth life would be easier.] (735–36)

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The advice Casanova gives to Andrea is identical to that given by Casanova to his son in Blei’s play: in the end women are all the same since they cannot help being unfaithful and forgiving at the same time.

Andrea, however, is unforgiving. Interpretations of Andrea’s character to date presuppose a resolution of the conflict between Andrea and Anina at the end of the play: G. J. Weinberger suggests that Andrea grudgingly ac-cepts the “ways of the real world.”34 Ernst L. Offermanns argues that Andrea is persuaded to give in by the compelling atmosphere (i.e., the dilapidated guest house and the bad company in which he finds himself, while Frithjof Stock proposes that Andrea succumbs to Casanova’s powers of persuasion and forgives Anina.35 The play, however, is remarkably open-ended. It is true that Andrea ends up in the room where the final festivities will take place with Anina, Casanova, and the others. If, however, one considers Andrea’s character, order has only been restored on the surface. Andrea still seems in turmoil about the closeness between Anina and Flaminia, and he does not enter the room of his own volition since Casanova takes him by the arm and leads him into the room. Most importantly, Andrea does not reply to Casa-nova’s observations. Recalling how highly Andrea values words, the reader can only conclude that, although the play might be over, the matter in hand is anything but finished for him. This interpretation is also supported by an entry in Schnitzler’s diaries: “[Ich] steh nicht dafür, daß Andrea nicht wäh-rend des Festes die Anina umbringt” (I cannot guarantee that Andrea will not kill Anina during the party).36

While Casanova creates serious mischief in Die Schwestern, Schnitzler nevertheless also portrays him as a fairly ridiculous character. His playboy image is constantly undermined throughout the text. In his novella Casa-novas Heimfahrt Schnitzler goes a step further than in his play and shows the dark side of this philandering character. The novella is set in Italy, where we witness Casanova undergoing a midlife crisis: aged fifty-three, his success with women is gradually waning and he feels desperately homesick for Ve-nice. While waiting to learn from the authorities of his hometown whether he will be allowed to return, he amuses himself halfheartedly with his land-lady yet feels restless and bored. By chance he meets Olivio, an old acquain-tance, who invites him to his country estate. Casanova accepts only after Olivio mentions that his niece, Marcolina, a young and learned woman, will also be staying there.37 In the ensuing two days a drama unfolds, with Casa-nova at its center.

The plot consists of two narrative strands. Sixteen years earlier Casanova had helped his hosts, Olivio and Amalia, to get married by convincing Amalia’s mother through amorous means to give her daughter to the poor, young schoolteacher Olivio. Before the marriage he had also made love to Amalia. Although the marriage between Amalia and Olivio has been a happy one — she has borne him three daughters — she remembers her affair with Casanova as a moment of bliss. With Casanova’s return she convinces herself


that they will be lovers again, although Casanova does not show any interest in her. Instead, he falls in love with Marcolina and is ready to do anything to make her love him, the young philosopher all the while resenting his ad-vances. She is not attracted to him physically, and when he tells stories of his adventurous life, which excite the other women at the table, Marcolina lis-tens to him intently, albeit “als wenn man ihr etwa aus einem Buch leidlich unterhaltsame Geschichten vorläse” (258; as if someone read a fairly enter-taining story to her from a book). Upon learning that he will only be al-lowed to return to Venice if he works as a spy for the very government that once imprisoned him Casanova engages in even more outrageous behavior. The fact that he now has to spy on revolutionary youth in order to return home brings his midlife crisis to a head and makes him spiral out of control. He sexually abuses Theresa, Olivio’s oldest daughter, throwing her on his bed and warning her not to tell the priest or any future lovers of their do-ings. He later pays her with a gold coin in front of Olivio: “Casanova nickte vergnügt; es machte ihm einen ganz besonderen Spaß, das Dirnchen, deren Mutter und Großmutter ihm auch schon gehört hatten, im Angesicht ihres eigenen Vaters für ihre Gunst zu bezahlen” (324; Casanova nodded cheer-fully; he found it especially amusing to pay the little whore for her favors in front of her father, having already had her mother and grandmother).

Casanova subsequently takes sexual advantage of Marcolina, who un-knowingly has been traded off by her lover Lorenzi. In order to settle his gambling debts, Lorenzi gives Casanova access to her chamber. The dark-ness of the night facilitates the “mix-up,” with Marcolina feeling disgusted and degraded after a passionate night of love. This seems especially fiendish for two reasons. First, it is Lorenzi’s own ambivalence that creates this situ-ation and leads to his lover’s degradation and his own premature death. When Casanova suggests that he should offer Marcolina in exchange for his gambling debts, he seems to agree. However, by later challenging Casanova to the duel in which he is subsequently killed, Lorenzi clearly shows that he has been able to accept neither Casanova’s deal nor his arguments. Casanova argued that the onset of war might change everything, possibly bringing about Lorenzi’s own death and the loss of Marcolina to a new lover. Like Blei’s Jacques and Schnitzler’s Andrea from Die Schwestern, Lorenzi readily fights the threatening father figure to avoid thinking about the situation and the consequences of his own behavior.

Second, Marcolina only became Lorenzi’s lover after Casanova started a rumor that the outbreak of a new war was imminent. Since she had pre-viously rejected Lorenzi’s marriage proposal, the reader is left to wonder whether she gave herself to him because she feared his death or because she was certain he would not return — hence allowing her to lead an indepen-dent life. By introducing the figure of the young woman Schnitzler further complicates his narrative. On the one hand, she seems to be the only char-

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acter who can stand up to Casanova. On the other, her mysteriousness in-vites partial projections both by the other characters and by literary critics.

To date, Marcolina has been interpreted either as Casanova’s ideal wo-man or as the voice of the author. Angelika Gleisenstein has convincingly argued against Marcolina as Casanova’s ideal woman, insisting that he fan-tasizes about her before they even meet. This counter-argument is further confirmed by Casanova’s obvious distress and the obsessive nature of his de-sire, as well as the ambivalence he shows toward her. To portray Marcolina as the voice of the author is also problematic, as Willy H. Rey argues, since her character is so very mysterious.38 I would like to offer further evidence for this view by pointing out that Marcolina effectively never has an oppor-tunity to voice her opinions since the whole story is told through Casanova’s consciousness. The reader learns about her through the conversations Casa-nova has with other people, all of which are partial projections. For example, Olivio only sees Marcolina’s scholarly potential, Amalia her innocence, and Casanova the potential lover. The narrator increases this confusion by hiding Marcolina from the reader by refusing, for example, to reveal anything about Marcolina’s body after her night with Casanova (352). The only descriptions we have are Casanova’s fantasies. The narrator is also the one who sum-marizes Marcolina’s philosophical debates with Casanova without giving away her detailed argument.39 Marcolina’s mysteriousness is further high-lighted in the scene in which Casanova sees Lorenzi leave Marcolina’s rooms for the first time. Marcolina’s “schattenhafte Erscheinung” stands “wie an ein unsichtbares Kreuz geschlagen” (298; her shadowy form [stands] as if nailed to an invisible cross). The symbolic crucifixion can be interpreted as a premonition of events to come, suggesting her abuse at the hands of Casa-nova. Although she looks as if she has been crucified here, she is in fact hid-ing her own affair and helping Lorenzi to escape safely. This ambiguity is the beginning of a seminal change in Schnitzler’s depiction of women, which was to characterize his works following the First World War.

What, then, are the similarities between Schnitzler’s and Blei’s portrayal of youth? First, the younger generation stands alone. Its members do not have any meaningful familial or institutional bonds. Andrea has fallen out with his family to be with Anina, and Lorenzi is a soldier, although not at war. The young men’s relationship to Casanova is dominated by competition. Young women, on the other hand, turn to Casanova for (fatherly) affection. Nevertheless they are just as devoid of family bonds as their male com-panions: Anina has run away from home and Marcolina is an orphan. In Blei’s play Theres has a mother, but she only wants her daughter to marry for reasons of financial stability and not because she wants her to be happy. Second, the young do not know how to relate to the old and fail to judge their actions correctly at crucial moments. This holds true for Anina and Andrea as well as Marcolina and Lorenzi. In Blei’s play Jacques and Theres are most susceptible to Casanova’s presence. While the young men are un-


able to take Casanova’s advice and refuse to listen, the young women are too gullible, too easily seduced by Casanova’s honeyed words, or by the repu-tation that precedes him. Furthermore, members of the younger generation do not face up to their own struggles in life. While they busy themselves in fruitless discussions and love affairs with the older generation, they fail to address their own problems.

This generational conflict at the heart of these late Casanova adaptations has not yet been addressed in the secondary literature, which has sidelined Blei’s play and has interpreted Schnitzler’s works as a representation of the end of the fin de siècle or even of the fall of the Habsburg Empire. Gleisen-stein focuses exclusively on the portrayal of Casanova and on the past and hence overlooks the focus on youth and the future. Carina Lehnen, who takes Gleisenstein’s point one step further, argues that Casanova’s decay in Casanovas Heimfahrt symbolizes the end of the Habsburg Empire, compar-ing his fate to that of the Trotta family in Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch.40 However, this argument is belied by the fact that Casanova is not a subject of the Austrian empire but rather a Venetian who defines himself in oppo-sition to France and is cosmopolitan at heart. Contrary to secondary lite-rature, Schnitzler’s Casanova is not merely about the past but expresses a concern for the next generation.

Analyzing Schnitzler’s and Blei’s Casanova works from a generational perspective allows us to contextualize them historically as signposts of the war-ridden and politically unstable period, an expression of the generational gap that was created by the First World War. By portraying an aging Casa-nova, Blei and Schnitzler give their stories a different spin, in accordance with their Weltanschauung. Blei is not concerned with holding Casanova accountable for his actions. In his play the young people favored are those who participate in the adventures the future brings. Casanova mocks those who take a conservative stance. Schnitzler questions the responsibility of his own generation and highlights the dangers for the next in their attempt to adopt the impressionist lifestyle of the older generation.

A New Beginning for Viennese Eroticism? Schnitzler and Blei during the First Republic

The revolution Schnitzler and Blei had predicted during the First World War took on a different shape than either expected. It was not the Bolshevik Revolution but rather an increase in fundamentalist Catholicism that had an impact on their artistic lives. In his study of the fin de siècle Carl Schorske sees Schnitzler as representing a political liberalism that was dying out and describes the rise of Catholicism as a political force.41 While Schorske con-centrates on the late 1890s, the immediate postwar years also brought new challenges in this respect. The political turn to Catholicism during the fin de siècle meant that by the early years of the First Republic many members of the cultural elite had already converted to Catholicism. Schnitzler’s former

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friend and colleague Hermann Bahr, who was director of the Burgtheater in 1918, was one of the best-known converts. Several years before the infamous Reigen scandal Schnitzler had approached him concerning a performance of Die Schwestern, which Bahr declined. Schnitzler noted in his diaries:

Er: “Du darfst nicht glauben, weil ich jetzt fromm bin, andre Ansichten über ‘Sittlichkeit’ — oder erotische Fragen überhaupt habe . . . etc.” — Ich: “Es bleibt doch bestehn, daß du das Stück nicht magst, und nicht spielst, weil es sich mit deiner ‘Weltanschauung’ nicht verträgt; denn du wirst ein Dutzend viel schlechtre spielen!” [. . .] Er machte mich dann noch aufmerksam (auch das hatt [sic] ich vorausgesagt) daß man die Komoedie gegen mich ausnützen werde . . . etc. Ich: “Ich stehe nun bald dreißig Jahre in der Öffentlichkeit — man ‘nützt’ alles gegen mich aus.”42

[He: “Don’t think that because I am religiously observant now that I have changed my opinions concerning ‘morals’ or even that I question erotic matters . . . etc.” — I: “But you still do not like the play and will not stage it because it does not square with your ‘Weltanschauung’; you will put on a dozen much worse ones!” [. . .] He then pointed out to me (and even that I had predicted) that the comedy will be used against me . . . etc. I: “I have been in the public eye for nearly thirty years now — everything is ‘used’ against me.”]

Democratization had brought about the end of censorship and, at the same time, the unstable political situation had undermined the relationship be-tween the state and its subjects. As a consequence people felt empowered to intervene in the public sphere by taking charge at a point where they felt the state did not. One of the more prominent examples of this development was the scandal during a 1921 performance in Vienna of Schnitzler’s Reigen, when an angry Catholic mob stormed the theater. This event has been dis-cussed in great detail.43 Suffice it to point out here that it demonstrated Schnitzler’s changing attitude toward the staging of his plays. When he first penned Reigen, he did not believe that a staging was possible. As he wrote to Otto Brahm in 1897, “Ich arbeite jetzt übrigens auch zu Zeiten — zehn Dialoge, eine bunte Reihe; aber etwas Unaufführbareres hat es noch nie ge-geben” (I have been working at times — ten dialogues, a colorful series; but anything less stageable has never existed).44 The play was then published in a private edition in 1900. Even twelve years later Schnitzler commented in a letter to Ernst Friedmann: “Eine Aufführung dieser zehn Szenen in ihrer wahren Gestalt [wäre] ein absolutes Ding der Unmöglichkeit und jede Mil-derung [müßte] den Sinn des Ganzen zunichte machen” (A performance of these ten scenes [in a spirit] true to the original [would be] absolutely im-possible and every compromise [would] ruin the point of the whole play).45 After several unauthorized (by Schnitzler) and censored (by state authorities) attempts to stage Reigen, Schnitzler finally gave his permission after receiv-ing a letter from his publisher, Fischer.46 The play had its official premiere in


Berlin at the Kleines Schauspielhaus in late 1920, where it was nearly cen-sored — a fact that sparked off considerable debate in Germany. In Vienna the Kammerspiele staged the play in 1921. However, at a performance on 16 February 1921 a stink bomb was set off in the theater and demonstrators stormed in as the doors were opened,threatening the audience and pelting them with tar-filled eggs.47 As a consequence, the police closed down the production. The riots in Vienna sparked off a similar reaction in Berlin. Schnitzler sadly concluded that Reigen was not to be produced again during his lifetime.

Literary critics often stress Schnitzler’s growing feeling of isolation in the years following the First World War. This was the result not only of the pub-lic attacks but also personal reasons, including his divorce and his worsening hearing condition.48 Schnitzler seems to have been frustrated by the recep-tion of his works for two main reasons. In his correspondence with his old Berlin friend Dora Michaelis, he complained that reviewers only seem to know Reigen and Anatol: “Daß man meine Sachen (allerdings nur in deutschen Landen) beinahe ausschließlich aufs erotische [sic] hin ansieht, durchschnüffelt, beurtheilt, bin ich gewohnt” (I am used to the fact that my works — although only in the German-speaking world — are almost always only read for, snooped through, and judged by their erotic content).49

Schnitzler nevertheless remained interested in matters erotic, as can be seen in his Komödie der Verführung (Seduction Comedy, 1924).50 In this play he further developed the transgenerational critique of impressionism first voiced in Die Schwestern and Casanovas Heimfahrt. The play is a swan song of the eroticism of the fin de siècle. Set in an undisclosed location, it stages love in the postwar era. The characters in the play seem alienated and ethe-real, and — for the first time in Schnitzler — the women are allowed the same sexual freedom as the men, although they also suffer from comparable symptoms of alienation.

Feminist critics have welcomed this change as a positive development: the women are portrayed as sexually liberated and do not kill themselves in desperation, like Christine in Liebelei.51 Schnitzler’s contemporaries thought differently, as the writer revealed in a letter to Dora Michaelis: “Und hier blühen nun gerade meine vergangenen Sachen auf” (Only my old works are flourishing here).52 The postwar reception of Schnitzler’s new works is indeed peculiar.53 While ultra-Catholic critics increasingly branded him a Jewish pornographer, the liberal press saw Schnitzler’s work as retrospective and old-fashioned, a view perpetuated in the secondary literature for a long time.54 Felix Tweraser has pointed out that in Schnitzler’s works “social criti-cism is not one of global statement, but emerges by illuminating the com-plexities of individual experience in the settings that they depict.”55 At the same time, the nature of Schnitzler’s critique contributed to the way he was perceived. Despite its subtlety, Schnitzler’s account was indeed biting. By criticizing women as impressionist in his Komödie der Verführung, he sent

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out a complex message. Although he was portraying women here as more emancipated, he also emphasized the price they had to pay for this eman-cipation, namely, the unhappiness they are forced to share with their alterna-ting partners. Read against the changing legal and social status of women at the time, his assessment — which was by no means unsympathetic — raised valid concerns, although it did not correspond with the zeitgeist.

Whereas Schnitzler saw the one-sided perception of his work as prob-lematic, Blei was able to harness the new interest in erotica. Writing in 1927, Englisch stated that “zu keiner Zeit hat die Erotik in der Literatur derartige Triumphe gefeiert wie in der Gegenwart” (at no other time has eroticism been so triumphantly rampant in literature as today).56 The sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld likewise suggested that this development had arisen in the after-math of the First World War.57 Following the war, Blei’s hopes of a sus-tainable revolution were soon annihilated. Although he had welcomed the end of the monarchy, which had restricted the rights of its citizens, he ra-pidly adopted a very critical stance toward the young Austrian republic.58 His vision of a state led by intellectuals became untenable in the light of actual politics. In order to confront the chaos of the postwar years and to resist the accompanying decline in values, he proposed a rather eclectic fusion of com-munism and Catholicism.59 However, Blei was too revolutionary for the conservative Catholicism being propagated in Austria. Perceived as a lewd communist by contemporary Austrian society, he left for Munich in 1919 and moved to Berlin in 1923. The escape from his Catholic home country was to prove successful in terms of his literary oeuvre.

While Blei’s interwar years have been described as isolated and im-poverished,60 his vast list of publications contradicts this assumption to a cer-tain extent. His satirical take on the contemporary writer’s scene in Das grosse Bestiarium der modernen Literatur was a huge hit. His biggest accomplish-ment, however, lay in compilations and translations. Almost all of his ap-proximately one hundred publications between 1918 and 1933 belonged to the realm of erotica. Despite German censorship laws, Blei published several cultural histories of sexual customs, such as Die Sitten des Rokoko (Customs of the Rococo, 1921) and Formen der Liebe (Forms of Love, 1930). He also pandered to the tastes of the times, publishing erotic compilations such as Der persische Dekameron (The Persian Decameron, 1926).

Unlike Schnitzler, whose critique of the impressionist lifestyle had been mediated through the Casanova motif, Blei’s references to Casanova after 1918 seem both more obvious and more disjointed. In Der Geist des Rokoko and Formen der Liebe Casanova is again described as a revolutionary.61 Blei’s view has only changed insofar as Casanova’s merits are now situated in the past: “Er war auf seine Weise sein Rebell” (He was a rebel in his own way).62 On the other hand, the economy of love Blei had described in his earlier Casanova play was now to haunt the playright rather than Casanova’s fic-tional son. Although Blei’s late oeuvre was almost entirely erotic, he re-


peatedly asserted that his works were not pornographic. He described por-nography as void of aesthetics and only intended for physical pleasure.63 In his autobiography he even suggests that the only reason his publisher added an appendix, containing titillating pictures, to Formen der Liebe was to en-sure the sale of any copies at all.64 In light of the mass of erotica Blei pub-lished, some of which is indeed very clichéd, such statements seem inherently contradictory. At best they can be interpreted as self-protection against impending censorship and as a concession to the sensibilities of his middle- and upper-class readership. If one considers Pierre Bourdieu’s notion that taste is an aesthetic judgement that helps position subjects in social space,65 Blei’s attempt to promote his body of work as tasteful — in contrast to por-nography — can also be seen as a sales strategy. While Blei’s attempt to em-brace a new eroticism was successful, the commercialization of eroticism affected the choices he could make since he had to cater to the tastes of his readership. To a certain extent this meant that he had to put his earlier revolutionary views aside.

Despite their common interest in matters erotic, Schnitzler’s and Blei’s way of conceptualizing the world around them had always been different. Even when they interpreted the situation at the end of the First World War in a similar fashion, the consequences they drew from it in their works re-mained distinctly different. While Blei hoped for a sustainable revolution, Schnitzler saw the anticipated changes in a more complex manner. In 1918 aged fifty-six and forty-seven, respectively, Schnitzler and Blei both belonged to the older generation. Exposed to new political and social forces during the interwar period, they sought artistic fulfillment in different ways. For Schnitzler the heritage of Casanova played out in a renewed critique of the impressionist lifestyle, whereas Blei made Casanova a commodity. In both cases Casanova’s era in Vienna had ended, although his legacy lived on.

Notes

1 Reigen was translated into English several times. The translation of Frank and Jac-queline Marcus was first published under the title Merry-go-round (London: Wei-denfeld and Nicolson, 1953), then under the title La Ronde (London: Harborough Publishing, 1959; London: Methuen, 1982). The American translation by Eric Bentley was first published in 1954 and then reissued (New York: French, 1978). La Ronde was also published in English in Arthur Schnitzler: Plays and Stories, ed. Egon Schwarz (New York: Continuum, 1982). 2 See, e.g., Beatrix Müller-Kampel, Dämon — Schwärmer — Biedermann: Don Juan in der deutschen Literatur bis 1918 (Berlin: Schmidt, 1993); Nike Wagner, Geist und Geschlecht: Karl Kraus und die Erotik der Wiener Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhr-kamp, 1987); Sixtus von Reden and Josef Schweikhardt, Eros unterm Doppeladler (Vienna: Überreutter, 1993).

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3 Paul Englisch, Geschichte der erotischen Literatur (Stuttgart: Püttmann, 1927), 266–67. Subsequent references to this work are acknowledged following the quoted text. 4 For a comprehensive survey of the differences between erotica and pornography, see Hiltrud Gnüg, Der erotische Roman: von der Renaissance bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003). Much of the complexity and confusion arising from this discussion has its origins in the unruly relationship between text and reader. 5 Murray G Hall, “Der unbekannte Tausendsassa: Franz Blei und der Etiketten-schwindel 1918,” Jahrbuch der Grillparzer-Gesellschaft 15 (1983): 129. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are by Birgit Lang and Deborah Holmes. 6 At the time of the completion of this essay one volume of essays, two volumes of correspondence, and fourteen of Blei’s translations — most of them of works by Oscar Wilde — were in print in Germany. 7 Carl Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979), 3–23. 8 Karl Kraus, “Notizen,” Die Fackel 13, no. 5 (1921): 35. 9 Franz Blei, Das Grosse Bestiarium der Literatur (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1924), 61. 10 Franz Blei, Erzählung eines Lebens (Leipzig: List, 1939): “Hermann Bahr,” 370–75; “Hugo von Hofmannsthal,” 375–78. 11 Arthur Schnitzler, Tagebuch, 1917–1919 (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1985), 27 (12 March 1917), 251 (9 May 1919), and 259 (8 June 1919). 12 Schnitzler, Tagebuch, 1917–1919, 211 (22 December 1918). 13 Schnitzler, Tagebuch, 1917–1919, 260 (11 June 1919). 14 Schnitzler, Tagebuch, 1917–1919, 261 (15 June 1919). 15 Schnitzler, Tagebuch, 1917–1919, 266 (25 June 1919). 16 Blei, Erzählung eines Lebens, 476. 17 Blei was much too eccentric to be dogmatic about politics. However, his view of history was influenced by his communist leanings. For the most detailed discussion of Blei’s relationship to communism, see Helga Mitterbauer, Die Netzwerke des Franz Blei: Kulturvermittlung im frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Marburg: Francke, 2003), 133–34. 18 Schnitzler, Tagebuch, 1917–1919, 164–65. (23 July 1918, 25 July 1918). 19 The Sisters, or Casanova in Spa has been translated into English by G. J. Weinberger in Three Late Plays; The Sisters, or Casanova in Spa; Seduction Comedy; The Way to the Pond (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1992). Casanovas Heimfahrt has been published in English translation several times. It was first translated by Eden and Cedar Paul under the title Casanova’s Homecoming (New York: Seltzer, 1922: rpt. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954 and New York: AMS Press, 1971). Ilsa Barea, who had written the introduction to Casanova’s Homecoming would later translate the story as Casanova’s Return to Venice (London: Pushkin Press, 1998). Most recently the story has been translated by Norman M. Watt in Casanova’s Journey Home and Other Late Stories (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 2002).


20 Der Abenteurer und die Sängerin has not been translated into English. The English translation of Christinas Heimreise was titled Cristina’s Journey Home. A Comedy in Three Acts (Boston: Badger, 1916). 21 Carina Lehnen, Das Lob des Verführers: Über die Mythisierung der Casanova-Figur in der deutschsprachigen Literatur zwischen 1899 und 1933 (Paderborn: Igel, 1995), 11. Subsequent references to this work are acknowledged following the quoted text. 22 Thomas Koebner, “Casanovas Wiederkehr im Werk von Hofmannsthal und Schnitzler,” in Akten des Internationalen Symposiums “Arthur Schnitzler und seine Zeit,” ed. Giuseppe Farese, Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik. Reihe A. Kongress-berichte, vol. 13. (Bern: Peter Lang, 1985): 128. 23 Chronologically these include: “Die Memoiren des Casanova,” in Der Amethyst: Blätter für seltsame Literatur und Kunst 1906: 247–53; “Die zwei unveröffentlichten Kapitel aus Casanovas Memoiren,” in Der Amethyst 1906: 327–42; “Giacomo Casa-nova: Aus den Briefen Casanovas an J. F. Opitz, den Philosophen von Tschaslau,” in Der Geist des Rokoko, ed. Franz Blei (Munich: Georg Müller, 1923), 142–52; “Casanova,” in Formen der Liebe, ed. Franz Blei (Berlin: Trianon, 1930), 201–4. 24 This fact was first noted in her doctoral dissertation and a subsequent article by Martha Bowditch Alden; see “Schnitzler’s Repudiated Debt to Casanova,” in Modern Austrian Literature 13, no. 3 (1980): 25–32. While Alden challenges Schnitzler’s “Anmerkungen” to the story, in which he claims that Casanovas Heimfahrt was “frei erfunden,” Lehnen criticizes her attempt as unfruitful for further analysis (Das Lob des Verführers, 187). In light of the tense personal relationship between Schnitzler and Blei, Schnitzler’s behavior seems more comprehensible. Although it does not further the analysis of his novella, it provides an amusing insight into the sulky side of Schnitzler’s character. 25 Lehnen, Das Lob des Verführers, 182; Schnitzler, Tagebuch, 1913–1916, 173 (12 February 1915). Conrad published the 15 volumes of Casanova’s memoirs between 1907 and 1913 with Georg Müller in Munich. 26 Koebner, “Casanovas Wiederkehr im Werk von Hofmannsthal und Schnitzler,” 128. 27 Koebner, “Casanovas Wiederkehr im Werk von Hofmannsthal und Schnitzler,” 129; Lehnen, Das Lob des Verführers, 217. 28 Franz Blei, “Casanova,” in Die Puderquaste (Munich: Müller, 1918), 160. 29 Volker Klotz, Bürgerliches Lachtheater: Komödie — Posse — Schwank — Operette (Munich: DTV, 1980), 18–19. 30 Blei, Casanova, 175–76. 31 Klotz, Bürgerliches Lachtheater, 18. 32 See also Ernst L. Offermanns, Arthur Schnitzler: Das Komödienwerk als Kritik des Impressionismus (Munich: Fink, 1973), 9–11. 33 Arthur Schnitzler, “Die Schwestern oder Casanova in Spa,” in Die dramatischen Werke, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1962), 676. Subsequent references to this work are acknowledged following the quoted text. 34 G. J. Weinberger, Arthur Schnitzler’s Late Plays: A Critical Study (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 102. 35 Offermanns, Arthur Schnitzler, 121; Frithjof Stock, “Casanova als Don Juan,” Arcadia 13 (1978): 62.

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36 Schnitzler, Tagebuch, 1917–1919, 182 (20 September 1918). 37 Arthur Schnitzler, “Casanovas Heimfahrt,” in Erzählende Schriften, vol. 4 (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1922), 248. Subsequent references to this work are acknowledged following the quoted text. 38 Angelika Gleisenstein, “Die Casanova-Werke Arthur Schnitzlers,” in Arthur Schnitz-ler in neuer Sicht, ed. Hartmut Scheible (Munich: Fink, 1981), 133; Willy H. Rey, “Schnitzlers Erzählung ‘Casanovas Heimfahrt’: Eine Strukturanalyse,” in Festschrift für Bernhard Blume: Aufsätze zur deutschen und europäischen Literatur (Göttingen: Van-denhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967), 200–203. 39 Felix Tweraser sees this debate as exemplifying the dichotomy between public and private in the text; see Felix W. Tweraser, Political Dimensions of Arthur Schnitzler’s Late Fiction (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998), 46. Although the text positions Marcolina as a political thinker, I would argue that the discussion remains in the private realm. The reader is never given a real chance to compare her eloquence with that of Casanova. 40 Konstanze Fliedl, Arthur Schnitzler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 210–11; Gleisenstein, “Die Casanova-Werke Arthur Schnitzlers,”117–19; Lehnen, Das Lob des Verführers, 215. 41 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 141–44. 42 Schnitzler, Tagebuch, 1917–1919, 181 (18 September 1918). 43 See Schnitzlers “Reigen,” 2 vols., ed. Alfred Pfoser, Kristina Pfoser-Schewig, and Gerhard Renner (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1993); see also Gerd K Schneider, Die Rezeption von Arthur Schnitzlers Reigen, 1897–1994 (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1995). 44 Arthur Schnitzler, Briefe, 1875–1912, vol. 2, ed. Therese Nickl and Heinrich Schnitzler (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1984), 309. 45 Schnitzler, Briefe, 1875–1912, 699. 46 For further details of the scandal, see Pfoser, Pfoser-Schewig, Renner, Schnitzlers “Reigen,” vol. 1; Schneider, Die Rezeption von Arthur Schnitzlers “Reigen,” 1897–1994. 47 Schneider, Die Rezeption von Arthur Schnitzlers “Reigen,” 1897–1994, 141. 48 On Bahr’s further development, see Konstanze Fliedl, Arthur Schnitzler: Poetik der Erinnerung (Vienna: Böhlau, 1997), 376–78. 49 Schnitzler, Briefe, 1875–1912, 221 (22 November 1920). 50 Komödie der Verführung has been translated into English by G. J. Weinberger in Three Late Plays (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1992). 51 Marie Luise Wandruszka, “Die Liebe und das Erzählen: Zu Schnitzlers ‘Casanovas Heimfahrt,’” Modern Austrian Literature 31, no. 2 (1998): 13. 52 Schnitzler, Briefe, 1875–1912, 232 (5 February 1921). 53 Andrew C. Wisely, Arthur Schnitzler and Twentieth-Century Criticism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 22–23. 54 For example, Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler notes Schnitzler’s “bemerkenswerte Zu-rückhaltung” (notable reserve) when it came to embracing post-Habsburg Austria. See Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, “Literatur,” in Österreich, 1918–1938: Geschichte der Ersten Republik, ed. Erika Weinzierl and Kurt Skalnik (Graz: Styria, 1983), 635. 55 Tweraser, Political Dimensions of Arthur Schnitzler’s Late Fiction, 1.


56 Englisch, Geschichte der erotischen Literatur, 266. 57 Magnus Hirschfeld, Sittengeschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs (Leipzig: Schneider, 1929), 12–13. 58 Mitterbauer, Die Netzwerke des Franz Blei, 135–36. 59 Mitterbauer, Die Netzwerke des Franz Blei, 137. 60 Gregor Eisenhauer, Der Literat: Franz Blei — ein biographischer Essay (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 124. 61 Blei, Der Geist des Rokoko; Blei, Formen der Liebe. 62 Blei, Formen der Liebe, 204. 63 Mitterbauer, Die Netzwerke des Franz Blei, 126. 64 Blei, Erzählung eines Lebens, 432. 65 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984).

12: An Englishman Abroad: Literature, Politics, and Sex in John Lehmann’s Writings on Vienna in the 1930s

Robert Vilain

N THE LATE 1920S AND 1930S Austria was often only obliquely or retro-spectively the subject of its own literature. Alienated by Austrofascism,

authors such as Ödön von Horváth, Theodor Kramer, Rudolf Brunngraber, and Jura Soyfer did address contemporary social and political reality, but they represent the exception rather than the rule.1 In their major fictional works, the canonical writers of the period as Broch, Kraus, and Musil tended to look backward at Austria’s decline. Stefan Zweig’s nostalgia had no room for what he called “Pseudo-Wirklichkeitsreferate” (pseudoreports on reality).2 His main literary treatment of the political events of this period is couched in symbolic and allegorical form in Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rot-terdam (The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1934). Even Joseph Roth’s Kapuzinergruft (Capuchins’ Crypt, 1938), which includes the Anschluss in its narrative, is heavily weighted toward the past. Other authors, such as Alexander Lernet-Holenia, injected a strong note of fantasy into their retrospectives. Felix Braun’s idealism took him far away from contem-porary reality and even when he tentatively explored the politics of the 1920s in Agnes Altkirchner (1927), his apolitical nature was clearly in evidence. The same is true of Raoul Auernheimer’s novel Die linke und die rechte Hand (The Left Hand and the Right, 1927).3

It sometimes took non-Austrians to confront head-on the key political events of the 1930s. Der Weg durch den Februar (The Path through Feb-ruary), about the social conditions that led to the 1934 uprisings, is by Mainz-born Anna Seghers and was published in Paris in 1935. Both she and Bertolt Brecht (in his “Koloman Wallisch Kantate,” written in the mid 1940s) sin-gled out the party secretary and mayor of Bruck an der Mur, who had been a key participant in the uprising. From farther afield still, the events of 1934 were commemorated in literature by a variety of British writers, most fa-mously by Christopher Isherwood (in Prater Violet [1945] and, less cen-trally, in The World in the Evening [1954]) and by Stephen Spender (in his long poem Vienna [1934] and short story “Two Deaths” [1936], which fo-cuses on the weeks before Dollfuss was assassinated). They are also the sub-

I

AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD ♦ 247

ject of less well known works such as the novel Johanna, by Penelope Dimont (which follows the story of the daughter of a Social Democrat, killed in 1934, as she emigrates to London with her husband and later returns to Austria), and the poem “Austrian Requiem” by the English writer George Barker.4 The work on which this essay focuses, John Lehmann’s novel Evil Was Abroad (1938), treats the violence of these events from the perspective of a firsthand observer. Written by a foreigner who was also an old Etonian, this novel approaches the Austria of the period in a double sense “from out-side,” from a social perspective not guaranteed to sympathize with the Social Democrats and also quite literally from “abroad.”

John Lehmann is best known as the brother of the novelist Rosamond Lehmann and of the actress Beatrix, and as the founding editor of the New Writing series, later renamed “Penguin New Writing.”5 Yet he was a novelist and poet in his own right, publishing nearly a dozen volumes of verse, one of the fainter stars in the constellation that literary history calls “the Auden generation.”6 He was also the author of some historically informed travel writing7 and, later, of several stylishly written biographies of Edith Sitwell (1952), the Woolfs (1966), Edward Lear (1977), Rupert Brooke (1980), and Christopher Isherwood (1987). Like many minor writers, Lehmann was more important to literary history structurally than aesthetically. He was an influ-ential figure in the promotion of contemporary writing for thirty crucial years in the mid twentieth century, specifically from 1931 — when he worked for Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press — to 1961, when he gave up editing the London Magazine. His three volumes of autobiography — Whispering Gallery (1955), I Am My Brother (1960) and The Ample Prop-osition (1966) — and, in particular, his thinly veiled autobiographical novel In the Purely Pagan Sense (1976) earned him continuing recognition — not to say the occasional succès de scandale — as his editorial influence began to decline. Like many members of the Auden generation, including Isherwood, Spender, Wyndham Lewis, and Francis Bacon, Lehmann spent some time in Berlin, partly as what we would now call a “sex tourist”; he was there, for example, on 27 February 1933, the night of the Reichstag fire. More than any other member of this group, however, Lehmann preferred Austria.8 His attraction to Vienna was certainly in part sexual, but this essay explores the interrelations of sexuality with left-liberal politics and literature as they mani-fest themselves in Evil Was Abroad.

Lehmann’s family was originally north German; his great-grandfather had been a painter in Hamburg. The Lehmanns came to London by way of Paris; by the 1870s they had established themselves at the heart of the literary and cultural world, with a salon in Berkeley Square. Members of their circle in-cluded George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Charles Dickens. (John’s grandmother, Nina, may even have served as the model for Marion Halcombe in Wilkie Collins’s Victorian detective novel The Woman in White [1860]).9 John himself read German fluently. His love of Austria

248 ♦ ROBERT VILAIN

seems to have been stimulated by Rilke, an English translation of whose Auf-zeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) was published by the Hogarth Press in February 1931.10 He had al-ready been to Austria in 1930 — on a “tour of the Prints & Drawings depart-ments of the great European museums”11 — and had returned to St. Anton, Innsbruck, Salzburg, and Passau while on holiday in the spring of 1932.

In his autobiography Lehmann claimed that it was Rilke’s poetry that had created the illusion that the country itself was more beautiful than any other, the inhabitants more sympathetic, more deeply civilized and yet closer to the natural rhythms of life than anywhere else in Europe.

Whatever it was, illusion or reality or childhood haunting, it grew into an infatuation strong enough to turn the whole direction of my life, that survived the knowledge that came to me later of poverty and squalor in a discarded metropolis, of social dissension and a fecklessness that made the Austrians the easy prey of their powerful and pushing northern neigh-bours — a people to whom I was more closely allied in blood.12

He wanted above all to write “a truly modern poetry” and sought in Rilke the model for transforming imagination and experience into poetry. He re-called in particular the impact of Malte’s claim:

Um eines Verses willen muß man viele Städte sehen, Menschen und Dinge, man muß die Tiere kennen, man muß fühlen, wie die Vögel flie-gen, und die Gebärde wissen, mit welcher die kleinen Blumen sich auftun am Morgen. Man muß zurückdenken können an Wege in unbekannten Gegenden, an unerwartete Begegnungen und an Abschiede, die man lange kommen sah — [. . .] und es ist noch nicht genug, wenn man an alles das denken darf. Man muß Erinnerungen haben. [. . .] Und es genügt auch noch nicht, daß man Erinnerungen hat. Man muß sie ver-gessen können, wenn es viele sind, und man muß die große Geduld haben, zu warten, daß sie wiederkommen. Denn die Erinnerungen selbst sind es noch nicht. Erst wenn sie Blut werden in uns, Blick und Gebärde, namenlos und nicht mehr zu unterscheiden von uns selbst, erst dann kann es geschehen, daß in einer sehr seltenen Stunde das erste Wort eines Verses aufsteht in ihrer Mitte und aus ihnen ausgeht.13

[For the sake of a line of poetry one must see many cities, people, and things, one must appreciate the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and understand the gesture with which the little flowers open in the mornings. One must be able to think back to paths in unknown areas, to unexpected meetings and to long-anticipated leave-takings —, [. . .] and it is not even sufficient to think of all those things. One must have memories. [. . .] And it is not sufficient to have memories either. One must be able to forget them if there are many, and one must have pa-tience enough to wait for them to return. For it is not the memories themselves that matter. Only when they become our blood, our seeing


and our gestures, nameless and no longer distinguishable from our selves — only then, in a rare moment, is it possible for the first word of a line of verse to arise from their midst and proceed from them.]

The section of The Whispering Gallery that describes Lehmann’s poetic ambi-tions during this period is almost a translation of parts of this famous passage:

And yet it was not enough merely to be a watcher of other people’s lives from the outside. One must, I thought, be able somehow to enter into them, to lose oneself in them until one could hear inside one’s own heart the rhythms and music to which they moved. [. . .] And then the poetry that was still out of reach would lean out towards you and take you and create itself through you.14

Rilke was also a motif in Lehmann’s relationship with the Woolfs. Vir-ginia published a “Letter to a Young Poet” in 1932, its title inspired by Rilke’s Briefe an einen jungen Dichter, and we know that she discussed it at length with Lehmann.15 Lehmann also translated Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (1906; The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke).16 However, Lehmann resigned his job at the Hogarth Press quite suddenly on 31 August 1932 after his strained relations with the Woolfs finally collapsed altogether.17 He left work on Wednesday evening, and in-stead of returning the following day he went straight to Vienna, where he lived for a while in a boarding house in the Josefstadt, perfecting his German and learning Wienerisch (Viennese dialect) so as to be able to communicate with the ordinary inhabitants of Vienna. In his surreptitious departure from London there was a perhaps a conscious echo of Goethe’s flight to Italy in 1786; there was certainly a conscious attempt that autumn “to learn to be the poet that Rilke had ideally imagined.”18

Lehmann soon moved into a simple flat at the top of a tall building on the Invalidenstrasse, which he sometimes called his “Zeppelin cell.”19 The flat had once served as the directors’ dining room in the offices of a Czech min-ing company, with large windows giving panoramic views of the city. Vienna clearly represented a break with a social and political climate at home that was proving irksome. Lehmann was leaning heavily toward communism and sought greater scope for political self-education and self-expression than was available in England.20 Yet he was also well aware of his own divided con-sciousness, echoing Faust’s “zwei Stimmen in meiner Brust” speech in one of his books about the Woolfs:

On the one hand I see the moribund state of the culture I have been brought up in. The need to reject its shams and pretences if I am not to become a complete cynic. The need to be transplanted to fresh ground. On the other hand I have been educated in and accustomed to the old culture, my habits and states have been formed by it. My roots are fairly firmly embedded in the exhausted ground. Go and live among the work-ers, take part in their activities, make friends with them, work with them


if you can, refuse to have anything to do with the bourgeois world, says one voice. And another: but practically all your friends belong to that world, you cannot break the old ties. And what’s more, you’re totally un-fitted to think as they think and work as they work; you lack the back-ground and training of circumstances. So we stand between two worlds, uneasily contriving makeshift compromises to placate conscience and reason.21

The novel Evil Was Abroad is an exploration of the relationship of art to this conflict, an inquiry into whether it is “a dream apart from life” or has “a mis-sion for the abolition of social injustice and misery.”22

Lehmann and his lover, Toni Sikyr, went to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1934. In Moscow they were shown the jewels of the communist state by an Intourist guide and took in the May Day processions in Red Square.23 During trips to Paris Lehmann met Henri Barbusse and joined the Clarté circle of communist sympathizers; “Barbusse [. . .] agreed that he should become the secret Viennese correspondent for his organisation.”24 Unlike Zweig, he remained an enthusiast. Back in Vienna he learned some Russian from the young Jura Soyfer, who also educated him in the subtleties of the history of Austrian theater, his major passions being for Raimund, Nestroy, and Grillparzer.25 Soyfer connected Lehmann with the communist underground and helped him make something practical of his instinctive sym-pathy with the Social Democrat Schutzbund (Republican Defense League). He had a secret cupboard built in his flat to store subversive pamphlets. Being British, with bona fide editorial activities to pursue, he could easily travel between Austria, France, and England, although he was himself the subject of police surveillance and was arrested a number of times.26 Horst Jarka plausibly speculates that via Lehmann “Soyfers Nachrichten flossen ver-mutlich nicht nur in die von Lehmann selbst signierten Artikel ein, sondern in so manchen Lagebericht einer englischen Zeitung” (Soyfer’s information found its way not only into the articles signed by Lehmann himself but into a range of situation reports published in English newspapers).27 Lehmann published work by Soyfer in New Writing — the only writing by an Austrian to appear in this publication — under the pseudonym Georg Anders.28 After Soyfer’s death, Lehmann translated and published his “Dachaulied” — which had been written in the concentration camp, memorized by another inmate, and transmitted to Lehmann back in Britain — as “Song of the Austrians in Dachau.”29 John and Rosamond Lehmann’s repeated attempts to secure Soy-fer’s “export” (the term used in his correspondence with his family to main-tain secrecy) were ultimately to prove ineffective even though a visa for New York had actually been procured.30 Soyfer died of typhus in Buchenwald in mid February 1939.

The novel Evil Was Abroad was begun in the autumn of 1933, “put aside a few months later when fighting broke out in Austria,” and completed early in 1938.31 It is the story of Peter Rains, a young man just graduated from


Oxford, who has come to Vienna to write the biography of an unnamed Aus-trian poet and thereby make his reputation. Rains tries, as Lehmann did, to make himself at home among ordinary Austrians. In addition to a night out in the Prater, on the big dipper and the ghost train, evenings spent in bars and cafés eating simple food and drinking local wines and beers, Lehmann describes a visit to one of the famous Social Democrat–built tenement build-ings (26–28), perhaps the Karl-Marx-Hof, the Matteotti-Hof, or the Goethe-Hof. In his historical travel book Down River, published in 1939, Lehmann waxes lyrical about these “historical landmarks in the solution of mass-hous-ing,” which offered “proof that it was possible to establish hygienic and beau-tiful living-quarters within the reach of the average worker’s pocket, and in harmony with an intelligent town-planning, even under capitalism.”32 He at-tended the opening ceremony for the Friedrich-Engels-Hof in the Brigit-tenau in July 1933 and recalled the “red flags [that] flew from tier after tier of windows above the swarming crowds and the tableaux vivants of amity between manual workers, peasants, and white-collar workers set on the en-trance pillars.”33 The novel is no less admiring, and it was the careful, if not exactly unbiased, descriptions of a near-Elysian solution to the problems of mass housing that earned Lehmann Stephen Spender’s praise for writing “with almost photographic accuracy; even when he is expressing himself in a poetic image, one is conscious [. . .] of the photographer’s lens.”34

The novel is shot through with references to increasing civil unrest, the rise of the Heimwehr (right-wing Home Guard), and street fights provoked by Nazis. A character named Bertl is a member of the Schutzbund and tells Rains about the clashes between them and the Heimwehr that resulted in the shooting of striking workers by police on 15 July 1927 (55). This is the novel’s account of the events leading up to the fire in the Justizpalast (Palace of Justice) on that day, which signaled a turning point in the decline of the First Republic. Rains is invited by Bertl to join a demonstration against the closure of parliament (which took place in March 1933), but it turns out to be a dud (231–36).

Chapter 6 presents an extended dream sequence, an allegory of the political situation. It begins in Schönbrunn, where mirrors reflect not Peter Rains himself but pictures of imperial military triumphs come to life, bloody and stinking. The scene shifts to a courtyard whose “atmosphere [. . .] was charged, as a still valley seems charged sometimes on a summer evening with the thunder that is coming, with conspiracy” (72–73), a description some-what reminiscent of Trakl’s poem “Grodek.” This sequence gives the novel its title: “Evil was abroad, was lurking somewhere just out of sight, and he and all the other people hurrying towards the tramlines [. . .] were in desper-ate danger” (73).35 Rains ends up inside the Chancellery on the Ballhaus-platz, watching a puppet show in which the chancellor himself is the chief figure among many other world leaders assembled on a tiny stage, all of whom are being manipulated by an unseen hand. The unnamed chief conspirator


escapes on a plane to Berlin. Rains rushes through a newspaper office, whose machines “looked to [him] more like tanks than linotypes, heavily armoured and emitting jets of fire, and the workers whose hands were on the levers seemed to be dressed in unmistakably military uniform” (76) — a clear ref-erence to the fatal power of a censored press. Moving rapidly through the courtyard of the tenement building where Bertl lives to the Ringstrasse, Rains sees one of his friends run over by a truck while gunfire rains down from the rooftops on the gathering crowd.

The novel ends with a parallel scene, with the sound of crowds rushing out into the street:

[Rains] thought he heard police whistles. Some people burst out of the houses lower down the street, and started running towards the scene of the commotion, which seemed to be beyond the yellow mass of a church, to the left where a thick factory chimney dominated the roofs. (254)

A comparison with Lehmann’s own historical account confirms that the time scale of the novel has been telescoped a little and that this is the prelude to the events of 12 February 1934, when, after a police raid on the Linz offices of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria (SDAPÖ), workers in some factories in Vienna began a strike that was declared an official general strike by the party a few hours later. Fighting broke out in various parts of the city, but the main centers of resistance were the workers’ tenement buildings. In the words of Lehmann’s historical account, “As the sun went down, the un-pleasantness of the complete night that was swallowing up the city [with the electricity workers on strike] was enhanced by the wild rumours that were now flying from mouth to mouth, and the noise of firing from the outer districts of factories and working-class homes.”36 The army fired on the Karl-Marx-Hof in Floridsdorf (with, as Lehmann observes, guns “of a size for-bidden by the Peace Treaties”),37 claiming that these were “fortresses.” A famous eyewitness account by G. E. R. Gedye, the distinguished British jour-nalist and foreign correspondent, expressed the same sense of outrage:

It must have been about 10 o’clock that the intermittent sound of dulled explosions came from the outer suburbs. Walking along the Ringstrasse with a colleague, [. . .] “Good God,” I said, “that sounds like howitzers or trench mortars. But they can’t do that — Dollfuss couldn’t — not even Fey — turn the guns onto those houses packed with women and children as well as the workers.”38

These events were the trigger for the destruction of Social Democracy in Vienna, the culmination of months of planning by the federal government. The novel never provides this sort of political detail, however, instead focus-ing exclusively on events in the streets and the effect on individual lives. That said, it does provide a remarkable and empathetic picture of aspects of or-dinary working-class Vienna in the 1930s and the topography of the city


from the high (palaces and churches) to the low (the slums in Simmering, beggars on the street), and from the public (the Prater, the theater) to the private (the disillusion and suicidal despair of many of the unemployed).

The central Viennese character is an out-of-work, half-starving shoe-maker befriended by Rains. Despite the novel’s disclaimer, Rudi Slavanek functions as a stand-in for Lehmann’s real-life lover, Toni Sikyr, perhaps combined with Toni’s cousin, Heini, who was also a shoemaker.39 Rudi used to be in the Rote Falken (Red Falcons), the Social Democrats’ youth move-ment, which was founded in 1925 and dissolved in 1934, but there has been little or no support for him from this or any other political organization since he lost his job.40 Peter is attracted by Rudi’s complete lack of preten-sion, his freshness and vulnerability — so unlike the narrow prejudices and shallow intellectual pretensions of his English social circle, memories of which now fill him with “revulsion” (195). However, he is made anxious by Rudi’s mood swings, the result of his highly precarious economic situation. Even-tually his fears that Rudi might commit suicide are apparently confirmed. It is Rudi whose death under the wheels of a truck is prefigured in Peter’s dream.

Peter’s relationship with Rudi, which crosses class boundaries, is juxta-posed with his continued contact with two friends from Oxford, who exter-nalize the political changes taking place within Peter.41 Dick is a foreign cor-respondent for a London newspaper who has been posted together with his wife, Juliet, to Prague, where Peter visits them, using the opportunity to chase up some Czech material on his poet. Dick has also developed strong left-wing sympathies and is sent to Berlin, where he covers the Reichstag fire, which he immediately recognizes as a Nazi attempt to discredit the com-munists. Dick functions as a conduit to the truth that most newspapers sup-press: “Nobody’s going to know the truth in Germany for a long time now” (170), he says, implicitly confirming Peter’s dream, in which the press be-come part of the global conspiracy that will eventually lead to war.

Dick explains this logically and rationally, yet the contrast between Dick the reporter and Peter the Literat (man of letters) underlines how for Peter the figure of Rudi has become broadly symbolic of Europe’s descent into conflict:

In his single figure now was concentrated all the suffering [Rains] had witnessed or had described to him since he had been in Vienna: the ab-ject figures slouching at the street-corners or abandoned like old sacks on park benches, the stillness and despair of factory districts, the lives of Rudi’s unemployed friends, [. . .] the shattered faces of a ruined middle-class, [. . .] and this unending casualty list of those who stole a march on their misery with gas ovens, razor blades, poison, old guns, and hastily improvised nooses. (192–93).

The personal and the social symbolism also merge with the message com-municated by the Austrian poet whose biography Peter is writing. The pas-


sage just cited is followed by an evocation of how Rudi’s figure vividly conveys “all the oppression and war-preparation and violence” of which Nazi Germany is guilty, and then by memories of lines of “poem-fragments” dis-covered in unpublished papers “inextricably associated” (193) with the personal, social, and political insights that Rudi also embodies. Talking to Professor Richard Horn, the owner of these papers (and one of the poet’s surviving close friends), reading their correspondence, and looking at Horn’s album of photographs taken at a house party in Schloss Wildenstein — all these help Peter uncover a new view of the poet. “How could he have known that certain incidents in the early life and certain finished longer poems still buried in confused manuscripts, would make his essay, and in-deed all other essays on the same subject he had ever come across, ring so completely false?” (2). Peter thinks his poet might turn out to be “of revolu-tionary significance” (2).

The interdependence of poet, friend, and politics is made explicit more than once. “There were two processes at work,” the narrator explains, for “contact with Rudi and his friends was bringing his new understanding of the poetry, just as much as the poetry was bringing him towards the living” (106). On one occasion, when he has been reading a letter by the poet that ends with the description of a shabby town at night, this verbal account is transmuted into visual reality, each detail of the letter becoming so real that he sees Rudi, in real life, across the street from him (31–32).

It is not straightforwardly the case, however, that studying the dead poet connects Peter Rains to the living, as he realizes when confronted with his worst fear, namely, that Rudi might have committed suicide: “If I hadn’t been so engrossed in my poems and dreams I would have realized” (203). When he is told to expect the worst, he wonders: “[H]ow was it that he [. . .] could feel intimate with someone for weeks, months, to find after all that he had not seen the real person? That plate after plate of coloured glass had been taken away, but there still remained one plate that falsified the whole image” (251).42 To which he adds: “To the last moment he had enveloped Rudi in distorting mists” (251–52), blaming the sentimental pity that he could never quite shake off for betraying his good intentions. Pity has no place in personal relationships. It produces — and is itself the product of — critical distance, inimical to the state of true intimacy and familiarity that would have been brought about “if he had seen, smelt, rubbed himself in Rudi’s world before he went away” (252). Rudi’s anger at Peter for his night out with Fräulein Horn at the theater and a chic café is not mere petty jeal-ousy but a clear realization that he and Peter are from different worlds. The fact that Rudi has never been to the theater and that even the highly literate Bertl found a performance of Faust at the Burgtheater boring are clues that Peter fails to identify. There is a moment when Peter tries to explain to Rudi how hard it is for them to understand each other because of their class dif-ferences and their divergent experiences (125–26), but it is interrupted and


the opportunity never offers itself again. Peter regrets that he never forced the two of them to confront the issue and that he effectively abandoned Rudi at a period of deepest crisis by going to Prague and failing to return as promptly as he had promised.

Nevertheless, the failure by both men to address their social dividedness does not vitiate the sense of mutual illumination that Peter Rains repeatedly affirms and with which the novel ends. After discussing the Reichstag fire with Dick and Juliet, Peter returns to his literary project:

He pressed on with the preparation of the book, though haunted by his own image of the flaming Reichstag and the true image of the Viennese boy’s shock of yellow hair with the sunken cheeks beneath it. The two mingled, pushed themselves in front of the pictures of Schloss Wilden-stein and the poet in the sun-barred glade. [. . .] He began to re-read all the poems in his mood of heightened perception, and all the clues which he had slowly gathered during the autumn seemed to fall into place in a new pattern, in the new aspect of the poet he had caught increasingly exciting glimpses of.

It is the poetic process of image association that is the engine for these con-nections: the yellow of the Reichstag fire evokes the yellow-blond of Rudi’s hair and the yellow dappling of light in the picture of the poet at Schloss Wildenstein. In the subtle shifting characteristic of the poetic process when effectively practiced, the associations are revealed as more substantial than images:

Yes, there was no doubt, he now felt at last, but deep down, implicit in the work of this great creator, was a protest against the very founda-tions of the society they lived in, a protest that developed from an early malaise to a disgust and rejection, an appeal to other values. He — alone it seemed of his literary generation in Austria — had sensed what Dick had called the “slowly collecting poison,” a death around him of human and creative values, and in the central moment of his life, the sudden disappearance from Wildenstein and the circles that had known him before, had made a gesture of denial, had started his search for new values. (178–79)

What is the identity of the poet whose biography Peter Rains is commis-sioned to write and who so profoundly affects Peter’s development? It is almost certainly not Hugo von Hofmannsthal, despite the fact that his fa-mous crisis of language and cognition, documented in the so-called Chandos Letter of 1902, neatly corresponds to the crisis undergone by Peter Rains’s poet. There is a passage in the novel that is strongly reminiscent of the last section of Hofmannsthal’s Märchen der 672. Nacht (1895; Tale of the 672nd Night), when Peter returns to Vienna and combs the city in search of Rudi. He leaves the smarter quarters of town and finds himself “in a network of small alleys and tumble-down, one- or two-storey houses that looked as if


they had come straight out of an engraving of an eighteenth-century Aus-trian village” (185). Rains gets lost in a cul-de-sac and encounters “a small and smudge-faced little girl” (187) before finding the alley he is looking for and the house with “rickety, paintless, old-fashioned windows.” Trying to find his way back, “he went to and fro in hopeless confusion, until he heard the tic-tac of horses’ feet on cobbles some way behind him” (191). This pas-sage has many details in common with Hofmannsthal’s tale, in which the main character (known only as “the Merchant’s Son”) receives an anony-mous warning about one of his servants and leaves his comfortable, un-troubled ivory tower to try to get to the bottom of the allegation. The Merchant’s Son’s own town house is closed up, and in his search for lodg-ings he, like Rains, gets lost in alleys and back streets: “[Er folgte] einer ärmlichen Straße, [bog] dann rechts ein und kam in eine ganz öde, toten-stille Sackgasse, die in einer fast turmhohen, steilen Treppe endigte” (He went down a wretched street, turned right, and arrived in a deserted cul-de-sac quiet as the grave, which ended in a toweringly steep flight of stairs).43 He, too, meets a small girl, “ein höchstens vierjähriges, kleines Mädchen [. . .] das ihn regungslos und böse ansah” (a little girl who could be no more than four years old and [. . .] who stared at him, motionless and angry).44 The Merchant’s Son also becomes confused and has to confront a second cul-de-sac before eventually emerging into a yard, where some twenty horses are being groomed or shod by soldiers. Unlike the Merchant’s Son, who is kicked to death, Lehmann’s protagonist escapes with his life and settles down to a nice cup of coffee.

Despite these parallels, there is no evidence that Lehmann ever read anything by Hofmannsthal, so they may merely be coincidental. Given what we know of Lehmann’s literary interests at the time, the poet that Rains is writing about is most likely to be Rilke.45 Chris Hopkins has suggested paral-lels between Rilke’s experiences in the artists’ colony at Worpswede (e.g. his marriage) and the gathering at Schloss Wildenstein attended by Rains’s poet, who admittedly is not married but, in a mirror image, is abandoned by his lover, Marika (a name that Hopkins suggests is a conflation of Rilke’s own second name and surname — “Maria Rilke” becoming “Marika”).46 The crux of the parallel is the shift in poetic direction that Rains’s poet undergoes, which Hopkins sees as akin to the shift that brought about Rilke’s Neue Ge-dichte (New Poems): “Two thirties twists are thus given to events in Rilke’s life: his new aesthetic becomes social and political consciousness, his mar-riage becomes the failure of (bourgeois) love, and the beginning of prole-tarian solidarity.”47 In fact, there is additional evidence for this identification that seems to have passed unnoticed, including the reference to “that letter to Richard Horn when he was a young man still hoping that poetry would be his destiny” (31), which is presumably an oblique reference to Rilke’s Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet). There is also the appearance of a group of saltimbanques reminiscent of the fifth Duino Elegy


(93), plus the fact that Peter’s poet “had lived in Prague for several years” (145). Moreover, it may be the case that the real parallel to Schloss Wilden-stein is not Worpswede but Schloss Duino, where the crisis that had blocked Rilke’s Duineser Elegien (1923; Duino Elegies) was overcome and the way was opened to the Sonette an Orpheus (1923; Sonnets to Orpheus), also re-ferred to in the novel as “the famous sonnet series” (102). The transition in Rains’s understanding of the poet’s significance is expressed as he looks at his photograph: “What struck Peter about the face which he had imagined he knew so well was an unexpected look of bold determination, something far more incisive and active, though the whole expression remained sensitive and delightful, than the accepted, almost feminine dreaminess, which had become the popular symbol of the poet’s appearance” (99). This final cliché might well be applied to Rilke.

Although Rilke is certainly present in the unnamed poet, Lehmann does not make a simple identification. Rather, he overlays Rilke with an image of himself as a writer. Lehmann is explicit about how Rilke brought about a change in his way of seeing — and consequently of expressing things. The direction that his own verse took as a result of his new perception of con-temporary reality was political, which may be why the poet in the novel is described as “of revolutionary significance” (2). There is more Lehmann than Rilke in the episode at Schloss Wildenstein, after which the poet makes what is described as an “extraordinary decision” (101) to leave his old life behind, although this is in effect what Rilke did when he went to Paris in August 1902. Rains’s friend Professor Horn realizes that “not to have gone away would have broken his genius” (104), which is how Lehmann saw his own need to leave London for Vienna in 1932. This overlaying is the necessary process that Peter Rains describes to Horn’s daughter: “I believe that study-ing all that poetry, and building up as clear an idea as I can of the person who wrote it, is not keeping me away from the living, but actually bringing me closer to them. I believe it’s making me understand to-day far better than I could have if I had never read a line he wrote” (105–6).

There is some doubt about whether Peter’s work on the poet can genu-inely feed into his relationships with ordinary working-class individuals; there are too many instances of failure for this to be completely convincing. Nev-ertheless there is evidence for the efficacy of the poet’s function as political and social catalyst even though the dual process that Rains describes — in which his new young Austrian socialist friends help him understand the poet’s work, and vice versa — does not at first sight seem to have much rele-vance to Rilke, who was hardly a standard-bearer for Social Democracy.48 However, there is no doubt that Rilke was a poet who could change world-views. His critique of the development of culture, his emphasis on the emer-gence of the spiritual from the material, and his exploration of what it means to be human are not so very far from what Peter Rains is striving to under-stand. Both Rudi and Rilke contribute to Peter Rains’s renewed conception


of what the artist should and can be. If, as Robert Martin suggests, Evil Was Abroad is partly an anti–Henry James novel, specifically conceived to counter the distanced ironic aesthetic of The Aspern Papers (1888), with which it shares some motifs, then the choice of Rilke is comprehensible as the model of an aesthetic in which personal engagement with the world is paramount.49 The fact remains that Rilke is not revolutionary in any of the senses that could best be applied to the workers of Vienna in 1934, and Lehmann’s choice of a poet whose most dynamic contributions occurred in 1906–7 with the Neue Gedichte and in 1922–23 with the Duineser Elegien and Sonette an Orpheus suggests the kind of nostalgia that Austrian writers of the period themselves often displayed. Lehmann may have left the effete image of Bloomsbury behind, but he did not embrace the aesthetics of the 1930s de-spite his friendship with artists such as Soyfer.

Evil Was Abroad has a third key theme besides politics and literature, namely sex, although it rarely features overtly except near the end, when Peter’s search for Rudi takes him to the Vienna underworld and to Annie’s, a gay club decorated with lewd naked figures of indeterminate gender, which is described by the narrator (rather tamely) as “grotesquely lascivious in places” (208). Annie, the pianist-owner, is a he, given to sudden “org[ies] of falsetto singing” (212). There is also a subjacent homosexual dimension to the sections on the Reichstag Fire: Marinus van der Lubbe was attacked by the National Socialists for his homosexuality as well as his alleged pyromania, and there was considerable violence perpetrated against homosexual organ-izations in Germany as a consequence.50 Much of the autobiographical ex-perience behind Evil Was Abroad can be reconstructed from Lehmann’s much more sexually explicit later novel In the Purely Pagan Sense. In the earlier work we are not told that Peter and Rudi are lovers, merely reminded — between paragraphs about Rudi — that Peter has always hated “the age-old hypocrisy of the English in anything to do with sex,” insisting “that the greatest sin was to pretend that any relationship could be deep and strong without an undercurrent of simply physical attraction” (195–96). The fact that Bertl’s first port of call when looking for Rudi is a gay pickup joint sug-gests that there is a sexual common denominator to many of the relation-ships in this group. Stephen Spender’s review of Evil Was Abroad suggests that “the relationship with the boy does not develop very far” and that it “is treated so slightly that it tends to give the whole vision a thinness.”51 In ef-fect, he is complaining that the homosexual relationship has remained too understated, and that he would have preferred a more overt, confessional tone. However, as Valentine Cunningham points out, Evil Was Abroad is “sexually a pretty hectic novel” even if “the precise nature of these hinted yearnings remains irresolutely smudged.” It is verging on the hypocritical for Spender to take this line when “for his own part [he] could only manage to deploy the occasional male pronoun in his love poems.”52


The relationship between Peter and Rudi is, in fact, perfectly well devel-oped, albeit on a somewhat abstract plane and, crucially, articulated in con-nection with the poet whom Peter is working on, a point Spender ignores. Lehmann shows almost ham-fistedly that sex is important to the intellectual economy of the novel when he describes Peter’s belief in the importance of sex in political terms as a “charter of emancipation” that liberates that gen-eration from the mistakes of its predecessors. He also sees it as a “first step in the argument about the creative power of all relationships, whether ex-pressed physically or not” (196). For Lehmann sexual identity was inextric-ably linked with social identity. His biographer reads Lehmann’s promiscuity as a political gesture rather than merely one of escapism: “Sexual pleasure was never an escape from the horror of global destruction; it was an act against it. And through sexual union he forged another, stronger link with the classes he needed to identify with.”53 This link was made in order fun-damentally to change what he was, what his background had made him. This may strike us nowadays as at best sentimental, at worst a lame excuse for a sexual preference that has little to do with ideology, but in the 1930s it was taken much more seriously. Cunningham speculates that the Auden genera-tion’s predilection for young German men was, on one level, the articulation of the “First World War by proxy,” a latecomer’s “substitute for the uni-formed world of the military father and elder brother, a wasteland place that was legally and physically dangerous.”54 Rainer Emig takes a more down-to-earth approach, showing how Berlin (and, by implication, Lehmann’s Vienna) represented not only “liberal attitudes to homosexuality” but also the “op-portunity to establish closer contacts with the working class” and, above all, a “proximity to direct political struggle” — in all respects unlike Britain at the time.55 The assessment of Peter’s sexual experiences in Evil Was Abroad by one of the few critics to have written about them at all is therefore flawed. When Robert Martin suggests that “there is no illusion of sex as a source of human brotherhood; it is merely the means to one person’s aesthetic and personal transformation,”56 the point he makes about individual personal transformation is certainly valid, but he underestimates the degree to which Lehmann calculated a symbolic overlap of sex and politics. This emerges much more clearly from the later, more explicit novel. Nevertheless, in Evil Was Abroad sex is partly about human brotherhood and consequently — in the context of interwar Vienna — about politics.

It is clear, therefore, that there is rather more to this novel than most literary historians of the Auden generation usually recognize. The same is true of Lehmann’s 1934 collection of verse, The Noise of History, elements of which shed further light on the artistic shift that its author underwent while writing Evil Was Abroad. It is in three parts, a series of twenty-one short verse poems (written between late 1931 and 1932), followed by fourteen prose poems (early 1933 to just after the February uprising of 1934), and, finally, by a four-part verse poem entitled “The Years of Illness” (early 1934).


Lehmann specifically notes that the ordering of poems within the volume “is fairly exactly that of writing, and so follows the course of a gradually de-veloping point of view.”57 Whether or not that is literally true, it is an indi-cation that the poems are meant to be read as a progression.

A brief glance at the first section of this collection makes clear how Leh-mann’s aesthetic changed. The earliest poems, written in England, are highly introspective, with the outside world functioning “primarily as a correlative for subjective states,”58 but after Lehmann left London in 1932, the per-sonal, the intimate, and the emotional are intermingled with the political and the social. Sometimes the tone is optimistic or hymnic, risking the reproach of naïveté, which may be true of the opening of “Though Time May Loiter” (subtitled “Karl Marx Hof 1932”):

But here is promise, too, among the wreck, New thoughts expand eclipsing forms that waste, The green of a new world, as the young trees In woods grow under withered boughs [. . .]. The future opens leaves to all the West Here in wide courtyards where the concrete throws Never full shadow [. . .]. Where life is light and space and home for rest, With faith to hope, though factories employ Fewer each week at gear and plant that rust [. . .]. (27)

Poems such as this encapsulate their own critique and enact the realization that ideological “promise” may be thwarted by social reality: to acknowledge the risks of unemployment is, in effect, to throw a “shadow” over the lives of those inhabiting the tenement block and to retract the bold claim that “life is light and space.” The next poem, “Like the Wind,” simultaneously man-ages to idealize the young men who have been made redundant and come, cap-in-hand, to sing for their supper (“Fair, with brown skins, and one had a violin”), to register their individual suffering, and to recognize that they are symptomatic of society’s broader problems and not merely isolated, pic-turesque cases of indigence: “To-morrow these too will be gone, but more will come” (28). “The Door Flies Open” registers impressions perhaps gained during the fighting in February 1934, perhaps from Lehmann’s visits to Ber-lin, personifying terror itself as a hostile force in a single breathless sentence:

Now terror advances, and the door flies open Sweeping aside barriers that scuffled with the wind, Now the dark assumes fingers, the unthinkable can happen, The wheels of the engine, terror on my flesh Advances in iron, on the rail, on the wound Flying open like a door, and the blood jetting warm, Shrapnel is no story, but irradiates with its flash


The twist of the mutilated and the feeding worm, The cries of the tortured break in cells under my feet, — Comfort of busy streets, and flowers, and the flush Of morning over belfries are as paper in this hour Of the inrush of the wind, the naked claws of fate, — I am fixed beneath the shadow of terror like a hare. (29)

“In the Dying City,” however, subordinates harsh reality to emotional es-capism. Although Lehmann talks of “banks that close their doors” and the “anger of neighbour states” in token of economic trouble and the rising tide of war, he sees past them to claim “awakening lips and bodies greet / In fields the fire of arc-lamps cannot reach, — / In the dying city, and epoch, we are happy” (31). The volume uses such moments of private inwardness to give momentum to the external analysis of Vienna’s situation at the time. They underpin Lehmann’s appreciative evocation of crisp November mornings in “As the Day Burns On,” his feel for the beauty of the light, his slightly eroticized admiration of “the carriage of a young man’s head” (32) and his regard for the warmth and joy of friendship: “How splendid a tex-ture they form.” These, in turn, are essential prerequisites for his gradual hollowing out of the same social situation as he evokes the noise of “the thunder of trains” and “their wakeful shunting at dawn.” “How splendid a texture,” he repeats,

but woven so thin in places Tearing to gape on darkness, gulfs of cold, Where a white-cheeked mother holds by flaring windows Her ulcered child in arms of ice, And boys in shuddering shadows of the planes Stray numb beyond the stab of hope’s imposture, When sudden ambulances clang returning From blood-wet streets and cries that rack a suburb, Or telegrams report A sentry’s death by sniping on the frontier, The jealousy of empires howling vengeance And dense behind barbed wire the guns and helmets. (32–33)

A similarly complex interplay of aesthetic and political is evident in the broader canvas of Evil Was Abroad.

Reviewers were not kind to The Noise of History. It was the only volume of poetry reviewed that year in The Daily Worker — and was thus clearly felt to offer something prima facie worth considering — but the response was lukewarm. Although Lehmann was praised for his antifascist stance, his po-etry was felt to “suffer [. . .] from the uncertainty of its origin,” by which the reviewer presumably means Lehmann’s well-to-do, private school upbring-ing. Geoffrey Grigson, writing in the Bookman, thought that there was little


good in it except the title.59 In a letter to Lehmann Christopher Isherwood wondered, “What noise does history make?,” and speculated trivially, “I imagine something like the loud speaker of the radio at the German cafe in Orotava [Tenerife], a superhuman bass voice speaking through whistles, crackling and loud pops.”60 But the noise of history that Lehmann evokes so powerfully is much less camp than Spender imagines: it is “the thunder of trains emerging from stations,” the “clang” of “sudden ambulances” and, above all, “the jealousy of empires howling vengeance” from “As the Day Burns On.” It is “the ringing of alarm bells” (37) — from the prose poems in the second section — the bells of the trams heard by the “boy in the rag-ged coat” contemplating suicide because he cannot find work (45), “the blare of merry-go-rounds” (47) and the cough of a neighbor on the other side of a thin wall interrupting a late-night political discussion with the fear of being overheard (49). Paradoxically the noise of history is also the spell-bound silence of the crowds “gazing dumbly at the shattered glass of the dome” of the burnt-out Reichstag in Berlin (39), the sudden silencing of the piano in a nightclub being raided by police intent on arresting Jews (40), or the pause made by ministers during “their most secret conference [to] listen to the faint sound of rustling feet” (41). It is the mixture of the domestic and the political encapsulated in an evocation of a British mother (perhaps Lehmann’s own): “The voices of her children [. . .] bring her anxiety into sharper focus. She sees obscurely a future that will deny the values which her life, her well-filled house and quiet gardens are teaching them. She hears the angry noise of history grow louder, like the noise of a landslide on an island coast” (44). Back in Vienna the noise of history is felt in the contrasts be-tween the social (the happy revelers in the Prater, whose “chattering and laughing” is chased away by a rain shower), the political (the continued con-ference of workers in “the inner hall of a municipal building [. . .] discussing the future of their movement” and the continued “whirling, loud machines that were printing the next day’s newspapers”), and the private (the “agony of a mother giving birth, in the room at the top of a new tenement house, to the desire of many years, her first child, a son” [52], an extraordinary bitter-sweet image of the impact of history on everyday life).

Horst Jarka maintains that it was precisely Lehmann’s “Unantastbarkeit” (untouchability) as an outsider that makes his sympathies with the working-class Viennese convincing.61 This may be true, but it is not quite the same as the special interpenetration of private and public, sentimental and social, aesthetic and political that may constitute what an English writer such as Lehmann can contribute to the literary history of Austria at this time. Ideo-logically committed to a different kind of politics from those suggested by his own background and upbringing, emotionally shaped by a different world from the one he inhabits when in Vienna, he is not “untouchable.” On the contrary, he is touched at every turn by the people he meets and en-gaged in a way that a native Austrian might not be.


Notes

1 It should perhaps be added that Soyfer was born in Russia and that Horváth, although born in the old empire, only had a limited connection with post-1918 Austria. See Alan Bance, “Ödön von Horváth: Kasimir und Karoline,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 13 (1977): 177–89; and Horst Jarka, “Horváth, Kramer and Soyfer,” in Austria in the Thirties: Culture and Politics, ed. Kenneth Segar and John Warren (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1991), 151–77, here 158. Roth, who was skeptical about supposedly national identities of all kinds, has similarly been reevaluated by Jon Hughes, who discusses the potentially “distorting” effect that the identification of Roth with an “Austrian” identity can have; see his book Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth’s Writing in the 1920s (Leeds, Engl.: Maney, 2006), 8–9. 2 Stefan Zweig, Briefe an Freunde, ed. Richard Friedenthal (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1978), 213. 3 Ernst Glaser lists nearly fifty works by Austrian and non-Austrian writers that treat this topic; see his article “Der blutige Februar 1934 in Österreich und seine Wider-spiegelung in der Dichtung,” Exil 5, no. 1 (1985): 22–40; here 39, n. 7. 4 Penelope Dimont, Johanna (London: Secker & Warburg, 1947). Dimont (née Fletcher) later married John Mortimer. George Barker, “Austrian Requiem,” in Horizon 1, no. 2 (February 1940): 72–73. 5 See John Lehmann’s “New Writing.” An Author-Index, 1936–1950, compiled by Ella Whitehead (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1990). 6 For an account of the specifically political dimension to this group, see Justin Replogle, “The Auden Group,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature [special issue: Books and Writers of the 1920s and 1930s] 5, no. 2 (1964): 133–50. 7 The most relevant are Down River: A Danubian Study (London: Cresset, 1939) and Vienna: A Travellers’ Companion, ed. John Lehmann and Richard Bassett (London: Constable, 1988). 8 Auden famously came round to this view, buying the only house he ever owned in Kirchstetten, near Vienna, in 1957. He had been to Austria before, notably in 1926 with Bill McElwee, an undergraduate friend from Christ Church with whom he was in love. See Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (London: Heinemann, 1995), 69. 9 See Adrian Wright, John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure (London: Duckworth, 1998), 5–8. Biographical details are taken chiefly from this source. 10 Wright, John Lehmann, 53. 11 John Lehmann, The Whispering Gallery (London: Longmans, Green, 1955), 196. 12 Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 196; see also Wright, John Lehmann, 59. Rilke was an inspiration for Welsh poet Alun Lewis, another of the British writers interested in Austria and its politics. See his poem “To Rilke,” in Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets (London: Allen & Unwin, 1945), 37–38. 13 Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1966), 724–25. This and subsequent translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Some extracts from Malte are quoted in English in Whispering Gallery, 198. Its influence on Lehmann’s


essay “The Life of the Prodigal Son” is also evident. See John Lehmann, The Open Night (London: Longmans, Green, 1952), 34–44. 14 Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 198–99. 15 Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 201. Rilke’s Briefe an einen jungen Dichter date from from 1903–4 and were first published by the letters’ recipient in 1929. See Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an einen jungen Dichter mit einer Einleitung von Franz Xaver Kappus (Leipzig: Insel, 1929). 16 The translation remains unpublished. See Horst Jarka, “British Writers and the Austria of the Thirties,” in Österreich und die angelsächsische Welt: Kulturbegegnungen und Vergleiche, vol. 2, ed. Otto Hietsch (Vienna: Braumüller, 1968), 439–81; here 463 n. 36. 17 He was also experiencing trouble with his family. See Wright, John Lehmann, 60–61. 18 Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 207. 19 Wright, John Lehmann, 74. 20 On “Red Vienna” in general and the political situation in particular, see Austrian Studies 14: Culture and Politics in Red Vienna (2006); see esp. Wolfgang Maderthaner, “Austromarxism: Mass Culture and Anticipatory Socialism,” 21–36. 21 John Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs: Leonard and Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978), 42–43 (quoted by Wright, John Lehmann, 63). This is precisely the opposite view to Auden’s at about the time he first visited Vienna (see n. 8): the reason he gave his Politics, Philosophy, and Economics tutor for wanting to switch to English was “to an introvert like myself, the social conditions of the poor in the 19th century as expounded by G. D. H. Cole [an Oxford political theorist and economist] do not click” (Davenport-Hines, Auden, 53). 22 Jarka, “British Writers,” 464. 23 Wright, John Lehmann, 75. 24 Wright, John Lehmann, 76. 25 Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 294–95. 26 Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 298–300, which indicates how closely Lehmann had been followed as he walked around Vienna. 27 Horst Jarka, Jura Soyfer: Leben, Werk, Zeit (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1987), 186. 28 Jarka, Jura Soyfer, 296–97. The chapter “Waffensuche” from Soyfer’s unfinished novel appeared in English in New Writing 2 (1936), 52–62 (trans. James Cleugh); a further chapter appeared after his death in New Writing, n.s., 3 (1939), 260–65 (trans. Charles Ashleigh). 29 Jarka, Jura Soyfer, 301. See Jura Soyfer, Das Gesamtwerk, ed. Horst Jarka (Munich: Europaverlag, 1980), 245–46; Jarka, “Horváth, Kramer and Soyfer,” 169. Lehmann’s translation of Soyfer’s famous “Lied des einfachen Menschen” (as “The Song of the Twentieth-Century Man”) was published by Jarka in “British Writers,” 477 (with a facsimile of the manuscript [pl. 46 and 47] between pp. 463–65). 30 See Jarka, Jura Soyfer, 484, 493, 545 n. 42. 31 Dates taken from the author’s note to Evil Was Abroad (London: Cresset Press, 1938), [n.p.]. Subsequent references to this work are acknowledged following the quoted text. The few studies of this work include: Horst Jarka, “Pre-War Austria as


Seen by Spender, Isherwood, and Lehmann,” in Proceedings of the Pacific Northwest Council on Foreign Languages 15 (1964): 231–37; Jarka, “British Writers” (pp. 462–78 on Lehmann); Robert K. Martin, “Appeals from Across Some Frontier: The Novels of John Lehmann,” in John Lehmann: A Tribute, ed. A. T. Tolley (Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1987), 61–67; and Chris Hopkins, Neglected Texts, Forgotten Contexts: Four Political Novels of the Nineteen Thirties, English Studies, 4 (Sheffield, Engl.: School of Cultural Studies, Sheffield Hallam University, 1994), 7–24. 32 Lehmann, Down River, 31. 33 Lehmann, Down River, 30. 34 Stephen Spender, “Novels” (containing a review of Evil Was Abroad and two other works), Fact 20 (November 1938): 75–77; here 76. The superficial link with the aesthetic implied in the opening phrase of Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939) — “I am a camera” — is unmistakable, although “recording, not thinking” is as far from Lehmann’s approach as it is possible to be. 35 While “evil is abroad in the land” has now become almost a proverbial phrase, the novel’s title seems not to be a quotation or a specific reference by Lehmann. 36 Lehmann, Down River, 33–34. 37 Lehmann, Down River, 36. 38 G. E. R. Gedye, Fallen Bastions (London: Gollancz, Left Book Club, 1939), 104–5. 39 Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 223–34. 40 On the “Rote Falken” in the context of another contemporary account of these events, see Robert Vilain, introduction to Ian Menzies, “‘Late Starter’: Extracts from a Memoir,” Austrian Studies 14 (2006): 261–67; here 265 and n. 13. 41 For example, Rains sees “how little of the Oxford Dick seemed to be left” in the new activist version of his friend (173). Political sympathies are shown not to be dependent on class, upbringing, and background. 42 This may be an echo of 1 Cor. 13:12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 43 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Das Märchen der 672. Nacht, quoted from Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden, ed. Bernd Schoeller (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschen-buch, 1979): Erzählungen, Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe. Reisen, 45–63; here 53. 44 Hofmannsthal, Das Märchen der 672. Nacht, 56. 45 Chris Hopkins, “Rainer Maria Rilke: A Source for John Lehmann’s Evil Was Abroad,” Notes and Queries 40, no. 238 (1993): 71–72. 46 Hopkins, “Rainer Maria Rilke,” 72. 47 Hopkins, “Rainer Maria Rilke,” 72. 48 Horst Jarka notes that “it was one of the paradoxes of the period that many of the English poets with radical views became admirers of the most unpolitical poets.” “British Writers,” 462–63. 49 Martin, “Appeals from Across Some Frontier,” 62–63. The protagonist of both novels is “a biographer in search of the letters that will reveal the secrets of the poet’s life,” and in both the daughter of the poet’s friend is a source of information. Martin argues that Lehmann’s novel is specifically a renunciation of the Jamesian novel of ideas, where the hero is an “impotent observer.”


50 See Martin, “Appeals from Across Some Frontier,” 63; see also Hans-Georg Stümke and Rudi Finkler, Rosa Winkel, Rosa Listen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981), 148–62. 51 Spender, “Novels,” 76. 52 Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988), 154. 53 Wright, John Lehmann, 66. 54 Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, 55. 55 Rainer Emig, “Transgressive Travels: Homosexuality, Class, Politics and the Lure of Germany in 1930s Writing,” Critical Survey [special issue: Literature of the 1930s] 10, no. 3 (1998): 48–55; here 52. 56 Martin, “Appeals from Across Some Frontier,” 62. 57 John Lehmann, “Author’s Note,” in The Noise of History (London: Hogarth Press, 1934), n.p. 58 Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (London: The Bodley Head, 1976), 141. 59 A.L.M., “A Poet Writes of Real Things,” Daily Worker, 24 October 1934, 4; Geoffrey Grigson, “The Year’s Poetry,” Bookman 87 (December 1934): 151. Both reviews are quoted by Hynes, The Auden Generation, 144. 60 Quoted by Lehmann in “Two of the Conspirators,” Twentieth-Century Literature [Christopher Isherwood Issue] 22, no. 3 (1976): 264–75; here 268. 61 Jarka, Jura Soyfer, 209.

Contributors

ANDREA AMORT is Lecturer in Dance at the Konservatorium Wien Privat-universität and dance critic for the Austrian daily newspaper Kurier. She has worked as a dramaturge and curator in Germany and Austria, and was artistic director of the festival “Berührungen. Tanz vor 1938 — Tanz von heute” (Vienna, 2008). She edited the reference work Österreich tanzt. Geschichte und Gegenwart (2001). Her book on Hanna Berger will be published in spring 2010 by Christian Brandstätter.

ANDREW BARKER is Professor of Austrian Studies at the University of Edin-burgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of London. His work centers on the cultural history of Vienna in the 19th and 20th centuries, and publications include Telegrams from the Soul: Peter Altenberg and the Culture of fin-de-siecle Vienna (1996) and a parallel edition of the two versions of Altenberg’s book Semmering 1912 with Leo Lensing (Wesleyan University).

ALYS X. GEORGE received her PhD in German Studies from Stanford Uni-versity and is an independent scholar living in Vienna. She has studied at the Freie Universität Berlin and was a Fulbright scholar at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK) in Vienna. Her areas of research include German and Austrian cultural history, modernism and the avant-garde, literature, film and art history.

DEBORAH HOLMES is Researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna where she is currently working on a biography of Eugenie Schwarzwald. Her publications include the mo-nograph Ignazio Silone in Exile (2005) and numerous articles on late nine-teenth and early twentieth-century literature and culture in Austria, Germany and Italy.

JON HUGHES is Senior Lecturer in German and Deputy Dean of Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely on the interwar period in German literature, including Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth’s Writings of the 1920s (2006). His other research interests are the cinema of the Weimar Republic, anti-fascist exile, the literature and film of the German Democratic Republic. He is reviews editor of the journal Austrian Studies.

BIRGIT LANG is Lecturer in German at the University of Melbourne, Aus-tralia. She is author of Eine Fahrt ins Blaue. Deutschsprachiges Exiltheater und -

268 ♦ NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

kabarett in Australien 1933–88 (2006). She is also co-editor of the Austra-lian Yearbook for German Literary and Cultural Studies, Vol. 1 Memory Crisis (2008) and Vol. 2 Narratives of Work (2009). Her areas of research include Modern Literature, History of Sexuality, Exile and Migration Studies.

WOLFGANG MADERTHANER is Academic and Managing Director of the Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in Vienna, and currently also the director of a research project on the biography of Emma Adler. He has published widely in the areas of urban studies, mass and popular culture and intellectual history. His most recent books include . . . der Rest ist Österreich. Das Werden der Ersten Republik 1918–1920, 2 volumes, co-edited with Hel-mut Konrad (2008) and Kultur Macht Geschichte. Studien zur Wiener Stadt-kultur in 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (2005).

THERESE MUXENEDER is head archivist at the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna. She teaches at the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of Music and the Performing Arts. Her publications include essays on Austrian music history and editing and archival practices. She was co-editor of the Mozart Bibliography published by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg. Other editorial projects include the catalogue raisonné of Schoen-berg’s visual art and the critical edition of Schoenberg’s collected works.

BIRGIT PETER is Researcher at the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Vienna and director of its archive and collec-tions. She is co-editor with M. Payr of “Wissenschaft nach der Mode?” Die Gründung des Zentralinstituts für Theaterwissenschaft an der Universität Wien 1943 (2008) and with G. M. Bauer of Neue Wege. 75 Jahre Theater der Jugend in Wien (2008). Her research interests include history of Austrian theatre and its archives, history of science, history of circus, vaudeville, and magic.

LISA SILVERMAN is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has published articles in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, Austrian Studies, German Quarterly, and Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, as well as several essays in volumes on German- and Austrian-Jewish cultural history. She is currently completing a monograph on Austrian Jewish cultural history between the World Wars.

EDWARD TIMMS (OBE) is Fellow of the British Academy, Research Profes-sor in History at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, University of Sussex and holder of the Austrian Cross of Honor for Arts and Sciences. He is best known for his book Karl Kraus — Apocalyptic Satirist, published in two vol-umes as Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (1986) and The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika (2005). Further publications include the co-edited volumes Freud in Exile (1988) and Austrian Exodus (1995). His most recent book, Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani, co-authored with Deborah Schultz, was published by Routledge in May 2009.

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS ♦ 269

ROBERT VILAIN is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Lecturer in German at Christ Church, Oxford. He has published widely on Franco-German literary relations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including a monograph on The Poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and French Symbolism (2000) and two co-edited vol-umes on Rilke (2009). He is currently completing a monograph on Yvan Goll and a bilingual edition of Rilke’s poetry. He is co-editor of the journal Aus-trian Studies.

JOHN WARREN is former Head of German and Austrian Studies at Oxford Brookes University. He is co-editor with Ulrike Zitzlsperger of Vienna meets Berlin: Cultural Interaction 1918–1938 (2005) and with Kenneth Segar of Austria in the Thirties: Culture and Politics (1991). His research interests in-clude the performing arts in Berlin and Vienna between the wars.

PAUL WEINDLING is Wellcome Trust Research Professor in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University. He has published widely on the his-tory eugenics, public health organization, and evolution and society. His most recent publications include Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent (2004), and “Blood and Home-land”: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (co-edited with M. Turda) 2006. His book John W. Thompson, Psychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust will be published by University of Rochester Press in 2010.

Index

Note: Italicized page numbers indicate illustrations. Das ABC (cabaret), 48 abortion, 100, 152 acting, 133, 164 actors, 38, 63, 141n30, 145, 148,

163, 168, 172n12 Adametz, L., Professor, 103 Adler, Alfred, 25, 26–27, 38 Adler, Friedrich, 79n52 Adler, Fritz, 73 Adler, Guido, 29 Adler, Max, 25, 79n52 Adler, Nikolaus, 141n40 Adler, Victor, 21, 35, 66, 69, 71,

79n52 Adolf Luser Verlag, 29 Adorno, Theodor, 25 adult education, 5, 16n14, 36,

50n12, 73 adult education centers. See

Volksbildungshäuser; Volksheim Aichhorn, August, 25 Aichinger, Hermann, 25 Aichinger, Manfred, 141n40 Akademietheater, 34, 43, 46 Aktion Reinhard, 105 alcohol, 85, 152, 201; movement

against, 85, 87 alcoholism, 94 Alden, Martha Bowditch, 243n24 Alkohol, Sexualität und Kriminalität

(film), 152 Allan, Maud, 119 Allegretto (dance solo), 121, 122, 123 Allgemeine Biologie (booklet), 92 Allianz-Filmproduktions- und

Vertriebsgesellschaft, 150 Altenberg, Peter, 119, 122

America, 45, 82, 96–97, 118–20, 132, 135, 138, 139n4, 148, 154–55, 158n29, 213, 215; female guest performers from, 118–20. See also United States

American Eugenics Society, 96 An der Wiege des Walzerkönigs Johann

Strauss (film), 153 Anatomical Institute, 96 Andere Frauen, (film), 152 Anders, Georg. See Soyfer, Jura Andrian, Leopold von, 25 annexation. See Anschluss Anschluss, 1, 2, 7–8, 12, 28, 32, 37,

39, 40, 44, 59, 81, 84, 89, 103–4, 106n2, 130, 136–38, 140n26, 246

Ansorge-Verein, 181 Anthropological Institute, 93, 100–

101 Anthropological Society, 101,

109n33 anthropologists, 85, 89, 93, 95, 101,

104 anthropology, 83–84, 88–89, 91–92,

101–6 antifascism, 261 Antifascist Festival (Linz), 141n38 Antisemitenbund, 25, 41 antisemitism, 3, 10–14, 17, 18n41,

18n43, 28, 37–39, 41, 43, 45–46, 59–64, 66–67, 71–72, 76–77, 86, 88, 100, 118, 162, 169, 180, 182–84, 200, 227, 239

Anzengruber Verlag, 29 Apollo-Kino (movie theater), 150 Arbeiterbildungszentrale, 150

272 ♦ INDEX

Arbeiterbüchereien, 36 Arbeiterheimen, 11, 34, 169 Arbeiterkinos, 150–51 Arbeitersinfonie Konzerte, 26, 33,

36, 46 Arbeitersportbewegung, 150 Arbeiterturner, 36 Arbeiter-Zeitung, 7–8, 16n24, 25, 28,

34, 37, 50, 73, 79n52, 149, 158n33

architects, 22, 33, 40, 47, 140n17, 182

architecture, 1–2, 47–48, 54n75, 74 Archiv für Frauenkunde und

Eugenetik (journal), 86 Archiv für Rassen- und

Gesellschaftsbiologie (ARGB) (journal), 85, 92, 105

Argentina, 140n26 Arierparagraph, 13 Arntz, Gerd, 218 arts, 21–22, 33, 38, 74, 117–19, 127,

132–33, 135–36, 138, 140n17, 140n26, 141n40, 142n41, 162, 165–67, 170, 176–77, 181–83, 185–86, 189, 196, 207, 209, 211, 218, 220, 250, 256, 258; fine, 33, 51n25; performing, 37, 135–36; visual, 23, 38, 211

Arts Offices. See Kunststellen Aryans, 103, 183, 186 Aschner, Bernard, 103–4 Aschner, Bertha, 104 Aslan, Raoul, 43 Association for Human Heredity and

Endocrinology. See Verein für menschliche Vererbungslehre und Endokrinologie

Association for Population Politics. See Verein für Bevölkerungspolitik

Association of Antisemites. See Antisemitenbund

Association of Austrian Societies for Racial Hygiene. See Verband der Österreichischen Gesellschaften für Rassenhygiene

Association of Austrian Societies for Racial Hygiene, Linz. See Verband der Österreichischen Gesellschaften für Rassenhygiene, Linz

Astoria-Film, 147 atheism, 178 atomic physics, 38 Auden, W. H., 16, 263n8, 264n21 Auden generation, 247, 259 Auernheimer, Raoul, 25, 246 Auernheimer, Raoul, works by: Die

linke und die rechte Hand, 246 Aufartung, 94 Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt

Mahagonny (opera), 174n38 Aufzuchtspolitik, 88 Auschwitz, 35. See also concentration

camps Ausdruckstanz, 45, 117, 139n2.

See also dance; freier Tanz; modern dance

Ausstellung internationaler Theatertechnik (exhibition), 6

Austerlitz, Friedrich, 24, 25, 79n52 Austria, 4, 8–9, 12, 17n37, 21–22,

24, 28, 32–35, 37–39, 40–41, 43–47, 59, 68, 72, 81–84, 87–89, 93–94, 96, 100–101, 119–20, 125, 130, 135–38, 140n26, 141n40, 145, 151, 154, 158n29, 166, 185, 195, 197, 200, 206, 211, 213, 215, 217, 240, 244n54, 246–48, 250, 255, 262, 263n1, 263n8, 263n12; Catholics in, 100, 105; eugenics in, 81, 83, 85, 90, 97, 102–5; Jews in, 70–71, 78n38, 79n52, 204n8; provinces of, 13, 27. See also Deutsch-Österreich; First Austrian Republic

Austria (Hiking club), 13 Austrian army, 179 Austrian Association for Regeneration

and Hereditary Studies. See Österreichischer Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde

Austrian Center (London), 104

INDEX ♦ 273

Austrian constitution, 38, 43 Austrian Corporate State. See

Ständestaat Austrian culture, 13, 28, 32, 62, 70,

83, 105, 169 Austrian dance, 53n60, 125 Austrian Dreyfus Affair, 13 Austrian economy, 145–47, 149 Austrian elections, 7, 149–50 Austrian Film Industry Union.

See Vereinigung aller am Film Schaffenden Österreichs

Austrian identity, 10, 72, 105, 162, 165, 167, 263n1. See also Österreichertum

Austrian ideology. See Österreichideologie

Austrian League for Regeneration and Heredity. See Österreichischer Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde

Austrian Legion, 94 Austrian literature, 206, 211, 217.

See also Austrian writing Austrian medicine, 103 Austrian myth, 165 Austrian National Library, 163 Austrian “National” Theater, 34 Austrian newspapers, 121 Austrian patriotism, 180 Austrian President, 13, 34, 40, 85, 89 Austrian racial anthropology, 101 Austrian Radio Traffic Corporation.

See Österreichische Radio-Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft (RAVAG)

Austrian Railway Employees’ Club. See Club Österreichischer Eisenbahner

Austrian secret service, 152 Austrian society, 240 Austrian Society for Eugenics, 86 Austrian Society for Population

Policy [and Welfare]. See Österreichische Gesellschaft für Bevölkerungspolitik

Austrian Supreme Court, 96 Austrian Theater Museum, 125,

139n13, 140n18 Austrian universities, 89. See also

University of Innsbruck; University of Vienna

Austrian Women’s Party. See Österreichische Frauenpartei

Austrian writing, 195. See also Austrian literature

Austrianness, 162, 165–66, 220 Austrofascism, 14, 76n5, 76n7, 83,

100, 161, 171, 246 Austrofascist Putsch of 1934, 7, 74,

137 Austro-Hungarian Empire. See

Habsburg Empire Austro-Marxism, 14, 25, 61, 64, 69,

73, 161, 174n41, 216–17. See also Marxism

Automatenbuffet (drama), 51n28 avant-garde, 2, 21–22, 26, 33–34,

38, 44, 83, 177 B’nai B’rith, 65 Babelsberg, 45 Bach, David Josef, 25, 26, 50n7 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 183 Bacon, Francis, 247 Bad Ischl, 119 Bahr, Hermann, 25, 28, 119, 165–

66, 168, 226, 238, 244n48 Balázs, Béla, 25 ballet, 117, 119–21, 123, 129–30,

132, 135, 138, 140n26, 229; danse d’école, 120

Banta, Martha, 220 Barbusse, Henri, 193–94, 250 Barea, Ilsa, 242n19 Barker, George, works by: “Austrian

Requiem,” 247 Baroque, 43, 155 Barrison, Gertrud, 119 Barrison sisters, 118–20 Bartsch, Rudolf, 25, 28 Battleship Potemkin (film), 150

274 ♦ INDEX

Bauer, Felice, 204n6 Bauer, Helene, 79n52 Bauer, Ida (“Dora”), 68–70 Bauer, Julius, 95, 98, 102–3 Bauer, Leopold, 48 Bauer, Otto (Catholic Socialist), 25 Bauer, Otto (Social Democrat),

16n24, 25, 41, 62, 69–71, 78n46, 79n48, 79n52, 216

Bauer, Otto, works by: “Linzer Programm,” 216; Nationalitäten-frage und die Sozialdemokratie, 70

Bauer, Philipp, 68–70 Bauer family, 70 Baum, Vicki, 26, 38, 217 Bavarian Räterepublik (Soviet

Republic), 195, 226 Bayreuth, 17n30 Becker, Sabine, 207, 212, 214–15,

221n7, 222n16, 222n17 Beer, Rudolf, 33, 168–69 Beer-Hofmann, Richard, 25, 62 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 2, 121, 122,

123, 153, 183 Beethoven (film), 153 Beethovens Lebensroman (film), 153 Behrens, Peter, 25 Beiglböck, Wilhelm, 103, 112n89 Beller, Steven, 23 Benatzky, Ralph, 38 Beniston, Judith, 171n2 Benjamin, Walter, 211 Bentley, Eric, 241n1 Berg, Alban, 24, 25, 44, 46, 176,

181, 188n28 Berg, Alban, works by: Lulu (opera),

24; Wozzeck (opera), 44 Berg, Helene, 181 Berger, Fritz (pseud. of Fred Berk),

118 Berger, Hanna, 120, 125, 133, 134,

136, 138, 141n40 Berger, Hanna, works by:

“Dogaressa,” 134; Italian Journey, 134; L’Inconnue de la Seine, 133, 141n38

Bergner, Elisabeth, 164 Berlin, 5–6, 9, 15n11, 16n13, 33,

37–38, 44–48, 81, 84–87, 89, 91, 104, 132–33, 137–38, 139n1, 140n26, 145, 161, 169–70, 193, 198, 211, 213, 217, 239–40, 247, 252–53, 259–60; East Berlin, 133, 138

Berlin: Sinfonie einer Großstadt (film), 6

Berliner Börsen Courier (newspaper), 9, 193

Berliner Tageblatt (newspaper), 194, 211

Bertaux, Félix, 194, 204n8 Berührungen: Tanz vor 1938 — Tanz

von heute (festival), 138, 142n41 Bettauer, Hugo, 12, 25, 27, 37, 154 Bettauer, Hugo, works by: Andere

Frauen, 152; Er und Sie (editor), 25; Stadt ohne Juden, 12, 154

Beyond the Waltz (festival) 141n40 Bieberbach, Grete, 135 Biedermeyer era, 152 Bienenfeld, Franz Rudolf, 62, 65–66 Bienert, Bernd R., 141n40 Bilderbogen (drama type), 43 Bildungsarbeit (periodical), 149 Bildungsroman, 209, 223n43 Binder, Ewald G., 47 Binder, Sybille, 43 birth control, 82, 91, 100 birthrates, 83, 88, 91, 101 Blätter des Burgtheaters (periodical),

163, 165–66 Blau, Eve, 10–11 Blei, Franz, 14, 25, 166, 224–31,

234, 236–37, 240–41, 243n24; relationship to communism, 225, 242n17

Blei, Franz, works by: Der Amethyst (journal), 228; Casanova, 227–31, 234–37, 240–41; Formen der Liebe, 240–41; Das grosse Bestiarium der modernen Literatur, 224, 240; Logik des Herzens, 226; Der

INDEX ♦ 275

persische Dekameron, 240; Die Sitten des Rokoko, 240

Bliss, Arthur, 46 Bloch, Ernst, 211 Bloch-Bauer, Adele, 2 blood groups, 24, 30n17, 90, 98,

104 Bloomsbury Group, 26, 258 Blue Danube (waltz), 119, 123, 129 Blumenkorsi (flower parades), 170 Blüml, Rudolf, 40 Bodanzky, Robert, works by: Eine

Ballnacht (drama, with Leopold Jacobson), 173n31

Bodenwieser, Gertrud, 6, 14, 120, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129–30, 135–36, 141n36; Bodenwieser Dance Ensemble, 128, 129

Bodenwieser, Gertrud, works by: “Der brennende Dornbusch,” 127; “Cakewalk,” 126, 127; “Dämon Maschine,” 6, 127, 128, 129–30; “Groteske,” 127; “Hysterie,” 127; “Life Forces,” 128; Die Masken Luzifers (dance-drama), 130; “Terror,” 130

Bogota, 130, 138 Bohemia, 5, 67–69, 88 Böhm, Hermann, 172n21 Bolshevism, 41, 43, 195, 227, 237;

“red terror,” 50n9 Boltzmanngasse, 26 Bookman (periodical), 261 Botstein, Leon, 23 Bourdieu, Pierre, 26, 241 bourgeoisie, 34, 63–64, 71, 79n48,

144, 250 Brahm, Otto, 238 Brahms, Johannes, 175, 183, 189n29 Brandenburg, Hans, 121 Brandt, Max, 6, 38 Brandt, Max, works by: Machinist

Hopkins (opera), 6 Bratislava (Pressburg), 9 Braun, Felix, works by: Agnes

Altkirchner, 246

Braun, Heinrich, 79n52 Braunthal, Julius, 18n40, 25, 69,

79n52 Brecht, Bertolt, 44, 168, 174n38,

211, 246 Brecht, Bertolt, works by: Aufstieg

und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (with Kurt Weill), 174n38; Drei-groschenoper (with Kurt Weill), 168; “Koloman Wallisch Kantate,” 246

Brečka, Hans, 28, 40, 43 Breitner, Burghard, 98 Breitner, Hugo, 35, 79n52 Breslauer, H. K., works by: Stadt

ohne Juden (film), 12, 154 Breuss, Rose, 141n40 Brezina, Ernst, 95 Brieux, Eugene, works by:

Mutterschaft (drama), 167 Brigittenau, 251 Britain, 92, 96, 104–5, 250, 259 British Empire, 4 British Eugenics Society, 96, 104 Brno/Brünn, 81, 85, 100 Broch, Hermann, 4, 6, 15n10, 25,

42, 73, 246 Broch, Hermann, works by:

Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 4 Brockhausen, Carl, 95 Bronnen, Arnolt, 33, 212 Bruck an der Mur, 246 Brückl-Zehetner, Heidemarie, 161,

164, 173n31 Bruckner, Ferdinand (pseud. of

Theodor Tagger), 33, 38, 44, 168 Brüll, Oswald, 166, 173n28 Brülle China (drama), 33, 50n7 Brunner, Fanny, 142n41 Brunner, Gerhard, 130 Brunner, Otto, 25 Brunner-Hoyos, Magda, 130, 138 Brunngraber, Rudolf, 14, 206–23;

political beliefs, 206; sales and translations of novels, 221n2; Viennese background, 211, 217, 246

276 ♦ INDEX

Brunngraber, Rudolf, works by: Karl und das 20. Jahrhundert, 206–20

Buchenwald, 48, 105, 250. See also concentration camps

Büchner, Georg, 44, 168 Budapest, 67, 81, 86, 117, 155 Bühler, Charlotte, 25, 60 Bühler, Karl, 25, 60 Die Bühne (periodical), 49, 162–64,

169, 171, 172n12 Bukovina, 5, 71 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 247 Bund Neuland, 25 Bundeslehranstalt, 93 Bundesministerium für soziale

Verwaltung, 96 Bundesrealschule, 90 Bundestheaterverwaltung, 172n14 Bureau of Human Heredity, 104 Bürgerlichkeit, 69. See also

bourgeoisie Burggarten, 118 Burgtheater, 25, 27, 34, 38, 41, 43–

44, 163–67, 171, 172n20, 173n21, 173n28, 238, 254

Burjan, Hildegard, 25 Buttinger, Joseph, 26, 36 cabaret, 48, 54n80, 55n81, 55n82,

117, 121, 161–62, 174n41 Café Herrenhof, 25 cafés, 170, 251, 254, 262. See also

coffeehouses Canetti, Elias, 39, 42 Canetti, Veza, 17n28, 27 capitalism, 61, 70, 149, 151, 169,

216, 218, 227, 230, 251 Carl Michael Ziehrers Märchen aus

Alt-Wien (film), 153 Carnap, Rudolf, 25, 73–74, 218 Carpathians, 194, 199 Cartell Verband, 25, 40 Casanova, 224, 227–37, 240–41 Castiglioni, Camillo, 29 Castle, Eduard, 161, 163, 167–68 castration, 82, 196, 198

Catholic Grail Fraternity, 27 Catholicism, 12, 14, 18n40, 23, 26–

28, 32, 40–43, 60, 67–68, 86, 90–91, 97, 100, 105, 173n28, 180, 216, 225, 237, 240

Catholics, 27, 67, 83–84, 89, 94, 99–102, 227, 238–39; authors, 25; intellectuals, 18n40; publishers, 29; right-wing, 28; socialists, 25; welfare experts, 83

Cavell, Edith, 195 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 88 Charles V, Emperor, 45 Chiari, Richard, 89 children, 27, 30n17, 66–67, 89, 91,

94, 96, 98, 101, 104, 135, 252, 261–62

Chladek, Rosalia, 120, 125, 130, 131, 132–33, 135–38, 141n37

Chladek, Rosalia, works by: “Intrade,” 131; Jeanne d’Arc, 130; Die Kameliendame, 130; Rhythmen-Zyklus, 132; “Tanz mit dem Stab,” 132

Chopin, Frédéric, 121, 132 Christ Church, 263n8 Christian Social Party. See

Christlichsoziale Partei Christian Socialists. See

Christlichsoziale Partei Christianity, 2, 28, 40, 60, 70, 101 Christians. See Christianity Christlichsoziale Partei, 7, 12, 25,

27–28, 34, 46, 49, 50n9, 149, 180 Churchill, Stella, 104 Chvostek, Franz, 94 cinema, 143–46, 149–56, 157n10,

214–15, 223n40; cinematic montage, 210. See also film; Kino

Circus Renz, 127 Cižek, Franz, 38 Clarté, 250 clericalism, 39, 41, 49, 83, 91, 169 clinics: child guidance, 27;

counseling, 24; dental, 11; sex, 23. See also Eheberatungsstellen

INDEX ♦ 277

Club Österreichischer Eisenbahner, 182

coal shortages, 164 coffeehouses, 1, 13, 22, 29, 67. See

also cafés Cole, G. D. H., 264n21 Collins, Wilkie, works by:

The Woman in White, 247 Commonwealth Fund, 96 communism, 26, 28, 36, 61, 133,

168–69, 225, 227, 240, 242n17, 249, 250, 253. See also Kommunistische Internationale; Kommunistische Partei Österreichs (KPÖ)

composers, 13, 38–39, 44, 46, 48, 141n30, 153, 167, 175, 177, 179, 182–83, 185, 189n28

concentration camps, 133, 250. See also Auschwitz; Buchenwald; Dachau; Mauthausen; Ravensbrück

conductors, 38, 44–45, 119 Conrad, Heinrich, 228, 243n25 conservatism, 3, 27–28, 33, 38,

52n45, 90, 92–94, 99, 162–63, 165–66, 169, 177, 179, 181–82, 231, 237, 240

contraception, 97 conversion, 11, 13 corporate state. See Ständestaat Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard von, 25 counterculture, 26 Die Courage (cabaret), 48 Cracow, 9, 198 Cremer, Fritz, 133 Crinis, Maximinian de, 104 Csokor, Franz Theodor, 25, 41–42,

44, 168 Csokor, Franz Theodor, works by:

3 November 1918, 41, 44; Zeuge einer Zeit (collection of letters), 42

Cunningham, Valentine, 258–59 Curtiz, Michael (pseud. of Mihály

Kertész), 25, 45, 156, 158n28 Curtiz, Michael, works by:

Casablanca (film), 158n28; Die

Sklavenkönigin (film), 156; Sodom und Gomorrha (film), 156

Czech Republic, 195 Czechoslovakia, 105, 133, 194, 249,

253 Czermak, Emmerich, 25 Czinner, Paul, 25, 45, 155 Czinner, Paul, works by: Inferno

(film), 155 Dachau, 103, 250. See also

concentration camps The Daily Worker (periodical), 261 Dalcroze. See Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile Dalcroze Association for Rhythmic

Gymnastics, 135 Dalcroze School, 130 Dalinger, Brigitte, 161 dance, 4, 6, 45, 53, 117–42. See also

Ausdruckstanz; ballet; freier Tanz; modern dance

dancers, 40, 117–42, 193, 229; dance troupes, 135

Danielczyk, Julia, 172n21 Danneberg, Robert, 35, 79n52 Danube, 38, 143–44, 148, 170 Darwin, Charles, 65, 96 Darwin, Charles, works by: Origin of

Species, 65 Darwin, Leonard, 96 Darwinian natural selection, 86 Darwinians, 90 Dassanowsky, Robert von, 155 Debussy, Claude, 126, 127, 133 Dehmel, Richard, 168, 177, 180 Delsarte, François, 127, 141n30 Delvincourt, Claude, 46 DeMille, Cecil B., works by: The Ten

Commandments (film), 155 democracy, 8, 32, 34, 43, 48, 50n14,

73, 184 demography, 84, 88, 99, 100 Denk, W., 103 Deutsch, Felix, 25 Deutsch, Helene, 27, 25 Deutsch, Julius, 79n52

278 ♦ INDEX

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Blutgruppenforschung, 93–94

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege, 92, 100, 102, 106

Deutsche Meisterstätten für Tanz, 138

Deutsche Sängerbundfest, 34 Deutsche Tanzbühne, 137–38 Deutsche Vaterlandspartei, 87 Deutsch-German, Alfred, works by:

Franz Lehár, der Operettenkönig (film), 153

Deutsch-Österreich, 37, 89, 94 Deutsch-Österreichische Beratungs-

stelle für Volkswohlfahrt, 86 Deutsch-Österreichischer

Arbeitsausschuß, 37 Deutscher Bund für Volksaufartung

und Erbkunde, 94 Deutsches Haus, 92 Deutsches Volkstheater, 33, 43,

167–69 Deutschösterreichische Tageszeitung,

28 Deutschtum, 66 Deutschvölkische Bewegung, 25 Deutschvölkische Schutz- und

Trutzbund (German People’s Protective Confederation), 28

Deutschvölkischen Vereine, 28 Deutschvölkischer Verein, 92 Dewey, John, 220 Dianabad, 101 Dichterliebe (film), 153 Dickens, Charles, 247 Dimont, Penelope (née Fletcher),

263n4, 247 Dimont, Penelope, works by:

Johanna, 247 Dinner at Eight (film), 46 directors, 38, 45; artistic, 135,

142n41; dance, 130, 136, 138, 142n41; film, 33, 38, 145, 148, 152, 154, 156; opera, 23, 28, 44–45, 119; theater, 27, 33, 41, 43, 127, 163, 165, 168, 210, 238

District Office for Research on Ancestry of the Nazi Party Vienna. See Gauamt für Sippenforschung der NSDAP Wien

Dix, Otto, 205n25 Döblin, Alfred, 208, 214–15, 217 Döblin, Alfred, works by: Berlin

Alexanderplatz, 214–15 Döbling, 28 Doderer, Heimito von, 25, 28, 145 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 31n19, 34–35,

39–41, 43, 45, 171, 252; assassination of, 45, 47, 246; regime of, 39–48

Dollfuss Square, 48 Domanig, Carl, 25 D’Ora Benda (photography studio),

128 Dorner, Willi, 141n40 Das Drama von Mayerling, (film),

152 Dreamland Film Company, 147 Dresden, 87, 91, 135 Dubrovic, Milan, 137 Dubsky, Trudl, 125 Duncan, Elizabeth, 135 Duncan, Isadora, 119–21, 127,

141n30 Dunlop-MacTavish, Shona, 129–30 Durch die Quartiere des Elends und

Verbrechens (film), 152 Durieux, Tilla, 38 Duschinsky, Richard, works by:

Kaiser Franz Josef der Erste von Österreich (drama), 43

Eberle, Josef, 25 Ebert, Fred, 93 Eckmann, Alfred, 172n14 Eckstein, Gustav, 79n52 economic crisis of 1929, 99, 148.

See also Great Depression economic environment, 33–34, 48,

67, 70, 143, 145, 156, 209, 212–13, 215–16

INDEX ♦ 279

economic instability, 33–34, 44, 48, 68, 94, 96, 145–46, 151, 156, 157n13, 161–62, 164, 206, 212, 215, 253, 261

economics, 69, 217–19, 264n21 Egyptomania, 156, 160n60 Eheberatungsstellen (marriage

counseling clinics), 27, 82, 91, 95, 100

Ehn, Karl, 25 Ehrenstein, Albert, 25, 194, 226 Eibl, Hans, 25 Ein Abend am Bosporus (theater

production), 170 Eine Dirne ist ermordet worden,

(film), 152 Einstein, Albert, 59, 73, 185 Eisenstein, Sergei, 210, 214 Eisler, Hanns, 25, 38, 46, 48 Ekstase (film), 45 Eliot, George, 247 Ellenbogen, Wilhelm, 79n52 Emig, Rainer, 259 Engel-Janosi, Friedrich, 29 Engelmann, Paul, 25 England, 4, 39, 75, 97, 104, 129,

189n29, 247, 249–50, 253, 258, 260, 262, 265

Englisch, Paul, 224–25, 240 Enkelmann, Siegfried, 131, 134 Enlightenment, 14, 66, 70, 72, 74 Eppinger, Hans, 102–4 Erbbiologische Arbeitsgemeinschaft,

Institut für Anthropologie, 106 Erbforschung am gesunden Menschen

(exhibition), 101 Erbkunde, 97 Erdkunde, 97 Ernst-Mach-Gesellschaft, 59 erotic subculture, 22–23 erotica, 224–41, 242n4 eroticism, 22, 132, 225, 237, 239–41 Esperanto, 36 Estherhazy, 2 eugenics, 10, 81–112 86–87, 89, 96,

100, 104; Austrian, 81, 83–84;

British, 96; German, 83, 85, 87; Jewish, 104; socialist schemes, 107n7; Viennese, 81, 84, 86, 87, 104

Eugenics Review (journal), 86, 90 Eugenics Societies, 84, 86–87, 96,

104. See also American Eugenics Society; British Eugenics Society

Europe, 2, 5–6, 8, 11, 18n40, 35, 40, 48, 66–67, 71–72, 83, 91, 118, 123, 129, 137–38, 139n4, 145–46, 148, 154, 187, 199, 209, 248, 253; Central Europe, 6–7, 66, 81, 88, 93, 121, 184; Eastern Europe, 67, 136, 154, 162

Exhibition of Modern Theater Technology. See Ausstellung internationaler Theatertechnik

Exl, Ferdinand, 168 Exltruppe, 168 Exner, Gudrun, 88 expressionism, 25, 91, 132, 170, 176,

194; dance, 120, 125, 132; drama, 155, 166, 169–70; film, 151, 155–56, 160n53; literature, 194, 211; music, 175–76

expressive dance. See Ausdruckstanz Fabian Society (England), 85 Fabier Gesellschaft (Austria), 73, 85 Faktor, Emil, 9 Fallada, Hans, 211–15 Fallada, Hans, works by:

Kleiner Mann — was nun?, 212–13, 215, 217

Familienschutz, 101 fascism, 7, 26, 38–39, 48, 52n41, 99,

100 Favoriten, 169, 213 Federal Ministry for Social

Administration. See Bundesminis-terium für soziale Verwaltung

Federn, Ernst, 25 Fehér, Friedrich, works by: Haus des

Dr. Gaudeamus (film), 155 Feigel, Herbert, 76n11

280 ♦ INDEX

Fejo, R., works by: Frühlingstraum (film), 53n65

Fenichel, Otto, 25 feuilleton, 9, 28, 143 Fey, Major Emil, 35, 37 film, 6, 14, 33, 38, 40, 45–46, 53n64,

82, 123, 141n40, 142n55, 124, 143–60, 164, 214; Egyptomania in, 156, 160n60; expressionist, 151, 155–56; French, 46; German, 145; Italian experimental, 154; Jewish, 151, 154, 159n50; pro-ducers, 45, 148, 154; socialist, 158n32; talkies, 144, 148, 154, 164; Unterhaltungsfilme, 150; Viennese, 159n49; Yiddish, 154

Filmarchiv Austria, 157n10, 158n32, 159n48

Der Filmbote (journal), 147 Filmbund. See Vereinigung aller am

Film Schaffenden Österreichs fin de siècle, 1–3, 10, 14, 15n1,

16n13, 24, 32–33, 64, 69, 75, 84, 117, 139n4, 176, 216, 224, 228, 237, 239

Finger, Ernst, 95 Finkler, Walter, 92, 97 First Austrian Republic, 3, 8, 12, 21,

23, 32, 34, 37–38, 143–47, 149, 151–52, 155–56, 158n32, 166, 173n28, 176, 180, 224, 237, 240, 251

First World War, 1, 3–5, 7, 9, 11, 21, 32, 37, 43, 67, 72, 78n38, 82, 88, 117–18, 135, 143–45, 152, 163, 165, 167, 180, 184, 195–96, 203, 203n1, 209, 215, 218–19, 224–25, 227–28, 236–37, 239–41, 259

Fischer, Ernst, 39, 211 Fischer, O., 102 Fischer Verlag, 225–26, 238 Fleck, Jakob, works by: Die Schlange

der Leidenschaft (film, with Louise Kolm) 155

Fledermaus (cabaret and theater), 121, 140n17, 140n18

Fleischer, Hugo, 167 Fleischmann, W., 102 Floridsdorf, 252 flu epidemic, 164 Folies Bergère, 139n4 Fontana, Oskar Maurus, 167 Ford, Henry, 220 Forst, Otto, 87 Forst, Willi, 25 Forzano, Giovacchino, 43 Fraenkel, Alexander, 95 Fraenkel, Josef, 23 France, 18n40, 43, 46–47, 183,

189n29, 194, 204n8, 229–30, 237, 250

Franck, Paul, works by: Der Mandarin (drama), 167

Frank, Josef, 25, 40, 47 Frank, Leonhard, 193 Frank, Philipp, 29, 73 Frankfurter Küche, 5 Frankfurter Zeitung, 62 Franz Josef, Emperor, 4, 48, 67, 119 Franz Lehár (alternate title: Der

Schöpfer der modernen Operette) (film), 153

Franz Schubert und sein lachendes Wien (film), 153

Franz Schubert und seine Zeit (film), 153

Franz Schuberts letzte Liebe (film), 153

Die Frau ohne Schatten (opera), 32 Frauen aus der Wiener Vorstadt,

(film), 152 free dance. See freier Tanz freemasonry, 69 Freidenreich, Harriet Pass, 17n37, 23 freier Tanz (free dance), 12, 14, 45,

117–21, 125, 133, 135–38, 142n55. See also modern dance

Freiheit dem Vaterland (skyscraper project), 48

Das fremde Mädchen (film), 124 Freud, Anna, 25, 27

INDEX ♦ 281

Freud, Sigmund, 2, 13, 21–24, 25, 26, 37, 46, 62, 65, 68–69, 73, 193, 196–97, 201, 203

Freud, Sigmund, works by: Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 196–97; Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, 24

Freudenau (race track), 225–26 Friedell, Egon, 25 Friedjung, Josef K., 91 Friedmann, Ernst, 238 Friedrich-Engels-Hof, 251 Fritz, Walter, 157n10 Fröhlich, Georg, 25 Fruhwirth, C., 87 Fuchs, Brigitte, 83 Fuchs, Christoph, 218, 221n2,

221n4 Fugitive Poets (group), 26, 31n21 Fuller, Loïe, 119–20, 135, 139n4 Funder, Friedrich, 25 Funke, Fidelio, 46 Galicia, 5, 67, 71, 195, 199 Gauamt für Sippenforschung der

NSDAP Wien, 105 Gaulhofer, Karl, 95, 98 Gay, Peter, 65 Gedye, G. E. R., 252 Gefährdete Mädchen, (film), 152 gender, 27, 62, 69, 83, 230, 233,

258 Genius (periodical), 193 George, Stefan, 177. See also Stefan

George Circle George-Washington-Hof, 5 German Austria. See Deutsch-

Österreich German censorship laws, 240 German culture, 11, 62, 66–67, 72,

180, 183, 185, 187; art, 186, 189n28; cinema, 144–45, 155; dance, 121; language, 5, 43, 45, 162, 165, 168, 173n28, 228, 239, 247, 249; music, 13, 17n30, 34, 175–76, 180–81, 183, 185–86;

television, 204n2; writing, 161, 193, 195, 204n5, 207, 211, 222n16

German Dance Academy. See Deutsche Meisterstätten für Tanz

German Dance Theater. See Deutsche Tanzbühne

German identity, 66 German League for Regeneration and

Heredity. See Deutscher Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde

German Racial Hygiene Society. See Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene

German Society for Racial Welfare. See Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege

German Society for the Research of Blood Types. See Deutsche Gesellschaft für Blutgruppenforschung

Germanophilia, 66 Germany, 5–6, 8, 17n30, 28–29, 34–

35, 37–39, 42–45, 47, 49, 62–63, 65, 67, 79n52, 81–88, 92–97, 99–106, 121, 132–33, 136–38, 144–46, 148, 153–55, 180, 185–86, 189n29, 206, 211, 212, 216, 218, 227, 239, 242n6, 253–54, 258, 259, 262. See also Weimar Republic

Gesellschaft der Menschenrechte (drama), 44

Gesellschaft für menschliche Erbbiologie in Wien, 103, 106

Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene [German], 81, 85–87, 90, 100, 104; Munich Ortsgruppe, 87; Ortsgruppe Wien, 85, 100–101, 87

Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene [International], 84–85, 105

Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene in Freistadt, 106

Gesellschaft für Soziologie und Anthropologie der Juden in Wien, 65

Gesellschaft für Volksaufartung, 99

282 ♦ INDEX

Gesellschaft für Volksgesundheit, 89 Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmu-

seum (GWM), 217–19 Gessner, Hubert Johann Karl, 25 Gestapo, 23, 133 Der getreue Eckart (periodical), 29 Geyer, Eberhard, 101 Geyer, Emil, 168 Gföllner, Bishop, 41 Gide, André, 224 Gilman, Sander L., 65 Gini, Corrado, 99–100 Ginzkey, Franz Karl, 25 Glaser, Ernst, 263n3 Gleichschaltung, 100 Gleisenstein, Angelika, 236–37 Globocnik, Odilo, Gauleiter, 105 Glöckel, Otto, 35, 218, 25 Glück, Gustav, 25 Gmeyner, Anna, 27, 38 Gmund, 93 Gödel, Kurt, 29, 73 Godlewski, Carl, 120 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 46,

92, 249 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,

works by: Faust, 226, 254; Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit, 46

Goethe-Hof, 251 Goldin, Sidney M., works by:

Jiskor (film), 154; Ost und West (film), 154

Goldman, Leopold, 22 Goldman, Wera, 138 Goldscheid, Rudolf, 29, 85–88 Gombrich, Ernst, 23, 39 Graben, 69 Graham, Martha, 132 Gralbund (club), 25 Grand Hotel (film), 46 Gräser, Marcus, 5 Graz, 89, 94, 96, 106 Great Depression, 206, 212 Greater German movement. See

Grossdeutsch [ideology] Greenberg Theater, 141n40

Greene, Graham, 46 Gregor, Joseph, 166 Griffith, D. W., works by: Intolerance

(film), 155 Grigson, Geoffrey, 261 Grillparzer, Franz, 37, 43, 250 Gropius, Walter, 47 Gross, Otto, 25 Grossdeutsch [ideology], 81–85, 87,

92, 101, 173n28 Großdeutsche Volkspartei, 25 Großmann, Stefan, 37 Grosz, George, 38 Grosz, Wilhelm, 38 Gruber, Helmut, 10, 85n33 Gruber, Max von, 85, 87 Grübl, Raimund, 69 Grünberger, Arthur, 47 Gschwendner, L., 89 Guevrekian, Gabriel, 47 Guggenheim Foundation, 179 Gumplowicz, Ludwig, 85 Günther, Hans F. K., 101 Gütersloh, Albert Paris, 25, 226 Gutheil, Emil A., 25 Gutmann, Maria, 42 gymnastics, 28, 36, 129, 134–35,

137; rhythmic, 135 Habai, Karel, 46 Haberler, Gottfried von, 25 Habsburg Empire, 1, 3–5, 8, 10–11,

14, 21, 26, 33, 37, 41, 44–45, 66–67, 75, 82–84, 86, 89, 118, 143, 145–46, 148, 155, 156n2, 165–68, 170, 173n28, 176, 180, 194, 203, 216, 237, 244n54, 263n1

Habsburg myth, 194 Hacohen, Malachi, 66 Hagen-Bund, 126 Hahn, Hans, 29, 73, 76n10, 218 Hahn, Otto, 38 Haifische der Nachkriegszeit, (film),

152 Hainisch, Marianne, 41 Hainisch, Michael, 85, 88–89

INDEX ♦ 283

Haire, Norman, 91 Hall, Murray G., 225 Hall, Peter, 2 Halle, 88 Halsmann, Max, 13 Halsmann, Philipp, 13, 18n43 Hamburg, 247 Hamburger, V., 97 Hammerschlag, Viktor, 99, 102 Hanak, Anton, 25 Handel-Mazzetti, Erika, 25 Hanhart, E., 103 Hanka, Erika, 125 Hanneheim, Norbert von, 46 Hanus, Heinz, 152 Hanusch, Ferdinand, 46 Häring, Hugo, 47 Harkness Family, 96 Harmsen, Hans, 100 Harrasser, Albert, 101 Harta, Felix Albrecht, 127 Hartel, Wilhelm von, 22 Hartmann, Ludo M., 76n10 Hartwig, Mela, 27 Harvard University, 85 Hašek, Jaroslav, 197 Hashomer Hatzair (Zionist youth

movement), 71 Hassreiter, Josef, 120–21 Hassreiter, Josef, works by:

Mondweibchen (dance), 120 Hauer, Josef, 46 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 35, 50n14,

168 Haydn, Joseph, 2 Hayek, Friedrich A., 25 Heer ohne Helden (drama), 51n28 Heimwehr, 34–35, 41, 251 Heine, Albert, 165–66 Heine, Heinrich, 66, 153 Heine, Heinrich, works by: Buch der

Lieder, 153 Hellerau-Dresden School, 135, 137 Hellerau-Laxenburg School, 135,

136–37 Hellmann, Paul, 29

Henry VIII (film), 46 Henz, Rudolf, 41, 52n41 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 180,

188n21 Hereditary Biological Collaboration,

Institute for Anthropology. See Erbbiologische Arbeitsgemein-schaft, Institut für Anthropologie

Hernals, 213 Hertz, Friedrich, 85, 88, 104–5 Hertz, Friedrich, works by:

Antisemitismus und Wissenschaft, 88; Moderne Rassentheorien, 88

Herzl, Theodor, 21, 23, 154 Hesch, Michael, 93 Hilferding, Rudolf, 25, 79n52 Hindemith, Paul, 44 Hirmer-Markl, Miquette, 129 Hirsch, Max, 86 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 91, 193, 195,

205n24, 240 Hitler, Adolf, 1, 12, 37–38, 49, 81,

100, 125, 203, 212 Hoberman, J., 154 Hodson, Cora, 104 Hofburg, 2, 117, 163–64 Hoffmann, Géza von, 86, 88 Hoffmann, Josef, 22, 140n17 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 2, 4, 12,

25, 27, 29, 43, 50n4, 62, 73, 119, 124, 142n41, 154, 166, 202, 226, 228–29, 255–56

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, works by: Der Abenteurer und die Sängerin, 228; Cristinas Heimreise, 228; “Das fremde Mädchen” (text for pantomime), 142n41; Lord Chandos Letter, 255; Märchen der 672. Nacht, 202, 255–56; Der Rosenkavalier (film) (screenplay and libretto), 154; Das Salzburger große Welttheater, 43

Hofstätter, Alexander, 95 Hofstätter, Robert, 95 Hogarth Press, 247–49 Hohenstrasse, 37

284 ♦ INDEX

Hohlbaum, Robert, 25 Holger, Hilde, 125 Höllabrunn bei Wien, 85 Holland, 47. See also Netherlands Hollywood, 39, 45, 143–44, 148,

152, 155 Holocaust, 48, 64 Holzmeister, Clemens, 47 homosexuality, 22, 27, 91, 152,

258–59 Hopkins, Chris, 256 Hörspiel, 47 Horváth, Ödön von, 33, 42, 44,

53n66, 246, 263n1 Hotel Imperial, 119 House on the Michaelerplatz, 22 housing, 1, 5, 11, 36, 47, 67, 82,

91, 216, 251 Huber, Rudolf, 125 Hug-Hellmuth, Hermine, 27 Humanitas (Masonic lodge), 69 Hundert Jahre Johann Strauss

(film), 153 Hundert Tage (drama), 43 Hungary, 67, 88, 133 Hussarek, Max, 25 Huxley, Julian, 92, 104 Huxley, Michael, 139n2 Hygiene Institute in Vienna, 87 hyperinflation, 146–47, 155. See also

economic instability; inflation Iltis, Hugo, 92, 100 Im weißen Rössl (operetta), 168 Imperial Federation of Catholic

German Youth of Austria, 27 Imperial Royal Court Opera

Theater, 44, 119–21 inflation, 67, 147, 182. See also eco-

nomic instability; hyperinflation Innitzer, Cardinal, 100 Innsbruck, 13, 248 Institut für Rassenbiologie, 89 Institute for Sexual Research, 91 Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin,

91

International Federation of Eugenics Organizations, 93, 96–97

Internationale Frauenliga für Frieden und Freiheit, 25

Internationale Werkbund Siedlung, 47

internationalism, 66, 117, 120, 184 Ippen, Evelyn, 129 Isherwood, Christopher, 16n13,

246–47, 262, 265n31, 265n34 Isherwood, Christopher, works by:

Goodbye to Berlin, 265n34; Prater Violet, 246; The World in the Evening, 246

ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education), 219, 223n40

Italian Fascism, 48, 99–100 Italy, 39, 52n41, 52n47, 105, 155,

195, 211, 228, 234, 249 Ithaca, New York, 97 Jack the Ripper, 201 Jackson, George, 139n1 Jacobson, Leopold, works by: Eine

Ballnacht (drama, with Robert Bodanzky), 173n31

Jäger, Christian, 9 Jagic, Nikolaus von, 102–3 Jahoda, Marie, 39, 51n30 James, Henry, 258, 265n49 James, Henry, works by: The Aspern

Papers, 258 Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile, 127, 135,

141n30. See also Dalcroze Association for Rhythmic Gymnastics; Dalcroze School

Jarka, Horst, 42, 48, 250, 262, 265n48

Jellinek, Hans, 46 Jelusich, Mirko, 25 Jeritza, Maria, 50n4 Jessner, Leopold, 168 Jessnersche Treppe, 168 Jesuits, 12, 89, 100

INDEX ♦ 285

Jewish Feature Film Society. See Jüdische Kunstfilm-Gesellschaft

Jewish identity, 17n33, 162, 183, 185 Jewish museum, 23 Jewish self-hatred, 62, 64, 77n22 Jewish theater, 161–62 Jewishness, 14, 59–76 Jews, 2, 9–13, 17n37, 18n40, 22–

23, 28–29, 32, 37–39, 41–43, 45, 59–72, 75, 76n10–11, 77n22, 79n48, 79n50, 79n52, 81, 86, 88, 92–94, 102, 104–5, 118, 125, 136–37, 151, 154, 159n50, 161–62, 180, 183–85, 194–202, 204n8, 225, 227, 239, 262; assimilation, 64, 184; exclusion from Austrian culture, 27, 45, 92, 94, 104–5, 183–84

Josefstadt, 29, 249 journalists, 13, 34, 37–38, 49, 62,

92, 118, 120, 214, 252 Judaism, 65, 66, 79n51 Jüdische Kunstfilm-Gesellschaft, 154 Jüdisches Hilfswerk, 154 Der jugendliche Arbeiter (periodical),

149 Jugendstil, 119, 125, 176 Jung Wien, 64 Jünger, Ernst, 212 Justizpalast (burning of), 7, 251 k. k. Hof-Operntheater. See Imperial

Royal Court Opera Theater Kadmon, Stella, 48 Kaes, Anton, 207 Kaff, Sigmund, 79n52 Kafka, Franz, 193–94, 204n6 Kaiser, Georg, 166, 168 Kaiser, Georg, works by:

Sorina (drama), 166 Kaiser Karl, (film), 152 Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for

Anthropology, 89 Kaldewei, Gerhard, 219 Kálmán, Emmerich, 25 Die Kälte des Februars (exhibition), 36

Kammerer, Paul, 86–87, 90, 92 Kammerspiele, 168, 239 Der Kampf (periodical), 149 Kantian philosophy, 73–74 Kapeller-Adler, Regina, 97 Karczewska, Irma, 22 Karlinsky, Elisabeth, 38 Karl-Marx-Hof, 1, 5, 49, 251–52, 260 Karlsbad, 88 Karlsplatz, 48 Karpeles, Benno, 79n52 Kassel, 21 Kästner, Erich, 209, 211 Kästner, Erich, works by: Fabian,

212, 214, 217 Kaup, Ignaz, 85, 87–88, 90 Kaus, Gina, 166, 25 Kautsky, Karl, Jr., 82, 91, 94–95, 98,

100 Keller, Karl, 99 Kellerbühne, 48 Kelsen, Hans, 25, 38, 95 Kertész, Mihály. See Curtiz, Michael Keun, Irmgard, 211, 217 Keun, Irmgard, works by: Das

kunstseidene Mädchen, 214 Kiesler, Friedrich, 6, 25, 38 Das Kinderelend in Wien (film), 152 Kindermann, Heinz, 28 Kinetismus, 33 Kino, 143, 149. See also Arbeiter-

kinos; cinema; film; movie theaters Kino-Betriebsgesellschaft m.b.H.

(Kiba), 150–51 Kino-Debatte, 144 Kinopublikum, 150 Kirchstetten, 263n8 Kisch, Egon Erwin, 38, 25 Kisser, J., 102 Klabund (pseud. of Alfred Henschke),

works by: Der Kreidekreis (drama), 127

Kleiber, Erich, 38, 44 Das Kleine Blatt, (periodical), 149 Kleiner, Arthur, 130 Kleines Schauspielhaus, 239

286 ♦ INDEX

Kleinkunst (cabaret), 121 Klien, Erika, 38 Klimt, Gustav, 2, 21–22, 33 Knoll, August Maria, 25 Knopf, Alfred A., 193 Koebner, Thomas, 228 Koestler, Arthur, 92 Kokoschka, Oskar, 22, 127 Kolisch, Rudolf, 25 Koller, Esther, 141n40 Kolm, Anton, works by: Der Traum

eines österreichischen Reservisten (with Louise Kolm) (film), 152–53

Kolm, Louise, 153, 155 Kolm, Louise, works by: Die Schlange

der Leidenschaft (with Jakob Fleck) (film) 155; Der Traum eines österreichischen Reservisten (with Anton Kolm) (film) 152–53

Kolowrat, Sascha, 155–56 Kommunistische Internationale, 25.

See also communism Kommunistische Partei Österreichs

(KPÖ), 25. See also communism Die Komödie (theater exhibition),

163 Komödienhaus (theater), 167 Konservatorium Wien

Privatuniversität, 136, 138 Konzerthaus, 29, 117, 127, 135, 182 Köppen, Edlef, 214 Körber, Robert, 25, 93 Korda, Sàndor (Alexander), 25, 156 Korda, Sàndor (Alexander), works by:

Samson und Delila (film), 156 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, 39, 44,

46 Kortner, Fritz, 38 Kothes, Franz-Peter, 139n1 Kracauer, Siegfried, works by:

Die Angestellten, 208 Kralik, Richard von, 25, 27–28 Kramer, Theodor, 42, 246 Krasinski, Zygmunt, 44 Kratina, Valeria, 130 Kraus, Gertrud, 40, 45, 117, 125, 137

Kraus, Karl (1874–1936), 5, 14, 21–24, 25, 26, 29, 37–38, 46, 203, 225, 246

Kraus, Karl, works by: adaptations of Shakespeare, Nestroy, and Offen-bach, 29; Die Fackel, 5, 23–24

Krauss, Clemens, 45 Kreisky, Bruno, 36 Kreisler, Otto: works by: Mozarts

Leben, Lieben und Leiden (film), 153; Theodor Herzl, der Bannerträger des jüdischen Volkes (film), 154

Krenek, Ernst, 25, 44–46, 54n68 Krenek, Ernst, works by: Durch die

Nacht (song cycle), 46; Jonny Spielt Auf (opera), 54n68; Karl V (opera), 45; Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (music), 46

Kreutzberg, Harald, 136–37 Kris, Ernst, 25 Krolop, Kurt, 21 Kröschlova, Jarmila, 130 Krupp prize, 84 Kuh, Anton, 37 Kulka, Georg, 25 Kulturbund, 29, 25 Kun, Béla, 25 Kunschak, Leopold, 25, 27 Kunsthistorisches Museum, 122, 124,

126, 128, 131, 134 Kunstlieder, 153 Kunststellen, 25, 26, 28, 36–37, 43,

50n7, 169 Kunwald, Gottfried, 25 Laban, Rudolf von, 127, 133, 137,

141n30 Laban, Rudolf von, works by:

“Festzug der Gewerbe,” 137 Laban School, 135 Lady Lou (film), 40 Lagermentalität, 34, 41 Lamarckian biology, 86–87, 90, 92 Lämmel, Rudolf, 129

INDEX ♦ 287

Lampel, Peter Martin, works by: Revolte im Erziehungshaus (drama), 33

Landler, Jenö, 25 Landsteiner, Karl, 30n17, 93 Lang, Erwin, 125, 127 Lang, Fritz, 6, 38, 45, 158n28 Lang, Fritz, works by: Metropolis

(film), 6, 145 Lanner, Joseph, 121 Lanyi, Richard, 25, 29 Latzko, Andreas, works by:

Menschen im Krieg, 195, 203 Lauder, Ronald, 2 Law of Association, 26 Lawrence, D. H., 193 Laxenburg Palace, 135, 137 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 25, 27, 39 Lazarsfeld, Paul, works by: Die

Arbeitslosen von Marienthal, 39 Lazarsfeld, Sophie, 27, 39 Lazarsfeld, Sophie, works by: Wie

die Frau den Mann erlebt, 27 Le Corbusier, 47 Le Rider, Jacques, 23 League of Nations Health

Organization, 100 Lebzelter, Viktor, 89, 101 Lee, Jennie, 35 Lehár, Franz, 25, 38, 44, 153 Lehár, Franz, works by: Giuditta

(drama), 44; Das Land des Lächelns (operetta), 44

Lehmann, Beatrix, 247 Lehmann, John, 14, 246–62 Lehmann, John, works by: The Ample

Proposition, 247; “As the Day Burns On,” 261–62; biographies of Edith Sitwell, the Woolfs, Edward Lear, Rupert Brooke, and Christopher Isherwood, 247; “The Door Flies Open,” 260; Down River, 251, 263n7; Evil was Abroad, 247–62; I Am My Brother, 247; “In the Dying City,” 261; In the Purely Pagan Sense, 247, 258;

“Like the Wind,” 260; New Writing (series, later named Penguin New Writing), 247, 250; The Noise of History, 259–61; “Song of the Austrians in Dachau,” (translation), 250; “Though Time May Loiter” (subtitled “Karl Marx Hof 1932”), 260; Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (translation), 249; Whispering Gallery, 247, 249

Lehmann, Lotte, 50n4 Lehmann, Nina, 247 Lehmann, Rosamond, 247, 250 Lehnen, Carina, 228, 237, 243n24 Leibfiaker Bratfisch, (film), 152 Leicht family, 170 Leichter, Käthe, 25, 39 Leichter, Käthe, works by: Handbuch

der Frauen-Arbeit, 39; So leben wir, 39

Leischner, Eric, 47 Lenin, 73 Lenya, Lotte, 38 Lenz, Fritz, 89, 97 Leontjew, Sascha, 118, 137 Leopoldstadt, 150 Lernet-Holenia, Alexander, 246 Leser, Norbert, 32, 38 Lethen, Helmut, 212, 216 Lewes, G. H., 247 Lewis, Alun, works by: “To Rilke”

(poem), 263n12 Lewis, Wyndham, 247 liberalism, 14, 22–23, 28–29, 34, 60–

61, 64, 68–69, 72, 75, 87–89, 92, 104, 169, 180, 183–85, 211, 225, 227, 237, 239, 247, 259

Lichnowsky, Mechtilde, 2, 25 Lichtblau, Ernst, 47 Der liebe Augustin (cabaret), 48 Liegler, Leopold (pseud. of Ulrik

Brendel), 25 Lindtberg, Leopold, 38 Linz, 35, 90, 106, 130, 141n38, 252 Linzer Programm, 216

288 ♦ INDEX

Liszt, Franz, 131, 189n29 Die Literarische Welt (periodical),

211 Literatur am Naschmarkt (cabaret),

48 Lithuania, 13 London, 5, 35, 45, 81, 86, 104,

129, 247, 249, 253, 257, 260; City Council, 35

London, Jack, 37 London Evening Standard

(newspaper), 129 London Magazine, 247 Loos, Adolf, 4, 21–22, 25, 26, 47,

182 Loos, Adolf, works by: “Guidelines

for an Arts Office,” 26 Lopatnikoff, Nikolai, 46 Los Angeles, 6, 175 Losch, Tilly, 172n12 Lothar, Ernst, 25 Löwenstein, Hans Otto, 152–53 Löwenstein, Hans Otto, works by:

Franz Lehár (film), 153 Löwy, Franz, 126 Lubbe, Marinus van der, 258 Ludendorff, Erich, 87 Lukács, Georg, 24, 25, 211 Lukács, Georg, works by: Geschichte

und Klassenbewußtsein, 24 Lurçat, André, 47 Luschan, Felix von, 85 Lux, Josef August, 25 Mach, Ernst, 39, 59, 73. See also

Verein Ernst Mach Machism, 73 Magris, Claudio, 194, 206 Mahler, Gustav, 2, 21–24, 44, 46,

119, 181, 183 Mahler, Gustav, works by: Das Lied

von der Erde (song cycle), 24 Mahler-Werfel, Alma, 23, 25, 27,

29, 186, 226 Die Maifeier der Wiener

Arbeiterschaft 1923 (film), 150

Mainz, 246 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 46 Mann, Stella, 125, 137 Mann, Thomas, 35, 50n14, 193, 227 Mann, Thomas, works by:

Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 227

Marcus, Frank, 241n1 Marcus, Jacqueline, 241n1 Maré, Rolf de, 136, 142n46 Mariahilf, 150 Marriage Counseling Center. See

Eheberatungsstelle Martin, Karlheinz, 25, 127 Martin, Robert, 258–59, 265n49 Der Märtyrer seines Herzens (alternate

title: Beethovens Lebensroman) (film), 153

Marx, Karl, 46 Marxism, 7, 34, 37, 39, 49, 73,

76n10, 91, 211. See also Austro-Marxism

Die Masken Luzifers (dance-drama), 130

mass culture. See popular culture materialism, 50n14, 178 Matteotti-Hof, 251 Mattl, Siegfried, 144 Mattsee, 13, 183–84, 186 Mauthausen, 137. See also

concentration camps Mauthner, Fritz, 73 Max Reinhardt Seminar, 164 May, Joe, 38 May Day, 41, 137, 150, 250 Mayer, Carl, 6, 45 Mayer, Lisa Maria, 127, 128 Mayerling, 152 Mayr, Richard, 50n4 Mayreder, Rosa, 21–22, 25, 27, 29 McElwee, Bill, 263n8 medicine, 48, 81, 84, 87, 88, 95,

103–5, 193 Mehring, Walter, 37 Meisel-Hess, Grete, 27 Meitner, Lise, 38

INDEX ♦ 289

Mell, Max, 25, 28 melodrama, 151–52, 162 Mendel, Gregor, 87, 92, 98, 100 Mendic, Josef, 46 Menger, Anton, 70 Menger, Karl, 29, 73 Menghin, Oswald, 25 Der Merker (periodical), 162, 166–67 Merkl, Adolf, 25 Messepalast, 91 Messner, Johannes, 25 metaphysics, 59–60, 70, 73–75 Metternich-Sandor, Countess Pauline

von, 119 Metzl, Julius, 95 Michaelis, Dora, 239 middle class, 22, 49, 50n8, 50n9,

67–72, 168–69, 180, 195, 208, 212, 225

Midgley, David, 221n7 Miklas, Wilhelm, 37 Mill, John Stuart, 69 Minister for the Arts (British), 35 Ministry of Education, 34, 45, 100,

137 Ministry of Public Health, 87 Ministry of the Interior, Abteilung

für Volksgesundheit, 87 Mises, Ludwig von, 25 Missong, Alfred, 25 Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit:

Arbeiterkultur in Österreich 1918–1934 (exhibition), 36

Mittelstück (drama type), 48–49 Mitterhuber, Ottilie, 141n38,

141n40 modern dance, 33, 37, 40, 45,

53n60, 118–20, 132, 136, 138, 139n1, 139n2. See also freier Tanz

Moderne Laster, (film), 152 Modernes Theater, 168 modernism, 5–6, 32–33, 44, 46–48,

70, 101, 118, 162, 165–69, 175, 177, 182, 186

Moissi, Alexander, 25, 226 Moll, Carl, 25

monarchism, 169 Moravia, 5, 67, 194 Moreno, Jakob Levy, 25 Morrison, Herbert, 35 Moscow, 47, 100, 117, 250 Moscow Chamber Theater, 168 Moser, Koloman, 33 movie theaters, 144, 149–50. See also

cinema; film; Kino Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 153,

183 Muckermann, Hermann, 89, 94, 98,

100 Mühlen, Hermynia zur, 27 Müller, Georg, 243n25 Müller, Robert, 25 Munich, 81, 85, 87–89, 94, 97, 104,

140n18, 172n12, 193, 195, 218, 226, 240, 243n25

Münz, Ludwig, 25 Museum of Economy and Society, 26 Museum of Natural History, 89 Museum Villa Stuck (Munich),

140n18 museums, 170 music, 2, 4, 6, 12–14, 15n10, 23,

26–29, 32–34, 38, 46, 48, 54n70, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 130, 132–33, 135–38, 139n30, 153–54, 156, 162–63, 167, 169, 172n8, 172n10, 175–90

musicology, 29 Musikverein, 182 Musil, Robert, 17n25, 26, 33, 42,

49, 50n8, 52n45, 73, 75, 166, 172n20, 225, 246, 25

Musil, Robert, works by: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 75

Mussolini, Benito, 34, 39, 43, 100 Mysterium des Geschlechts (film), 45 Naderer, Hans, works by: Lueger

(drama), 43 Nadler, Josef, 166 Nagl, Johann Willibald, 161, 163,

167–68

290 ♦ INDEX

Napoleon, 2 National Film Headquarters. See

Staatliche Filmhauptstelle National Socialism, 4, 10, 12, 28,

35–36, 38, 40, 42, 45, 49, 59, 64, 93, 100, 136–38, 180, 184–85, 254, 258. See also Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)

nationalism, 28, 32, 50n14, 68, 70, 82, 89, 93–95, 100, 103, 168, 185; German, 8, 17n25, 25, 26, 28–29, 72, 81, 90–94, 103, 105, 169, 173n28, 180, 183, 185; Jewish, 68

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), 2, 12, 25, 39–40, 65, 83, 87, 89, 92–95, 97, 100–105, 136, 186, 193, 251, 253–54; book burnings on 10 May 1933, 42; Schutzstaffel (SS), 93; Sturmabteilung (SA), 94. See also National Socialism

Naturfreunde, 36 Naturhistorisches Kabinett, 82 Naturhistorisches Museum, 101, 104;

Anthropological Department, 101 Nazi Party. See Nationalsozialistische

Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) Nazism. See National Socialism Nelböck, Hans, 59, 75n1 neopositivism, 14, 73–74. See also

positivism Nesbitt House, 6 Nestroy, Johann Nepomuk, 29, 250 Netherlands, 97, 229–30. See also

Holland Neubacher, Willibald, 93 Neuber, Erwin, 130 Neue Filmwoche (journal), 145 Neue Freie Presse, 7, 13, 23, 61, 92,

183 Neue Galerie (museum), 2 Das neue Reich (periodical), 25 Die Neue Rundschau (periodical),

211

Neue Sachlichkeit, 14, 17n30, 169–70, 198, 206–8, 210–12, 214, 217, 220, 222n16, 222n17

Neue Vereinigung für Malerei, Graphik und Plastik, 127

Neue Wiener Bühne (theater), 167–68

Neue Wiener Volksbühne, 169 Neues Wiener Journal, 92 Neues Wiener Schauspielhaus, 50n7 Neufeld, Max, works by: Ein Walzer

von Strauss (film), 153; Hoffmanns Erzählungen (alternate title: Les Contes d’Hoffmann) (film), 153

Neumann, Robert, 39 Neurath, Otto, 24, 25, 26, 39, 60,

73–75, 206, 212, 217–20, 223n40 Neutra, Richard, 6, 47 neutrality, 46, 212 New Federation for Painting, Design,

and Sculpture. See Neue Vereinigung für Malerei, Graphik und Plastik

New Objectivity. See Neue Sachlichkeit

New Writing (series), 247, 250 New York, 2, 39, 81, 93, 104, 193,

250 Niedermeyer, Albert, 100 Niernberger, Leopold, 152 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 167; philosophy

of, 193, 195 Nobel prizes, 33, 96, 101 Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens

(film), 144–45 Noth, Ernst Erich, 213 Das Notizbuch des Mr. Pim (film), 82 novel, 12, 39, 42, 62, 75, 152, 154,

193–96, 204n6, 206–20, 221n2, 222n16, 222n20, 225, 246–47, 250–53, 255, 257–59, 264n28

novelists, 39, 42, 62, 193, 206, 208, 213, 219, 225, 247

novella, 204n8, 225, 227–28, 232–34, 243n24, 265n35, 265n49

Nunberg, Hermann, 25

INDEX ♦ 291

Oberösterreichische Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene, Linz, 106

Oberst Redl, (film), 152 O’Casey, Sean, 193 October Revolution of 1917, 195 Oedipus complex, 13 Oesterreicher, Rudolf, works by:

Johann Nestroy (Singspiel, with Alfred Maria Willner), 173n31

Die österreichische Trilogie (drama), 173n21

Offenbach, Jacques, 29, 153 Offenbach, Jacques, works by:

Hoffmanns Erzählungen (opera), 153

Offermanns, Ernst L., 234 Olden, Rudolf, 25 opera, 6, 24, 32, 34, 44–45, 48, 50,

53n57, 54n68, 120, 153–54, 174n38

opera houses, 1, 23, 117 Opera Nazionale Dopolavaro

(organization), 52n41 operetta, 38, 44, 153–54, 159n49,

167–69 Operntheater, 44–45. See also

Imperial Royal Court Opera Theater

Opfer des Hasses (film), 154 Ophüls, Max, 38 Orel, Anton, 27 Orlac’s Hände (film), 155 Orotava (Tenerife), 262 Österreichertum, 166. See also

Austrian identity Österreichideologie, 82 Österreichische Aktion, 25 Österreichische Frauenpartei, 41 Österreichische Gesellschaft für

Bevölkerungspolitik [und Fürsorgewesen], 88, 100, 105

Österreichische Kunststelle, 43 Österreichische Meisterwerke (drama),

43 Österreichische Radio-Verkehrs-

Aktiengesellschaft (RAVAG), 46

Österreichischer Bund für Volksaufartung und Erbkunde, 94–99, 102, 105–6

Ostmark, 100, 103 Oswald, Richard, 38, 45, 53n64 Oswald, Richard, works by:

Abenteuer in Lido (film), 53n64; Wenn Du Jung Bist, Gehört Die die Welt (film), 53n64

Ott, Bertel, 183 Ottakring, 169. See also Volksheim

Ottakring Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, 25, 38, 45,

158n28 Palace of Justice. See Justizpalast Palestine, 40, 48, 137 Pan-Europa movement, 25 Pan-Film, 154–55 pantomime, 142n42 Pappenheim, Marie, 25 Paragraph 144, (film), 152 Paris, 38, 43, 46, 132–33, 136,

139n4, 184, 193, 246–47, 250, 257

Parisien (nightclub), 123 Paschkis, Karl, 99 Passau, 248 Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 25, 29 Pauli, Hertha, 27 PEN Club, 25, 29, 42 Perco, Rudolf, 47 Perkonig, Friedrich, 42 Pernkopf, Eduard, 103 Pfister, Oskar, Pastor, 65 Pfitzner, Hans, 44 Pfliegler, Michael, 25 Pfoser, Alfred, 216 philosophy, 7, 24, 26, 29, 33, 38–39,

48, 59–61, 73–75, 76n6, 76n7, 177, 183, 217, 225, 232–33, 235–36, 264n21

photography, 5–6, 12, 33–34, 88, 117, 126, 128, 131, 134, 138, 215, 251, 254, 257

Pick, Karl, 172n14

292 ♦ INDEX

Pierrot als Schildwache (ballet), 120 Pirquet, Clemens von, 96 Pisk, Paul Amadeus, 25, 54n70 Plischke, Ernst, 47 Ploetz, Alfred, 81, 85–88, 93, 97 Pöch, Rudolf, 85, 88 poetry, 26, 29, 31n21, 42, 46, 48,

52n45, 63, 66, 153, 175, 177, 198, 207, 246–49, 251, 253–62, 263n12, 265n48, 265n49

Poland, 7, 9, 44, 105, 136, 133, 196–7

Polgar, Alfred, 25, 143, 156 Politisches Kabarett (cabaret),

174n41 Pollak, Oskar, 25, 79n52 Polland, Rudolf, 89, 97 Ponc, Miroslav, 46 Pope Piux XI, 40, 100 Popenoe, Paul, works by: “The

Child’s Heredity” (treatise), 96 Popp, Adelheid, 25 Popper, Jenny, 69 Popper, Karl, 25, 27, 39, 62, 69–70,

73 Popper, Simon Carl Siegmund, 69 Popper family, 70 Popper-Lynkeus, Josef, 29 popular culture, 144 pornography, 239, 241, 242n4 positivism, 21, 60–61, 73, 82–83,

90, 92. See also neopositivism Post Office Savings Bank, 22 Pötzel, Otto, 98 Prager Tagblatt, 143 Prague, 5, 9, 21, 73, 94, 117, 204n8,

253, 255, 257 Prater, 47, 170–71, 251, 253, 262;

Rotunde, 170; Stadium, 6, 34, 105; vaudeville theater, 170; Vivarium, 82, 92

Preminger, Otto, 45 Pressburg. See Bratislava Pressburger, Emeric, 45 Pribram, Alfred, 29 Protestantism, 66, 69, 100, 180, 184

Prussia, 61, 89, 93 Przibram, Hans, 92 psychiatry, 81, 87, 95–96, 99, 101,

104, 196, 204n11 psychoanalysis, 24, 26, 39, 64–65,

72, 83, 91, 101, 176, 196 Psychoanalytic Society, 23–24, 26 psychology, 64, 71, 82, 90–91, 95–

96, 194; of children, 24, 96 publishers, 29, 193, 226, 238, 241 Pyrah, Robert, 171n2 Der Querschnitt (periodical), 211 Raab, Julius, 41 Rabinbach, Anson, 10–11 race, 14, 46, 62, 64, 72, 81, 83, 85,

88–94, 96–97, 99, 100–101, 103, 186. See also racism

Die Rache des Pharaos (film), 156 Rachmaninov, Sergei, 126 Racial Hygiene Society. See

Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene racism, 28, 42, 62, 65, 71–72,

76n10, 81–90, 93, 96–97, 100–101, 103–5, 185; racial hygiene, 81, 84–91, 93–94, 96, 100, 101, 104–6

radio, 27, 35, 46–47, 94, 164, 215, 262

Raimund, Ferdinand, 250 Raimundtheater, 33, 168–69 Rank, Otto, 25 Rassenkunde, 94 Rassenpflege, 92–93, 105. See

also Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege; Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege [Rassenhygiene]

Räteregierung, 218 Raumbühne, 6 RAVAG. See Österreichische Radio-

Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft (RAVAG)

Ravensbrück, 39. See also concentration camps

Rawaruska, battle of, 197, 200

INDEX ♦ 293

Reche, Otto, 91, 93, 101, 104–5 Red Falcons. See Rote Falken Red Square, Moscow, 250 Redl, Alfred, Colonel, 152 Reger, Erik, 211, 213–14 Reger, Max, 127 Reich, Annie, 27 Reich, Emil, 76n6 Reich, Wilhelm, 24, 25, 27, 91 Reich Theater Chamber. See

Reichstheaterkammer Reichel, Heinrich, 88–95, 97–98,

102 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, 193 Reichsbund der deutschen

katholischen Jugend, 25 Reichspost, 25, 28, 40 Reichsschrifttumkammer, 206 Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933,

247, 253, 255, 258, 262 Reichstheaterkammer, 136 Reik, Theodor, 24, 25 Reinhardt, Max, 12, 25, 27, 33 Reinhardt, Max, works by: Mirakel

(drama), 127 Reisch, Walter, 45 Reiter, Karl, works by: Vater

Radetzky (film), 152 Reitter, Paul, 62 religion, 10, 12, 36, 40, 62, 65, 67–

68, 95, 177–78, 183–85, 238 Remarque, Erich Maria, 209 Remarque, Erich Maria, works by:

Der Weg zurück, 214 Rendl, Georg, 43, 172n21 Rendl, Georg, works by: Elisabeth

Kaiserin von Österreich (drama), 43 Renner, Karl, works by: Die soziale

Funktion der Rechtsinstitute, 24 Republican Defense League. See

Schutzbund; Social Democracy Reunionsgedächtnisdomanlage “Die

Zelte Davids” (building), 47–48 Revai, Josef, 25 revue, 41, 161–62, 168 Rey, Willy H., 236

Rezzori, Gregor von, 3, 14 Richard III (drama), 168 Richter, Helene, 173n28 Riehl, Walter, 25 Rietveld, Gerrit, 47 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 248–49, 256–

58, 263n12 Rilke, Rainer Maria, works by:

Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 248; Briefe an einen jungen Dichter, 249, 256; Duineser Elegien, 257–58; Neue Gedichte, 256, 258; Sonette an Orpheus, 257–58

Ringstrasse (Ring), 1, 41, 82, 137, 252

Risak, Erwin, 103 Röbbeling, Hermann, 41, 43 Robbins, Bruce, 220 Rockefeller Institute, 93; fellowship,

39 Rohan, Karl Anton, 25, 28 Rohe, Mies van der, 47 Roland, Ida, 25, 226 Roller, Alfred, 25, 50n4 romanticism, 153, 155, 175, 217 Rome, 97, 133 Ronacher Playhouse, 118–19, 139n4 Ronsperger, Emil, 25 Rosenfeld, Fritz, 149–51, 159n36 Rosenfeld, Siegfried, 87, 95 Rosentingl, Walter, 93 Rossak, Franz, 82 Rote Falken, 253, 265n40 Die Rote Kapelle (group), 133 Roth, Joseph, 16n23, 17n26, 25, 38,

193–94, 196–97, 199, 204n8, 204n11, 208–9, 211, 237, 246, 263n1

Roth, Joseph, works by: Die Flucht ohne Ende, 208; Kapuzinergruft, 246; Radetzkymarsch, 237

Rowohlt Verlag, 193 Rozenblit, Marsha, 11, 17n33, 23 Rübezahl (ballet), 120 Rüdin, Ernst, 81, 87, 94, 96–97, 104

294 ♦ INDEX

Rudolf, Crown Prince, 152 Rudolf, Karl, 25 Rufer, Josef, 183 Russia, 39, 73, 135, 195–96, 263n1;

Russian language, 250 Russian Revolution, 34 Sachs, Hans, 186 Salten, Felix, 25, 171 Salten, Felix, works by: Wurstelprater,

171 Salzburg, 183–84, 248 Salzburg Festival, 12, 17n30, 27, 29 Salzburger Festspielhaus, 25 Salzkammergut, 184 Sanzara, Rahel, 193 Sascha-Film, 25, 147, 155–56 Sassmann, Hans, 43, 172n21 Sauter, Johann, 76n7 Scala (Opera Theater), 43 Scandinavia, 33, 86, 211 Scarlatti, Domenico, 134 Schaffgotsch, Maria Josefa, 123, 125 Schalek, Alice, 13 Schalk, Franz, 25 Schallmayer, Wilhelm, 87, 108n25 Schaukal, Richard von, 25, 28 Scheibelreiter, Ernst, 42 Schenker, Heinrich, 189n29 Scherrer, Thomas, 95 Schiele, Egon, 33 Schiff, Max, 69 Schiff, Walter, 69–70 Schiffbauerdamm (theater), 51n28 Schindler, Walter, 25 Schinzel, 97 Schirach, Baldur von, 136–37 Schlesinger, Therese, 26, 79n52 Schlick, Moritz, 25, 26, 39, 59–62,

73–74, 75n1, 76n5, 76n6, 76n11 Schmalfilm, 150 Schmidt, Franz, 44 Schmidt, Wilhelm, Pater, 89, 101 Schmidt-Dengler, Wendelin, 10, 211,

219, 244n54

Schnitzler, Arthur, 2, 14, 22, 24, 25, 26, 37, 62, 73, 166, 194, 196, 224–28, 231–41; diaries, 226–27, 234, 238; omission from the Paris World Exhibition of 1937, 43; translation of plays into Yiddish, 162

Schnitzler, Arthur, works by: Anatol, 239; Casanovas Heimfahrt, 227–28, 231, 234–37, 239, 243n24; Frau Berta Garlan, 194; Fräulein Else, 194; Komödie der Verführung, 239; Leutnant Gustl, 194; Liebelei, 226, 239; Reigen, 224, 238–39, 241n1; Die Schwestern oder Casanova in Spa, 227–28, 231–35, 238–39; Therese, Chronik eines Frauenlebens, 194

Schnitzler, Julius, 194 Schoenberg, Arnold, 2, 12–13,

15n10, 21–23, 25, 26–27, 38, 44, 46, 175–87; conversion to Protestantism, 184

Schoenberg, Arnold, works by: Der biblische Weg, 185; Chamber Symphony, op. 9, 181; “Compo-sition with Twelve Tones” (essay), 179; Entrückung, 177; Die Jakobsleiter (oratorio), 177–79; Litanei, 177; Moses und Aron, 179, 185; “Nicht mehr ein Deutscher” (forward to choral satires op. 28), 188n28; op. 23, no. 5 (piano waltz), 177; Pelleas und Melisande, op. 5, 175; Second String Quartet, op. 10, 175, 177; the Serenade, op. 24, 177; the Suite, op. 25, 177

Scholz, Alois, 93–95 Schönbrunn, 2, 251 Die schöne Müllerin (film), 153 Schönere Zukunft, 60 Schönerer, Georg von, 87 Schönherr, Karl, 25 School for Delsartism, 135 Schoop, Trudi, 133

INDEX ♦ 295

Schorske, Carl, 15n1, 21–22, 64, 225, 237

Schreker, Franz, 38, 44 Schreyvogel, Joseph (pseud. of

Thomas West; Karl August West), 25

Schreyvogl, Friedrich, 172n21 Schubert, Franz, 121, 153 Schultz, B. K., 93 Schumann, Robert, 153 Schumpeter, Joseph, 25 Schuschnigg, Kurt von, 37, 48 Schuster, Franz, 25 Schütte-Lihotzky, Margarete, 5, 25,

47 Schütz, Erhard, 9 Schutzbund, 36, 250–51 Schwarzkopf, Gustav, 25 Schwarzwald, Eugenie, 23, 27, 64,

71, 181 Schwarzwald School, 25, 142n55,

181–82 Schweden (cinema), 150 science, 2, 29, 30n17, 33, 38–39, 48,

60, 63, 65, 73–74, 82, 84–85, 88, 90–92, 99, 101, 103–4, 217

screenwriters, 33, 145, 148 Secession (art movement), 33, 125 Secession (building), 22, 119 Second International Workers’

Olympics, 34, 170 Second Viennese School, 46, 175,

181–82, 186–87 Second World War, 1, 7, 21, 118,

133, 136, 138 Seghers, Anna, works by:

Der Weg durch den Februar, 246 Seipel, Ignaz, 12, 25, 41, 48 Seipel-Dollfuss church, 47 Seitz, Karl, 35 Serpentine Dance, 119 Sexus (journal), 91 Shakespeare, Wilhelm, 29, 47, 168 Shore, Marci, 7 Sicher, Harry, 99

Der Siegeszug der Wiener Operette (film), 153

Siemens, H. W., 99 Sikyr, Toni, 250, 253 Silesia, 5, 93 Simmering, 34, 253 Sinclair, Upton, 213 Sissy (operetta), 168 Skoronel, Vera, 121 Slezak, Leo, 25, 172n12 Social Democracy, 32, 35–36, 73,

79n52, 149, 252, 257 Social Democratic Party. See

Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs

social science, 23, 85, 88, 92–94 Social Welfare Ministry. See

Sozialministerium social workers, 96 socialism, 8, 11, 14, 18n40, 24, 25,

26–28, 33–34, 37, 43, 49, 50n12, 50n14, 52n45, 61, 70–71, 74–75, 79n51, 79n52, 82, 84–85, 87, 90, 92, 94, 100, 102, 107n7, 149–51, 178, 184, 206, 213, 216, 218–19, 257

Society for Human Hereditary Biology in Vienna. See Gesellschaft für menschliche Erbbiologie in Wien

Society for Private Musical Performances. See Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen

Society for Public Health. See Gesellschaft für Volksgesundheit

Society for Racial Hygiene [International]. See Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene [Internationale]

Society for Racial Hygiene in Freistadt. See Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene in Freistadt

Society for Regeneration. See Gesellschaft für Volksaufartung

Sociological and Anthopological Society of the Jews in Vienna. See

296 ♦ INDEX

Gesellschaft für Soziologie und Anthropologie der Juden in Wien

Sociological Society [Vienna]. See Soziologische Gesellschaft [Wiener Ortsgruppe]

Sonnenschein, Hugo, 25 Sorel-Abramowitsch, Ruth, works by:

“Salome” (dance) Soviet Union, 150, 210, 250 Soyfer, Jura (pseud. of Georg

Anders), 48, 54n82, 246, 250, 258, 263n1

Soyfer, Jura, works by: “Dachaulied,” 250; “Lied des Einfachen Menschen,” 264n29; Vineta (Mittelstück), 48

Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SDAPÖ) 1, 7–8, 11–14, 17n25, 18n37, 25, 26–28, 31n19, 34–36, 38–39 41, 47–48, 50n7, 50n8, 54n80, 60, 66, 69, 70–72, 74, 82, 91, 118, 137, 149–51, 156, 169–70, 216, 219, 247, 250–53; educational reform, 50n12; Jewish leaders of, 79n52; Jewish support of, 79n50n52; May Day parade on the Ring, 41; 1934 raid on Linz, 35, 252; support for free dance, 137; uprising of 12–16 February 1934, 34, 39, 46, 49; youth movement, 253

Sozialministerium, 93 Soziologische Gesellschaft [Wiener

Ortsgruppe], 86, 105, 108n22 Spann, Othmar, 25, 76n7 Spender, Stephen, 246–47, 251,

258–59, 262 Spender, Stephen, works by:

Vienna (long poem) 246; “Two Deaths” (short story), 246

Sperber, Manès, 40, 71, 25 Spiel, Hilde, 27, 61 Sprachkritik, 73 Sprachtheorie, 73 Spree, 38 Srbik, Heinrich Ritter von, 25

Staatliche Filmhauptstelle, 152 Staatsamt für Volksgesundheit, 90 Die Stachelbeere (cabaret), 48 Stadler, Friedrich (Fritz), 37, 39,

76n6 Stadtschulrat, 35, 76n10 Stammfilme, 148 stamp clubs, 36 Stampfer, Friedrich, 79n52 Ständestaat (corporate state) (1934–

1938), 32, 36, 39–40, 42–43, 45–49, 49n1, 52n42, 60, 97

St. Anton (Austria), 203, 248 State Office of Public Health. See

Staatsamt für Volksgesundheit statistics, 69, 87, 95, 104, 206–8,

215, 217–20, 223n40 Staudinger, Anton, 52n40 St. Denis, Ruth, 119–20 Stefan George Circle, 26 Stefansdom, 2, 69 Steffan Paul, 93 Steinach, Eugen, 82, 92 Steinberg, Michael, 65 Stekel, Wilhelm, 25 sterilization, 81–82, 90, 92, 96–97,

99, 100–101, 104 Stern, Frank, 159n50 Stern, Josef Luitpold, 25 Sternberg, Hermann, 99 Stiller, Mauritz, 124 Stimmen der Völker im Drama

(drama), 43–44 Stock, Frithjof, 234 Stockinger, Fritz, 45 stockmarket, 1924 collapse, 7, 147 Stolz, Robert, 38 Storfer, Adolf Josef, 25 St. Pölten Festival Hall, 141n40 Stransky, Erwin, 25, 96, 99 Strauss, Johann, 119, 121, 123, 153 Strauss, Richard, 25, 28, 32, 44,

50n4, 154 Stravinsky, Igor, 44, 127 Strindberg, August, 168 Strnad, Oscar, 25, 47

INDEX ♦ 297

Strobl, Karl Hans, 25, 28 Suchenwirth, Richard (pseud. of R.

Suchanek), 25 Surrey, England, 130 süßes Mädel, 225–26 Suttner, Bertha von, 37 Sweden, 89, 109n33, 209, 211 Switzerland, 9, 87, 133 Swoboda, Hermann, 95 Sydney, Australia, 125 Tairoff, Alexander, 168 Taller, Anton, 157n9 Tandler, Julius, 25, 35, 39, 79n52,

86–88, 90–92, 94–96, 98–100, 104–5

Tanz im Exil (dance series), 138 Tänze der Verfemten, 141n38 Tanzquartier (of Vienna’s

Museumquartier), 118 Tatsachenromane, 207 Täuber, Harry, 38 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 209, 215,

220 Taylor, Ronald, 207, 219 Taylorism, 209, 220 technology, 6, 12, 28, 198, 207–8,

214, 218–19 Tel Aviv, 138 Teleky, Ludwig, 88 Tels-Rabeneck, Ellen, 135 Tendenzstück, 167 Tenth International Music Festival of

the International Society for New Music, 46

Tergit, Gabriele, 211 theater, 4, 6, 10–11, 14, 27, 29, 32–

34, 36, 38, 41–46, 48–49, 51n28, 54n70, 62–63, 117–21, 125, 127, 132, 136–38, 139n1, 140n17, 144, 155, 158n33, 161–74, 225, 238–39, 250, 253–54; Austrian folk, 168; experimental, 140n17; history of, 171n2, 250; Jewish, 161–62; modernism in, 6; troupes, 162; Yiddish, 161–62

Theater für 49, 161 Theater in der Josefstadt, 29, 43, 168 Theater Odeon, 138 Thiele, Wilhelm, 38, 153 Thiele, Wilhelm, works by: Carl

Michael Ziehrer, der letzte Walzerkönig (film), 153

Thimig, Hans, 25 Thimig, Helene, 172n12 Thimig, Hermann, 172n12 Thimig, Hugo, 163 Thums, Karl, 94 Thüringer Spiel von den zehn

Jungfrauen (drama), 44 Thuringia, 44 Thurnwald, Richard, 85, 107n9 Tietze, Felix, 95–99, 102–4, 109n39,

111n67 Tietze, Hans, 23, 29 Timms, Edward, 14, 21, 49, 144,

156n2 Toller, Ernst, 91, 168, 193, 226 Toller, Ernst, works by: Hinkemann,

193; Hoppla, wir leben! (revue), 168

Török, Alfons, 127 Trakl, Georg, works by: “Grodek,”

198, 251 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye,

146 Treaty of Versailles, 83, 215 Trebitsch, Siegfried, 25 Tretjakov, Sergei, 33 Tschermak-Seyssenegg, Erich von,

87, 98 Tuberkulose, (film), 152 Tucholsky, Kurt, 37, 48 Tudor-Hart, Edith. See cover Turka (Galician shtetl), 199 Turka pass, 201 Turks, 2 Tutankhamen, King, discovery of

tomb, 156 twelve-tone music, 12, 176–77, 179–

80, 182, 186, 187n6 Tweraser, Felix, 239, 244n39

298 ♦ INDEX

Tyrol, 18n41; South Tyrol (Alto Adige), 9; Tyrolean Alps, 13

Ucicky, Gustav, 45 Uhl, Ottokar, 47 Ullmann, Marianne (My), 38 Ullstein Verlag, 198 Ulrich, Käthe, 135 unemployment, 3, 39, 48, 67, 146–

48, 155, 209, 214–17, 253, 260 Die ungöttliche Komödie (drama), 44 Union of Socialist Writers. See

Vereinigung sozialistischer Schriftsteller

United Kingdom, 65. See also Britain United States, 38–39, 45–47, 85, 96,

148, 179, 209–10. See also America Universal Declaration on Human

Rights, 65 Universal-Edition (publisher), 29,

177 universities, 2, 27, 59–61, 89, 136 University of Bonn, 76n11 University of Innsbruck, 90 University of Oxford, 39, 251, 253,

264n21, 265n41 University of Prague, German, 94 University of Vienna, 59–60, 69, 73,

76n10, 76n11, 85, 91, 93–94, 100–101, 104

Unruh, Fritz von, 25 Upper Austrian Society for Racial

Hygiene, Linz. See Oberösterreichische Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene, Linz

Urbanitzky, Grete von, 25 Vachet, Pierre, 91 Vanderbilt University, 31n21 Vaterländische Front, 40–41, 76n5 Vaterländisches Frontwerk “Neues

Leben,” 52n41 vaudeville, 118, 170 Veidt, Conrad, 155 Venedig in Wien (theater

production), 170

Verband der Österreichischen Gesellschaften für Rassenhygiene, 106

Verband der Österreichischen Gesellschaften für Rassenhygiene, Linz, 106

Verdi, Giuseppe, works by: Falstaff (opera), 45

Verein Ernst Mach, 39 Verein für Bevölkerungspolitik, 88,

104 Verein für menschliche

Vererbungslehre und Endokrinologie, 102–3, 105–6

Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen, 23, 26–27, 181–82

Vereinigung aller am Film Schaffenden Österreichs (Filmbund), 147

Vereinigung sozialistischer Hochschullehrer, 76n10

Vereinigung sozialistischer Schriftsteller, 206

Verkehrsgemeinschaft, 70 Verlag der Buchhandlung Richard

Lanyi, 29 Verlagsanstalt Tyrolia, 29 Vernon, Bettina, 130 Verschuer, Otmar von, 103 Versluys, J., 103 Victoria and Albert Museum

(London), 5 Vienna Academy of Music and the

Performing Arts. See Wiener Akademie für Musik und Darstellende Kunst

Vienna Anthropological Society, 101, 109n33

Vienna Circle. See Wiener Kreis Vienna City Council, 137, 163–64 Vienna City Library, 163 Vienna City Museum, 33 Vienna Conservatoire Private

University. See Konservatorium Wien Privatuniversität

INDEX ♦ 299

Vienna Festival. See Wiener Festwochen

Vienna Hygiene Exhibition, 91 Vienna Infant Welfare Center, 96 Vienna Institute for

Wirtschaftssoziologie, 39 Vienna International Film Festival

(Viennale), 158n32 Vienna Medical Society. See Wiener

medizinische Gesellschaft Vienna Music and Theater Festival.

See Wiener Musik- und Theaterfest Vienna Opera, 28, 44. See also opera;

opera houses; Vienna State Opera Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 125 Vienna Society for Racial Welfare

[Racial Hygiene]. See Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege [Rassenhygiene]

Vienna Society of the German Society for Racial Hygiene. See Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene

Vienna State Opera, 123, 135, 140n26. See also opera; opera houses; Vienna Opera

Vienna woods, 37 Vienna Workshops. See Wiener

Werkstätte Vienna: arts in, 33; birthrate in, 83;

as a center for innovation, 23–25; as a center for social reform, 50n14; as a center of intellectual achievement, 52n31; character of, 14; comparisons to Berlin, 5; glorificaton of past, 1–2; innere Stadt (city center), 143; logical empiricists in, 80n59; as Musikstadt, 172n8; press, 23; Red Vienna, 5, 7, 11, 24–25, 34–36, 47–49, 59, 71–75, 81–83, 89–90, 149, 151, 264n20; theater, 33; as Theaterstadt, 162–65; Vorstadt (outlying districts), 143, 213; workers in, 258

Viennese Section for Social Biology and Eugenics of the Sociological

Society in Vienna. See Soziologische Gesellschaft

Viertel, Berthold, 38 Vilna Troup. See Wilnaer Truppe Vita-Film, 147, 156 Volk und Rasse (journal), 93 Volksbildungshäuser, 50n7, 118 Die Volksbühne (theater), 167 Volksgesundheitsamt, 87, 89–90, 93 Volksheim Margareten, 118 Volksheim Ottakring, 50n14, 82 Volkskultur, 144 Volksoper, 44 Volkssturm (periodical), 25 Vorarlberg, 194–95, 203 Vorzensur, 7 Waber, Leopold, 25 Waggerl, Karl Heinrich, 42 Wagner, Otto, 4, 22 Wagner, Richard, 175, 180, 183,

189n29, 203 Wagner, Richard, works by: Die

Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 186 Wagner-Jauregg, Julius, 95–96, 98,

101–2 Waismann, Friedrich, 25, 61, 76n11 Waldau, Gustav, 172n12 Waldinger, Ernst, 42 Wall Street crash (1929), 209, 220.

See also economic crisis of 1929 Wallmann, Margarete, 44–45,

140n26 Wallmann, Margarete, works by:

Fanny Elβler (ballet), 44; Der liebe Augustin (ballet), 44; Österreichische Bauernhochzeit (ballet), 44

Wallnerstrasse, 182 Wallner-Theater, 51n28 Walter, Bruno, 25 waltz, 119, 120–21, 123, 129, 141,

153, 177 Wang, Cilli, 125 Wärndorfer, Fritz, 22 Warsaw, 7, 67, 117, 132, 136

300 ♦ INDEX

Washington, DC, 141n40 Wassermann, Jakob, 13, 25, 62–64 Wassermann, Jakob, works by:

Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude, 63

Wastl, Josef, 101, 104 Webern, Anton, 25, 26, 46, 175,

178–79 Wedekind, Franz, 127, 173n31, 201 Wedekind, Franz, works by:

Die Büchse der Pandora, 173n31, 201; Franziska, 127

Weichselbaum, Anton, 85, 87 Weigel, Helene, 38 Weill, Kurt, 44, 168–69, 174n38 Weill, Kurt, works by: Aufstieg

und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (with Bertolt Brecht), 174n38; Dreigroschenoper (with Bertolt Brecht), 168

Weimar Republic, 16n13, 34, 89, 94, 206–7, 211, 224

Weinberger, G. J., 234 Weinheber, Josef, 28–29 Weininger, Otto, 195 Weiss, Ernst, 14, 193–205 Weiss, Ernst, works by: Der arme

Verschwender, 194; Der Augenzeuge, 196, 203; “Franta Zlin,” 193–203; Mensch gegen Mensch, 194–95; Tiere in Ketten, 194; Der Verführer, 194

welfare, 5, 10, 14, 35–37, 39, 64, 81–84, 86–87, 90, 92–93, 96, 98–100, 101, 105–6; child welfare, 96, 104; welfare state, 72, 85

Wellenwalzer (waltz), 120 Wellesz, Egon, 25, 39, 44, 46 Wellisch, Siegmund, 93, 95, 104 Weltanschauung, 59, 237–38 Weltanschauungsmusik, 177 Die Weltbühne (periodical), 211 Weltparlament der Schauspieler, 164 Weninger, Josef, 95, 97, 101–2, 104 Wenter, Josef, 172n21 Werberg, Otto, 118

Werfel, Franz, 25, 27–29, 166, 168, 226

West, Mae, 40 Wettstein, Richard von, 76n6 Wied, Martina, 27 Wien, die Stadt der Lieder (film), 154 Wien, Stadt der Juden (exhibition),

23 Wiene, Robert, 45, 154–55 Wiene, Robert, works by: Das

Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (film), 144, 155; Der Rosenkavalier (film version of opera by Richard Strauss), 154

Wiener Akademie für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, 125, 133, 135–38

Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, (newspaper), 33, 37, 54n68

Wiener Festwochen, 46, 137 Wiener Freie Volksbühne, 167,

173n29 Wiener Gemeindebauten (council

housing), 1 Wiener Gesellschaft für Rassenpflege

[Rassenhygiene], 93, 100–101, 104, 106

Wiener Institut für Wirtschaftssoziologie, 39

Die Wiener Jahrhundertwende (conference), 21

Wiener klinische Wochenschrift (journal), 95

Wiener Kreis, 21, 25, 26–27, 29, 33, 39, 59–60, 72–74, 206, 218

Wiener medizinische Gesellschaft, 103, 106

Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik, 217–18

Wiener Musik- und Theaterfest, 6, 32–33, 34, 38, 54n70, 137, 163

Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung, 39

Wiener Tageblatt, (newspaper), 92 Wiener Werkstätte, 22, 121, 125,

140n17

INDEX ♦ 301

Wienerisch (Viennese dialect), 249 Wiesenthal, Berta, 121, 135 Wiesenthal, Elsa, 121, 135 Wiesenthal, Grete, 120–21, 123, 125,

132, 135–38, 142n41, 122, 124 Wiesenthal, Grete, works by:

“Allegretto,” (dance solo), 122; Das fremde Mädchen (pantomime), 142n42; “Wein, Weib und Gesang,” (dance solo) 123

Wiesenthal sisters, 121, 123, 135 Wigman, Mary, 132–33, 140n26 Wilczek, Hans Graf, 85 Wilde, Oscar, 224, 242n6 Wilder, Billy, 158n28 Wildgans, Anton, 25, 27, 52n45 Willner, Alfred Maria, works by:

Johann Nestroy (drama, with Rudolf Oesterreicher), 173n31

Wilnaer Truppe, 162 Winter, Ernst Karl, 25 Wise, Stephen S., Rabbi, 184 Wistrich, Robert S., 23, 79n52 Wittels, Fritz, 22, 24, 25 Wittgenstein, Karl, 22 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 21, 24, 25,

38, 59, 73–74 Wlassak, Rudolf, 85 Wojtowicz, Boleslav, 46 Wolf, Friedrich, 33, 168 Wolf, Friedrich, works by: Cyankali

(drama), 33; Die Matrosen von Cattaro (drama), 33

Wolhynian refugee families, 88 Wöllersdorf, 40 women, 12, 68, 135, 87, 142n55,

195, 228–30, 234–37, 239–40, 252; as authors, 27; as contributors to Viennese culture, 26–27, 118–19; election to parliament, 41; emancipation of, 27, 41, 240, 259; issues related to, 39, 152; Jewish, 12

Woolf, Leonard, 247, 249 Woolf, Virginia, 247, 249

Woolf, Virginia, works by: “Letter to a Young Poet,” 249

workers, 34, 36, 41, 50n12, 54n71, 60, 72, 137, 148–51, 169, 216, 218, 249, 251–52, 258, 262; Workers’ Choir, 26; Workers’ Olympics, 34

World Exhibition of 1873, 170 World Exhibition of 1937, 43 World League for Sexual Reform, 91 World Parliament of Actors. See

Weltparlament der Schauspieler World War. See First World War;

Second World War Worpswede (artists’ colony) 256 writers, 27, 37, 39–40, 42–43, 45,

51n20, 52n35, 117, 158n33, 193–95, 206–7, 210, 216, 247, 263n3; Austrian, 42, 258, 263n3; British, 246, 263n12; German, 35; Jewish, 45; women, 17n28, 27, 224–25, 227, 229, 246

Wurstelprater, 171. See also Prater Yale University, 85 Yates, W. E., 171n2 Yiddish, 11, 154, 161–62 youth groups, 27 Zagreb (Agram), 9 Zeho (skyscraper), 47 Zeidler, Jakob, 161, 163, 167–68 Zeisel, Hans, 39, 51n30 Zeitschrift für angewandte Anatomie

und Konstitutionslehre (journal), 90 Zelnik, Friedrich, 38 Zemlinsky, Alexander von, 44, 175 Zemlinsky, Alexander von, works by:

Verklärte Nacht, 175 Ziehrer, Carl Michael, 153 Zionism, 11, 23, 40, 68, 70, 154,

162, 185; fourteenth international Zionist congress, 34

Zlin (Czech Republic), 195 Zollschan, Ignaz, 88, 104

302 ♦ INDEX

Zollschan, Ignaz, works by: Das Rassenproblem, 88

Zsolnay, Paul, 29 Zuckerkandl, Berta, 23, 25 Zurawno (Galicia), 195 Zurich, 85, 97 Zweig, Stefan, 2, 16n23, 39, 246,

250 Zweig, Stefan, works by: Triumph

und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam, 246; Die Welt von Gestern, 2