1). “Modern Housing w/ Gail Radford”,
Dec 11, 2022, Daniel Denvir interviews Gail Raford about her book Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era, duration of interview audio 2:37:15, The Dig, at < https://thedigradio.com/podcast/modern-housing-w-gail-radford/ >
Featuring Gail Radford on her classic book Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era. Radford tells the story of Catherine Bauer, the Labor Housing Conference, and the struggle to make the American housing system a radically social one. In place of the two-tier system that won out, Bauer and her allies proposed a massive federally-backed system of noncommercial housing that would appeal to and house the majority of Americans.
Note: This is a link to an audio file there is no transcript - no text.
2). “Red Vienna: The enduring legacy of an architecture of hope”
January 8, 2020, Dennis Broe, peoplesworld.org, at <https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/red-vienna-the-enduring-legacy-of-an-architecture-of-hope/>
3). “Red Vienna: A worker’s paradise”,
n.d., Anson Rabinbach, Virtual Vienna, originally published at www.metropolismag.com, at < https://www.virtualvienna.net/the-city-its-people/history-vienna/red-vienna/ >
4). “Remembering Red Vienna”,
Feb 10, 2017, Veronika Duma & Hanna Lichtenberger, Translation by Loren Balhorn, Jacobin.com, Republished from LuXemburg.
At < https://jacobin.com/2017/02/red-vienna-austria-housing-urban-planning/ >
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista:
On February 7, The Class Struggle posted an article about the ongoing struggle to keep housing costs at reasonable levels for working people in Berlin, Germany (BERLIN’S PLEDGE TO SOCIALIZE A QUARTER MILLION APARTMENTS IN DANGER OF BEING NULLIFIED ~~ Molly Shah). That article mentioned that housing rights advocates want to achieve the control of exorbitant rents by socializing a significant part of the housing inventory of the city. This brought to mind the long and checkered history of private sector dominated housing in the U.S. In the audio file from The Dig Gail Raford very effectively discusses the struggles that took place during the New Deal. Major private landowners and developers managed to defeat an attempt to institute European Social Housing policies in the U.S. The myth is that privately built and marketed housing does not use up public resources, however the truth is that tens of billions of dollars were lavished on subsidizing private land development schemes. One of the outcomes of the political battles in the1930s was that any publicly constructed housing would be built very cheaply and be as unattractive as possible.
The most significant contrast to the private sector dominating housing was the effort in Red Vienna where a strong socialist political movement controlled public policy in Vienna for over 15 years from 1919 - 1934. In her interview, on The Dig, Radford pointed out that half the housing in Vienna is publicly owned and that the residents love their apartments. The accomplishments of Red Vienna went beyond just providing decent apartments for working people. The apartment blocks built by the City Government included communal kitchens, health clinics, day care facilities, libraries, and fine well designed public spaces. Of course the apologists and right-wing political operatives, including the Capitalist PRess, took every opportunity to attack the accomplishments of the Red Vienna housing program. The Nazi takeover with violent attacks on the housing projects brought an end to that golden age, before WW 2. After WW 2 there were some additional projects to provide fine housing for working people.
Now, like in every other major city on the planet Vienna is undergoing gentrification and other very unfavorable socioeconomic and political changes. The accomplishments of the Red Vienna era should inspire all of us into the future. The three articles about the Apartments built for working people in Vienna do have some repetition, but there is enough unique material in each one to make them worth reading.
1). “Modern Housing w/ Gail Radford”, Dec 11, 2022, Daniel Denvir interviews Gail Raford about her book Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era, duration of interview audio 2:37:15, The Dig, at < https://thedigradio.com/podcast/modern-housing-w-gail-radford/ >
Featuring Gail Radford on her classic book Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era. Radford tells the story of Catherine Bauer, the Labor Housing Conference, and the struggle to make the American housing system a radically social one. In place of the two-tier system that won out, Bauer and her allies proposed a massive federally-backed system of noncommercial housing that would appeal to and house the majority of Americans.
Note: This is a link to an audio file there is no transcript - no text.
2). “Red Vienna: The enduring legacy of an architecture of hope”, January 8, 2020, Dennis Broe, peoplesworld.org, at <https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/red-vienna-the-enduring-legacy-of-an-architecture-of-hope/>
(Karl Marx Hof Vienna Tourism)
Europe’s zero interest rate is being used to further hollow out its major cities as those with capital in places such as Munich, Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam are borrowing at no cost and buying up apartments that are then being used as tourist rentals in partnership with Airbnb and other services. Along with this trend go steadily rising rents, which means that working and ordinary middle-class residents—nurses, teachers, social workers—can no longer afford to live in the cities and now must commute to work from far outside. This is also a global problem: Rents in California are now so high that residents in order to find more affordable housing are leaving not just the cities but the state.
It doesn’t have to be this way. One of the cities that is still livable—with a tourist interior with increasingly higher rents but affordable housing just outside and an extremely efficient system of public transportation which makes commuting easy—is Vienna. The design for this type of housing is to be found in the city’s history and particularly in the period 1919 to 1934, called “Red Vienna,” where first Socialists and then Social Democrats were in power, and where the major project was the construction of not just public housing but also complexes such as the still standing Karl-Marx-Hof that were cultural centers as well.
The 100-year anniversary of the movement is being celebrated in the city with two exhibits at the Karl-Marx-Hof and at the Wien Museum opposite Vienna’s city hall, both of which call attention to this building feat. When the exhibition toured New York, it was met with overwhelming enthusiasm as architects and city planners flocked to see how Vienna in a previous period had made progress on a problem that is supposedly at the center of Mayor Bill De Blasio’s agenda. The social theorist Karl Polyani described the period as one where “a highly developed industrial working class…achieved a level never reached before by the masses of people in any industrial society.”
In 1918, after the disappointment and destruction of World War I, as part of the fall of the Habsburg dynasty, Austrians won universal suffrage as women for the first time were allowed to vote. The government elected by this new constituency was a socialist government which made the eight-hour work day legally binding, introduced unemployment insurance, and began to address the city’s housing crisis where the poor and many workers lived in unheated, tuberculosis-infected, overcrowded shacks.
Building began in earnest in 1925 and by 1933, 64,000 apartments had been constructed in complexes that were not just housing units but spacious living facilities that also boasted gyms, swimming pools, kindergartens and green courtyards. By the end of the period one-tenth of all residents now lived in low-rent facilities—costing in some cases only 4 percent of their income—that were dubbed palaces of the proletariat. The most magnificent of these, the Karl-Marx-Hof, with its 1300 apartment complex, was referred to as the Workers’ Versailles.
Amalienbad pool. | Vienna Tourism
The public funds came from a combination of a housing tax, a luxury tax and federal funds. This degree of public housing also discouraged speculation. The infrastructure for this building, including a steam-powered city railway that was then electrified which could transport workers easily across the city, was laid in place under the administration of the infamous Karl Lueger, whose modernization also included a strong anti-Semitic component. The most famous architect of the period of the construction of the Ring surrounding the inner city was Otto Wagner, who after building many bourgeois homes turned his attention to subway construction and to a plan for green suburbs with workers’ homes surrounded by parks. Wagner’s work is currently on display at Paris’ City of Architecture, which emphasizes his contribution to the greening of the city.
The epitome of this construction, the Karl-Marx-Hof, was designed by Karl Ehn, a student of Wagner’s who is said to have designed over 2700 different workers’ apartments. The structure stretches almost three-quarters of a mile and includes gardens, a children’s school, large laundries and libraries. Also part of this building movement was a gigantic pool at Amalienbad, in a nearby district referred to as a temple of hygiene with its glass roof, Roman bath and showers with—a first for workers—clean water.
The twin ideas of space and education guided, for example, kitchen construction, so that a former tenement kitchen with a woman ironing on what was also the cutting board for cooking all the while tending to five children at her feet was replaced by a spacious kitchen with a large dining table that also functioned as a study table for the working-class mother now getting an education.
First the Socialists then the Social Democrats lost power. What ensued were pitched battles in the street in what is referred to as the Austrian Civil War. The most famous of these was at the Karl-Marx-Hof as workers retreated into their housing complex as both the last bastion and the focal point of their achievement. They were shelled and bombarded by a combination of the Austrian army, police and fascist militias heralding the beginning of what was called Austrofascism, which ran parallel to Hitler’s movement in Germany. The date of the battle is commemorated by the naming of the plaza as 12 February square.
Ernst Plojhar, Draft for the 14th Party Congress of the KPÖ (Communist Party of Austria) in the Musikverein, Vienna, AT, 1948. | Architekturzentrum Wien Collection
After the Nazi invasion in 1938, the name of the complex was changed, but in 1945 its original name was restored and the reverberations of the period have influenced subsequent building. An exhibit in the Vienna Architecture Museum on The Cold War and Architecture explains that there were four different views for reconstructing the city after the war, proposed by each of its conquerors. The Russians proposed monumental state and power construction. The French, following Le Corbusier, proposed vertical modernist housing. The Americans wanted to build luxury hotels with pre-fabricated housing for everyone else. But it was the British Labor Party model of a green garden movement stressing the need for workers to live away and freed from the congestion and pollution of factories that the Viennese favored.
The legacy of Red Vienna has bequeathed to the city a suburban workers’ space that is still both green and affordable and that hopefully will be able to withstand new onslaughts of speculation.
3). “Red Vienna: A worker’s paradise”,
n.d., Anson Rabinbach, Virtual Vienna, originally published at www.metropolismag.com, at < https://www.virtualvienna.net/the-city-its-people/history-vienna/red-vienna/ >
During the 1920s and early 1930s, “every visitor to Europe who had any interest whatsoever in reform, housing, social progress, went as a matter of course to look at the magnificent workers’ apartments that Vienna had built,” the distinguished American journalist Marquis Childs observed. Between 1923 and 1934, the city’s socialist administration launched an extraordinary campaign to provide housing for working-class residents, who were among the party’s most enthusiastic backers.
The government constructed 400 apartment complexes–64,000 new apartments in all–that together housed one-tenth of the city’s population. The pride of Vienna’s residential-building program was the majestic Karl-Marx-Hof (Karl Marx House), designed by Karl Ehn. Stretching almost a mile along a major railway line, the Karl-Marx-Hof featured five monumental archways, a striking red and yellow stucco facade, and lush interior courtyards as well as state-of-the-art kindergartens, playgrounds, maternity clinics, health-care offices, lending libraries, laundries, and a host of other social services.
As their heroic scale suggests, the Wiener Gemeindebauten (Vienna Communal Houses, as all of the new socialist apartments were called) amounted to far more than mere residential housing. They embodied something more politically daring and potentially fragile. As Eve Blau points out in her handsomely illustrated and well-researched study, The Architecture of Red Vienna 1919–1934, the communal houses were a vivid expression of the working class’s ascent to power. The heady symbolism of the houses did not go unnoticed by the regime’s rightist opponents. As Blau observes, socialist housing went up in “the midst of highly charged, and often violent, political conflict between right and left.” During the civil war of February 1934, “Red Vienna” came to a sudden, tragic end, as the socialists’ enemies fired on the Karl-Marx-Hof and drove the party and its leader’s underground, often into exile.
Red Vienna had its beginnings immediately after World War I, when the Austrian Social Democrats, whose leaders included such remarkable “Austro-Marxists” as Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, and Max Adler, inherited power and established a new republic. Against the backdrop of severe food and housing shortages produced by both the military defeat and the collapse of the monarchy, the Social Democrats won a significant electoral victory in the municipal elections of May 1919, making Vienna the first major European capital to be governed by an absolute majority of socialists.
The socialists’ triumph was short-lived. Just a year after taking power in Vienna, they were defeated in national elections by the agrarian Christian Socialist Party, which whipped up anti-socialist and anti-Semitic sentiment among rural voters. Excluded from power at the national level, the Social Democrats in the city council eagerly turned Vienna into their laboratory. There they had virtual sovereignty over decision-making, thanks to a 1921 constitutional provision that made Vienna an independent province. It didn’t take long for Red Vienna to become the interwar period’s most extensive European experiment in municipal socialism, and perhaps the most ambitious such experiment ever.
Vienna’s communal houses were both a symbol and a strategy. As a symbol Red Vienna offered “the best object lesson in the world of what Socialism can and cannot do on a democratic basis in a Socialist capital of an anti-Socialist State,” the British journalist G.E.R. Gedye noted at the time. The Viennese workers’ houses were islands of socialist power in a bourgeois city. With their monumental facades and their entrances accessible only from interior courtyards, the Gemeindebauten resembled citadels: While their existence challenged the old order, they were confined to enclaves that betrayed the party’s political vulnerability.
Vienna’s apartment blocks were also a key component of Social Democratic strategy. The Austro-Marxists believed that by building municipal socialism they were laying the foundations of the future socialist society. A “pragmatic utopia” that comprised an extensive network of educational, social, and cultural institutions, the housing program fulfilled the immediate needs of workers while converting them into socialist citizens. In the words of Otto Bauer, the party’s leader and most brilliant theorist, Red Vienna fused “sober realpolitik and revolutionary enthusiasm.”
The socialists’ housing projects drew fire from rightist critics, who assailed the workers’ houses as “voter blocks” (their very size transformed entire districts into Red precincts) and as “fortresses” destined to hold hostage key bridges, railways, and sewer lines. But there were also complaints from friendlier quarters. A number of Vienna’s most innovative architects, including Josef Frank, Margarete Lihotzky, Franz Schuster, and the eminent Adolf Loos, all of whom worked for the administration, took the city building agency to task for failing to produce a unified aesthetic vision. In their view, Vienna suffered by comparison with the sleek, modern satellite towns built outside of Berlin by Martin Wagner and outside of Frankfurt by Ernst May. (Ironically, some of the most impressive Frankfurt projects, like Lihotzky’s famous “Frankfurt Kitchen,” were designed by Viennese architects whom May had wooed for his housing initiatives.) In 1926, the German city planner Werner Hegemann gave voice to conventional wisdom when he pronounced Vienna a “missed opportunity.”
Echoes of such criticisms could be heard in the influential work of the Italian architecture critic Manfredo Tafuri. In his 1980 study Vienna Rossa, Tafuri, a Marxist, described Red Vienna as a “declaration of war without any hope of victory,” condemned to failure by the contradiction between the Social Democrats’ radical rhetoric and their reformist strategies. The communal houses, he argued, were, like Red Vienna’s socialist administration, “petit bourgeois” and structurally incoherent.
Blau’s book is an important corrective to these harsh evaluations. Like Tafuri, Blau sets the communal-housing program in the political context of Austrian socialism’s historic compromise with capitalism. But she does not write about Red Vienna’s architecture as if it were simply a mirror of the troubled Viennese political scene. Instead, she focuses on the city planners and architects, coming up with a different set of answers to the question of what was unique about Red Vienna and why its heterodox style departed so dramatically from the architectural experiments in Germany.
Though socialist ideology influenced Vienna’s housing program, Blau shows that practical constraints ultimately determined the sites and structures that were built. Among these constraints were a depressed housing market, strict rent controls, and an exorbitant tax on luxury apartments. To make matters worse, the end of World War I plunged Vienna into an acute housing and food shortage, setting off potentially dangerous levels of social conflict. There was a sizable and radical squatters’ movement, and settlements were springing up on unoccupied land at the outer edges of the city. Faced with a movement of unemployed settlers and a massive housing shortage, city officials initially considered building “flourishing garden cities” of the kind promoted by renowned architects such as Heinrich Tessenow and Loos, who was made director of the city’s settlement office.
Loos’s vision of self-sufficient garden cities on the outskirts of Vienna proper fell out of favor with planners, however, when it was discovered that Vienna’s status as a province would prohibit the city from acquiring new land or expanding beyond its pre-1921 borders. The workers’ housing program inaugurated that year was thus restricted to sites either owned or bought by the city and with easy access to existing railway, bus, and tram lines. As a result, the socialists decided to concentrate housing in urban complexes.
Lacking a firm architectural or town-planning vision, the city enlisted several students of Vienna’s most prominent prewar architect, Otto Wagner, who is now best known for his Postsparkasse (Postal Savings Bank), to design large-scale public housing. The city building agency, Blau argues, “favored a neovernacular architecture,” and Wagner’s students, notably Josef Hoffmann, Hubert Gessner, and Karl Ehn, seemed best qualified to create it, despite their lack of socialist credentials.
What Blau calls “Wagner School Practice” was not so much a distinctive style as it was a “strategy of architecture”– a way of thinking about the social uses of buildings. Red Vienna’s housing complexes placed less emphasis on private space (apartments were notoriously small) and street access in favor of semi-public spaces and interior courtyards. By retaining the old city plan, the socialists honored the older, bourgeois topography. At the same time, they transformed the bourgeois notion of private interiors by adding such public facilities as playgrounds and laundries.
The socialists’ predilection for courtyards and monumental facades highlights not only their belief in the social function of architecture but also their sensitivity to the cultural memory of Habsburg architecture in the Baroque era. An especially striking example is the Reumannhof, a major complex named after the city’s first socialist mayor, Jacob Reumann. With its large central court flanked by smaller side courts in the Baroque manner, the building alluded to the Shoenbrunn, the nearby imperial summer palace.
Although Blau appreciates monumental “superblocks” like the Karl-Marx-Hof and the Reumannhof, which feature a “historical” and “embellished” Wagner School Modernism, her aesthetic sympathies lie with the more marginal projects that she calls “countertypes,” notably the Winarskyhof, jointly built by Peter Behrens, Josef Frank, Margarete Lihotzky, and Adolf Loos. Diverging from both Wagner School monumentality and German functionalism, such buildings achieved a more complex balance of tradition and modernity, and a greater diversity of color and detail.
While the architecture of Red Vienna still stands today, the ideas that animated it, and the politics it embodied, have largely vanished. As Blau writes, when the guns of the fascist paramilitary fired on the Karl-Marx-Hof in February 1934, “it was the idea, not the buildings, of Red Vienna that they destroyed.” Indeed, several of Red Vienna’s most prominent architects, notably Ehn, went on to design buildings for the Nazis, a sad coda to the socialists’ defeat.
By devoting close attention to Red Vienna’s built environment, planners, and architects, Blau has shifted discussion from the polemical arguments of socialist leaders to the way in which the Gemeindebauten successfully “established a new relationship between private and public space… in Vienna.” She argues cogently that Wagner School Modernism was at once socially progressive and respectful of Viennese traditions. And she explains deftly why this style fit so well into, and has continued to complement, the city’s spatial patterns. Still, she fails to answer the larger question that her book raises: Why does Red Vienna continue to figure in architectural discourse so long after the political and military defeat of its ideas? Did its idiosyncratic blend of large-scale housing construction, Wagner-style Modernism, and visionary socialism turn out to be a success after all?
Article Author: Anson Rabinbach. Professor of history and director of European Cultural Studies at Princeton University. His recent publications include: In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (University of California Press, 1997) and The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Basic Books, 1990).
4). “Remembering Red Vienna”, Feb 10, 2017, Veronika Duma & Hanna Lichtenberger, Translation by Loren Balhorn, Jacobin.com, Republished from LuXemburg.
At < https://jacobin.com/2017/02/red-vienna-austria-housing-urban-planning/ >
(Caption: The Karl-Marx Hof in Vienna, Austria. Wolfsonian)
When it comes to progressive urban planning and municipal administration, “Red Vienna” (1919–1934) remains a common reference point. Best known for its housing programs, this radical municipal project also entailed comprehensive social improvements that included health care, education, child care, and cultural reform efforts.
Red Vienna represents a historically specific, social-democratic response to social and political questions that remain relevant today: the distribution of wealth, access to infrastructure, and the reorganization of reproductive labor. Against the backdrop of contemporary challenges to left, urban politics — the struggle for the right to housing, for public reinvestment, and against the rising right — we should look back on this sweeping interwar project to draw out the possibilities and limits of progressive urban politics within a conservative state.
Red Vienna’s Social Basis
Other European cities also approved socially oriented, modernist housing projects for their urban working classes: both Frankfurt am Main (“New Frankfurt”) and Zürich (“Red Zürich”) initiated programs much like Vienna’s in the wake of World War I, but none were nearly as expansive and ambitious.
The combination of social forces in Vienna at the end of and just after World War I created the necessary conditions for the project. Strong labor, feminist, and council movements emerged from the widespread hunger, unemployment, and homelessness that characterized the war years. These culminated in a wave of demonstrations and strikes toward the war’s end. Throughout Vienna, workers and residents organized councils modeled on the Russian Revolution and the Council Republics in Germany and Hungary.
After the Austro-Hungarian monarchy collapsed, space for social transformation opened. In November 1918, the newly formed Austrian republic extended the vote to both women and men. This allowed the Social Democratic Worker’s Party (SDAPÖ) to win the most votes in the first elections. The coalition government, consisting of the Social Democrats and the Christian Social Party (CS), which governed until 1920, introduced a series of progressive reforms that immediately improved workers’ living conditions, such as the eight-hour day, paid vacation, the Works Council Act, the establishment of the Chamber of Labor, and rent-control legislation.
The nature of the SDAPÖ — which rested on the organizational integration of various radical and revolutionary currents — facilitated these programs. While some sections of the party negotiated with the opposition, they were able to use the pressure imposed by social movements to win additional concessions. This history helps explain why the party still emphasizes unity. Unlike in Germany, Austria’s SDAPÖ witnessed few major splits, and the Communist Party never — except during periods of illegality under the Austrofascists and the Nazis — established itself as a serious rival.
Socialists also organized outside of parliament through its military wing, the Schutzbund, and through the labor movement. In Vienna, the Social Democrats regularly won an absolute majority in city council elections, revealing that both the city’s working class and large segments of the emerging white-collar professional class all gravitated toward the party. Red Vienna became a massive force in national politics.
But the challenges of running a socialist city within a conservative state soon became evident. The city administration pursued a political project that ran counter to the federal government’s aims and, to some extent, even contrasted with the behavior of the more reformist wing in the Social Democratic Party.
Beginning in the 1920s, the balance of forces began to shift against the labor and women’s movements’ interests. Calls to eliminate the “revolutionary rubbish” grew increasingly loud in public debates. Following the collapse the first governing coalition in 1920, the SDAPÖ would never again participate in a First Republic national government.
Meanwhile, as in Germany, inflation triggered by the war spread across the country. The currency’s collapse only stopped after the League of Nations promised to guarantee foreign credits. The government planned to balance the national budget by raising revenue and cutting expenditures, a familiar formula that was, as always, conducted at the expense of the vast majority.
Red Urban Renewal
In Vienna, the SDAPÖ concentrated on municipal political projects. A thorough restructuring in all spheres of life, they thought, would produce the “new man” prepared for the coming socialist society. The approach’s ideological foundation came out of Austro-Marxism, an ideology located somewhere between reform and revolution that sought to realize socialism through the ballot box. The corresponding political strategy emphasized building hegemony within the confines of the city.
Vienna’s municipal administration intervened in the postwar economic crisis with a massive investment and infrastructure program. Unsurprisingly, it immediately faced a barrage of criticism from bourgeois and right-wing forces. Opposition to Red Vienna’s policies united the federal government, the main industrial and banking associations, big capital, the church, and the fascist and paramilitary organizations against the city.
Despite internal and external resistance, the city council used a broad, tax-based wealth redistribution program to pay for the programs. This was only possible after 1922, when Vienna became a federal state and thus acquired far-reaching autonomy on tax policy. The Breitner tax, named after the councilor of finances, raised money from luxury goods and consumption, taxing cars, horse racing, and domestic servants. A progressive housing tax, which largely targeted villas and private homes while ignoring most working-class apartments, also supported the project.
The council created a broad economic stimulus program, including massive investments in infrastructure and job creation, while a wave of municipalization and nationalization swept the reproductive sector. The administration focused on spheres we would today describe as “care work” — nursing, medical care, education, and so on — and equipped them with improved infrastructure and significantly increased resources.
A massive expansion of child care and youth centers, modern nursing homes, and general health-care improvements followed. The administration pushed pedagogical reforms and increased opportunities for continuing education. Countless new libraries opened, often inside the public housing projects shooting up across the city. A broad network of publicly subsidized cultural associations and clubs gave more citizens access to cultural education. Together, these projects represented a comprehensive program of education reform and modernization. At the same time, new bridges, streets, parks, and promenades pushed forward the city’s architectural reorganization.
Decommodifying Shelter
In the nineteenth century, Vienna, as capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and residence of the Habsburg monarchy, grew into a metropolis of over two million inhabitants. In 1910, it ranked as the fifth-largest city in the world, after London, New York, Paris, and Chicago. Migrant labor from different parts of the empire allowed the city’s industrial center to expand.
Much of the population lived in aging over-crowded apartment buildings without proper lighting and ventilation. Multiple generations crammed themselves into overpriced tenement blocks in the city’s proletarian suburbs. Rents skyrocketed, and many lodgers only leased a bed between shifts at the factories. Tuberculosis as well as rickets — typical illnesses of the Viennese working classes — spread through the poorer districts.
The dire housing crisis following the war prompted the government to organize emergency housing, sometimes by expropriating vacant buildings. It opposed real estate speculation and successively bought up more and more property, so that by 1924 the Viennese government was the single largest property owner in the city. Between 1923 and 1934, it built over sixty thousand new apartments, which also served as job creators. Further, the administration supported the settlement movement, in which homeless war veterans and other destitute individuals seized unused land and built houses on it.
Apartment complexes became the favored construction style, provoking the ire of the elites, who condemned the amount of money being spent on “red fortresses” — a label that points to the suspicion that they might someday serve military functions. When construction began on the Karl-Marx-Hof, a massive housing complex of roughly 1,400 units, many critics claimed it was structurally unsound. When the famous Amalienbad (a public natatorium in a working- class district) opened, the bourgeois press worried that proletarian visitors would steal its beautiful decorations.
These housing complexes were usually multistory apartment blocks with green inner courtyards that provided residents with natural light and strengthened community ties and solidarity. The city connected these blocks to local infrastructure — like consumer cooperatives and schools — making residents’ daily lives easier by cutting down travel and shopping time.
The apartments themselves were generally about 125 and 150 square feet and consisted of an open-plan kitchen, one room, and sometimes an additional closet. All had running water and toilets.
Architects integrated the feminist and labor movements’ demands into the building’s layouts, and discussions around rationalizing and centralizing the domestic economy appeared in how the construction of the kitchens, child-care facilities, laundry rooms, and the Einküchenhaus — a series of apartment units served by one central kitchen. Planners intended that the state would take over traditionally female reproductive tasks and relieve women workers, already stressed by the triple burden of wage labor, housekeeping, and raising children.
Neither the complexes nor the various companies and services established to support them were intended to make a profit. The city administration continued to run public services like gas, water, power plants, and public transportation and pushed to take over private industries including garbage disposal and the canals.
Rents were calculated to cover these operating costs and nothing more; in 1926, they averaged about 4 percent of a worker’s monthly wage. Apartment allocation was conducted according to a points system; alongside need, current housing situation, employment status, and war injuries, the city privileged applicants born in Vienna, which counted for four times as many points as Austrian citizenship. This demonstrates the city’s commitment to helping anyone who lived in the city remain there.
Nevertheless, beginning with the outbreak of the global economic crisis in 1929, Red Vienna came under increasing pressure, both economically and politically.
The Socialist City in a Conservative State
The First Austrian Republic responded to economic crisis by pursuing a policy of austerity. Saving the state from the crisis required them to take out loans from the League of Nations, which came, of course, with strict conditions. League of Nations financial representatives travelled to Austria and developed a “restructuring program,” which called for dismantling social infrastructure, cutting jobs, and slashing workers’ rights. These policies were generally enforced via emergency decrees to avoid parliament and democratic decision-making more generally.
At the time, the labor movement press asked its readers a question that sounds eerily familiar over eighty years later: “Who will pay for the crisis?”
The crisis! Business people demand tax breaks, factory owners call for eliminating “social burdens.” . . . But is not the crisis felt . . . first and foremost by those about whom no one speaks — by the workers, employees, and civil servants? Now more than ever! Because it is their wages they want to cut, their welfare costs, it is they who are to pay more taxes, so that direct taxation can be done away with . . . In times of crisis, everyone is supposedly protected, only working people, and particularly women and the youth, are still forced to pay.
The government and League of Nations financial committee made no secret of the fact that they viewed democracy as disruptive and likely to endanger the program’s success. So they established more authoritarian structures, justifying them by citing the country’s dire economic need. The SDAPÖ criticized the austerity policies but nevertheless tolerated them at the federal level, at least in some instances. Red Vienna’s destruction closely resembles the authoritarian neoliberal measures that have been implemented in the wake of the most recent crisis. At the same time, it highlights the limited power municipal governments have when confronted with externally imposed debt ceilings.
Over the course of the crisis, the bourgeois-conservative Austrian federal government increased pressure on Vienna’s administration to cut expenses and increase revenues. While austerity was imposed at the federal level, the city tried to continue its investment programs, particularly with regard to apartment construction, albeit now on a smaller scale. Sessions of the city council were held “under the sign of frugality.”
The Communist Party — not represented in parliament nor on the city council — had followed the Red Vienna project critically since its inception and protested these cutbacks, accusing the “Red City Council” of relieving the “ailing” economy at the expense of the “ailing working class.” On the federal level, the SDAPÖ proposed job creation programs and investments, as well as wealth redistribution through taxation, but their suggestions were ignored.
In February 1934, the Austrofascist government removed Vienna’s administration in the course of its military evisceration of the labor movement as a whole, and appointed commissioners to rule the city. One of the caretaker government’s first measures dismantled the progressive tax system. Redistribution of wealth from the top to the bottom reversed, public housing projects were largely abandoned, rents rose, and social insurance and infrastructure were dismantled.
Forgotten History, Forgotten Lessons
Reconsidering Red Vienna allows the contemporary left to build on these experiences and strategies. Although today’s left has a vastly different character and exists in a very different political constellation, urban struggles continue. Anti-eviction movements (which include public-housing residents) and demands to productively use vacant space for new arrivals like refugees are mobilizing the Left across Europe. Red Vienna shows that far-reaching and transformational ideas can be made into reality, albeit in a specific situation in which massive pressure from below pushed through reforms.
Although today’s Vienna feels the effects of gentrification and rising rents, the city maintains a relatively high public housing budget when compared to metropoles of similar size. Vital to the interwar reform project was a political force supported by large segments of the subaltern classes that opened up a space for further changes and transformations.
At the same time, Red Vienna reminds us how important it is to address state power on local, national, and multiregional levels. While tax autonomy provided Red Vienna with greater room to maneuver, the city’s progressive government could not defeat the combined forces of the national government and the League of Nations.
At the time, the Austrian left dissected the SDAPÖ’s strategy. Socialist, activist, and social scientist Käthe Leichter, later murdered by the Nazis, argued that the party’s reluctance to address state power was its fatal mistake. The Left had lost “its faith in the creative power of the labor movement itself, the self-confidence in its own ability to act and shape society.”
We should take those lessons to heart, even while celebrating and defending the real achievements of socialist governance in Vienna.
Contributors
Veronika Duma is a historian and research fellow in the Department of History at the University of Vienna.
Hanna Lichtenberger is a political scientist and historian in the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna.
Loren Balhorn is a contributing editor at Jacobin and co-editor, together with Bhaskar Sunkara, of Jacobin: Die Anthologie (Suhrkamp, 2018).
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