The pre–Nazi era of authoritarian/dictatorial rule in Austria from 1933/34 to 1938—usually termed either “Austrofascism” or the “Corporate State” depending on one's political orientation—remains a deeply contested issue in Austrian political society and hence a fundamentally underdeveloped area of historical research. For this reason alone, Andreas Suttner's first monograph Das schwarze Wien—the title plays on the much more well-known era of “Red Vienna” in the 1920s and the identification of Austria's conservative right wing with the color black—breathes new life into an otherwise rather deadlocked area of contemporary Austrian history. As a detailed topographical survey of architecture and urban planning during the Austrofascist regime, this work moreover constitutes an innovative thematic and chronological contribution to the recent boom in the study of Vienna's historical cityscape, particularly under National Socialism (I think here for example of the recent works by Architekturzentrum Wien, ed., Wien. Die Perle des Reiches: Planen für Hitler [Vienna, 2015], or Dieter Hecht, Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, and Michaela Raggam-Blesch, Topographie der Shoah. Gedächtnisorte des zerstörten jüdischen Wien [Vienna, 2015]). Das schwarze Wien demonstrates the widespread intervention in Vienna's urban landscape undertaken by the Austrofascist regime, its ideological underpinnings, and, significantly, its continuities with both the Social Democratic and National Socialist regimes that preceded and succeeded it.

The book comprises only two hundred pages of analysis, complemented by a roughly sixty-page index of construction projects, sorted according to a typology devised by the author, and a map plotting these across the cityscape. As such, it is really more of a survey, and the author presents his work as a preliminary study inviting further and more detailed research in the future. Even if regarded as a survey, however, this work offers innovations to a number of facets of Vienna's political and urban history, the novelty and topicality of this research focus being underscored by the many recent Diplomarbeiten (graduate theses) referenced in the footnotes: evidently, a younger generation of scholars is beginning to reassess this disputed and long-neglected area of recent Austrian history. As such, this work should be read as an original and welcome stepping stone on a path to a more critical engagement with Austria's contemporary history beyond the years of Nazi rule.

The author's principal conclusion is that—against all assumptions—the Austrofascist regime indeed evinced an ideological building program, which was rooted in both national and international urban planning movements, either inspired by or set in competition against the architectural programs of neighboring regimes in Germany and Italy and as far away as the United States. Suttner, moreover, infers from the ideological and politicized character of this building program that it proves the essentially dictatorial nature of the Austrofascist regime, albeit that many of its projects could never be realized due to the incessant economic crises that characterized its short-lived rule. Along with manifold road and bridge constructions aiming to transform Vienna into a modern Verkehrsstadt (see especially 53–74), one of the perhaps more surprising findings presented here is the scale of residential housing projects initiated under Austrofascism (75–107, 128–64). These aimed primarily at “de-proletarianizing” Vienna's worker suburbs while evincing a striking continuity in administration, financing, and even architectural heritage with the hated predecessor regime of “Red Vienna,” that had originally politicized the urban space of the city (24–43).

To this is added a layer of more obvious ideological construction projects such as memorials and monumental administrative buildings (114–24, 166–92), of which many were either destroyed during the Nazi regime (with some notable exceptions, such as the Dollfuß memorial in the Michaelerkirche) or were ultimately not realized due to economic restraints and finally the Anschluss. Aside from individual exceptions such as the Rundfunkgebäude, today the seat of the Österreichischer Rundfunk, in the Argentinierstraße, the greatest and most significant exception is the string of churches built throughout Vienna's suburbs that were intended to “re-Catholicize” the urban population and demonstrate the connection between church and state that was idiosyncratic to this regime. A particularly innovative aspect of Suttner's analysis relates to the attempts through various, mostly unrealized memorial and/or urban planning projects to inculcate a conservative nationalist Österreich-Bewusstsein during the interwar period (see especially 169–74, 188–92)—a topic that is deserving of far greater attention for its role in the bumpy and conflicted development of the Austrian republican idea through the twentieth century.

The inclusion of historic photographs, maps, and blueprints throughout the work adds a striking visual dimension to the documentary analysis, moreover making plainly visible the surprising stylistic continuities from the “Red” through the “Black” regimes, reaching even through Nazism and beyond to the postwar era. This latter aspect in particular, which is only cursorily addressed in the conclusion by reference to the many architects, artists, and city planners (most notably Clemens Holzmeister) who continued to design, build, and decorate municipal housing blocks with implicitly Austrofascist symbolism into the 1950s (199–201), would make a fascinating follow-up study for continuities in the urban landscape reaching through and beyond National Socialism.

Those familiar with Vienna's urban topography in the present day will be interested to (re-)discover the areas of the city that were shaped by Austrofascist city planners, such as the Operngasse area in the fourth district or, somewhat more implicitly, the Austrofascist forerunner proposals of the only recently completed Hauptbahnhof project at the Wiedner Gürtel. The analysis of medieval and Christian-inspired public artworks as quintessentially Austrofascist expressions in public space should raise some eyebrows with regard to their continued proliferation in municipal housing projects through the 1950s. All in all, this is a fine and original survey of the politics of urban planning during Austrofascism and its (often subtle) impact on Vienna's urban landscape that can be observed to this day. As such, this work should be read as an inspiring contribution to contemporary Austrian history and as an impetus toward new research into the understudied era of Austrofascist rule.