The year 2019 marked the centennial anniversary of the beginning of a period in Vienna’s municipal history commonly referred to as “Red Vienna.” During this brief period, from 1919 to 1934, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party dominated both the political and the cultural scene. Its initiatives—in housing, education, health and welfare, leisure and culture—laid the groundwork for an equitably and justly organized modern urban metropolis. That lasting groundwork is in part why the city of Vienna is today consistently ranked one of the “most livable” cities in the world.
But the story of Red Vienna’s emergence, its claims, successes, failures, and above all its relevance for the present is certainly neither fixed nor uncontested. The following conversation—occasioned by the publication of a new book on Viennese modernism and newly published translations about Red Vienna in Barricade’s latest issue—ended up circling and kept resituating, from multiple angles, by way of various objects, what amounts to a fundamental, albeit generative ambivalence at the heart of this peculiar modernist project. Continue reading “Janus-Faced Modernism: The Body (Politic) in Red Viennese Life & Culture”