The year 2019 saw the centenary of the creation of Red Vienna, in other words, the period of majority municipal government of the Austrian capital by the Social Democratic Party. The term ‘Red Vienna,’ which was in fact coined by a Christian Socialist opponent, has long functioned as a placeholder for Vienna’s progressive city administration as well as, more generally, the left of centre cultural and intellectual life that flourished in the 15 years between 1919 and 1934, when the newly installed dictatorship of Engelbert Dollfuss (1892–1934) brought it to a halt.
However, beyond this general summary, how might we characterise Red Vienna and what does it mean for us in the present? Undoubtedly, its most visible monuments are the communal housing blocks that were constructed around the city: the so-called Ringstrasse of the proletariat. These have been the subject of intense interest and study, especially the Gargantuan Karl-Marx-Hof (1927–33) designed by Karl Ehn (1884–1957), and, as one of the main locations of the brief civil war fought in February 1923, a highly important lieu de mémoire.[1] Another example, the Winarsky Hof, has been mentioned on this blog in an article discussing the monument to Ferdinand Lassalle erected there. Yet ‘Red Vienna’ was a much more complex phenomenon, and it is this complexity that the anthology edited by Rob Macfarland, Georg Spitaler and Ingo Zechner, Das Rote Wien / The Red Vienna Sourcebook, attempts to convey.