Helmut Gruber's Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture
Coser, Lewis
RED VIENNA: EXPERIMENT IN WORKING CLASS CULTURE, by Helmut Gruber. Oxford University Press, 1991. 270 pp. $29.95. Most historical work on Austrian socialism in the interwar years is inclined to...
...As a result, this book by an author who clearly sympathizes with the New Left in this country sometimes reads almost like a right-wing polemic...
...It is indeed astonishing that in the mid-twenties 25,000 new apartments were built in mainly working-class quarters despite tight commercial conditions and the financial troubles of the municipality...
...The Austrian socialist movement, so it was argued, had managed to reintegrate into political society a previously rootless and alienated working class by creating socialist institutions, by no means FALL • 1992 • 553 all of them of a political character, that succeeded in constructing an autonomous framework and support for a community of Vienna's workers...
...When he was ill he went again to the same municipal hospital in which he was born...
...His youngsters joined the socialist Red Falcons at the requisite age, and later the Socialist Youth movement...
...He went to public schools, a high proportion of whose teachers were members of the Socialist party...
...This is a strong indictment, and it is, of course, substantiated by numerous other studies illustrating the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which Robert Michels had already formulated before World War I. Yet, there are circumstances in which party officers could have pleaded attenuating circumstances that Gruber tends to ignore...
...But Gruber discovered a fly in the ointment...
...The cultural reform based on the perspective that the workers lived like primitives lacking in standards and norms of common decency could become, in a sense, acts of creation in which the worker as a human emerged from the raw clay of the exploited and brutish beings...
...The prevalent left-wing myth about socialist Vienna in the twenties has it that Vienna prefigured in crucial respects the socialist commonwealth of the future...
...No so-called class-conscious worker was supposed to belong to what was considered a bourgeois sports club...
...Germany in the mid-twenties was a relatively strong and viable political and economic entity, not a sickly backwater...
...Postwar Vienna was, of course, the monstrous hydrocephalic head of a miserable small country, which only a short while earlier had been the head of an immense empire...
...Thus it seems to me unfair to compare the quality of housing in Vienna in the twenties with conditions in, for example, Hamburg or other German cities...
...By and large, even though there were major exceptions, the leaders of the socialist movement were reform-minded members of the academic or professional middle class whose links to the working class on an everyday level were tenuous indeed...
...It was transformed through networks of participatory institutions in which Vienna's working class found cultural as well as material support in the company of equals...
...Gruber reports all the facts of the case in a faithful but sometimes too brief manner...
...While not entirely neglecting positive aspects, the book is above all an experiment in trenchant criticism...
...When he wished to attend a play or a concert, he went to the "Volkstheater" (the People's Theater) and to a concert hall controlled by the Red cultural managers even though its concert program and theatrical offerings differed only marginally from the bourgeois variety...
...It is against this background, and not against conditions in more stable countries, that the success or failure of the experiment of Red Vienna must be measured...
...In a parallel manner, he tends to judge events of the Austrian twenties in terms of the standards of the American sixties...
...All in all, this book deserves attention as a valuable effort at demystification, but a definitive study of Red Vienna, warts and all, is still very much needed...
...Gruber sticks too much to the text of the story he wishes to tell, and pays altogether insufficient attention to the context...
...But quite apart from such perhaps relatively infrequent cases, it is certainly true, to repeat, that the party elders felt justified acting in loco parentis when it came to their charges...
...The proudest achievement of the socialist housing officials in the Viennese municipal administration was the new housing complexes that so impressed foreign visitors and admirers...
...By and large Gruber is correct in saying that "the SDAP operated as a paternalistic machine...
...This became much more pronounced in post-World War II Vienna...
...All in all, and despite the fact that the party also allowed the emergence in leadership positions of working-class intellectuals, such as Joseph Buttinger, who was for many years a devoted contributor to and editor of Dissent in this country, there was a great deal of cultural distance between the bulk of the leadership and the rank and file...
...The following paragraph sums up the essence of his critical stance: By casting workers as both less than human (because their lives knew only misery) and at the same time malleable, the directors of Vienna's cultural experiment could disregard the existence of worker subcultures and presume a kind of cultural tabula rasa on which they could imprint all that a new proletarian culture would require...
...Helmut Gruber's intention in this book, however, is to bury it...
...He was likely to be born in a municipal hospital controlled by the socialist city administration...
...Gruber sums up his indictment by writing: "For many [party functionaries] keeping their particular organization or activity going became an end in itself . . . . They were victims of their own claims of success...
...I remember asking a worker why he had joined the Socialist party after the War...
...In the higher reaches of the party leadership, Jewish professionals tended to predominate...
...That such an institutional framework was indeed created can hardly be denied, and Gruber does not deny it...
...And finally, when his time came, he was buried by a socialist burial society on the municipal cemetery amid his socialist comrades...
...What he disputes in the bulk of his thesis is the meaning conventionally attributed to these facts...
...It seems to have been the case that younger working-class couples with one or two children made up the bulk of the new tenants, but rumors abounded that correct political connections helped...
...he joined the parallel socialist sports organizations that existed in almost all branches of work...
...When he got married, the ceremony was typically not celebrated by a Catholic priest but by a socialist municipal councillor...
...Even in the mid-twenties, when the scarcity and hunger of the immediate postwar years had been overcome, Vienna was a very sick city indeed...
...He had in the meantime become a member of the Socialist party...
...A young socialist worker in, say, the midtwenties, was indeed likely to grow up in a counterculture and counter-society that took care of him from cradle to grave...
...Most historical work on Austrian socialism in the interwar years is inclined to praise it, often somewhat over-enthusiastically...
...A building constructed for senior party and municipal employees consisted of four rooms, kitchen, bathroom, toilet and maid's room...
...FALL • 1992 • 555...
...I know of no instance in which municipal planners or architects consulted future inhabitants about their wishes...
...There was no doubt a strong tendency among socialist commentators in Europe and in this country to concoct a kind of rose-colored mythology about the legendary Red Vienna that Gruber delights in debunking, but his demythologizing effort carries him farther than he might have intended...
...He provides telling examples...
...The leader of the party, Otto Bauer, was, of course, Jewish himself...
...He never missed the party pay day in the back room of a beer hall in his neighborhood where local members went once every month to pay their party dues and to participate in the party gossip of their quarter or of the city as a whole...
...Strong stuff this, but, alas, containing several ounces of truth...
...As he began to look for a job he was aided by municipal or union job placement offices...
...What had once been an antheap of deprived and isolated individuals had become a true Gemeinschaft...
...The municipal planners showed no interest in renovating older but still serviceable housing, putting all their energy into impressive new projects that could advertise the new Vienna even though many more persons could have been served if more attention had been paid to renovation...
...He answered without blinking an eye: "Because I need better housing...
...Once in a job, he joined the craft or industrial union of his trade...
...Such priorities, it should be stressed, were determined by the socialist leadership of 554 • DISSENT Vienna without participation and consultation of prospective tenants...
...But what he tries to show is that these institutions were in the main paternalistic structures led by Socialist party functionaries who pretended to know what was good for the people and argued that their socialist knowledge provided legitimation and justification for the transformation of inchoate masses into proud beneficiaries of a municipal welfare society...
Vol. 39 • September 1992 • No. 4
