This newly translated volume, first published ten years ago as Anarchie der Vorstadt (Frankfurt, 1999), is rooted in the authors' irritation with the prevailing discourse on fin-de-siècle Viennese modernity. That discourse they dismiss as myopic preoccupation with elite intellectual and artistic culture, which, while serving to underpin academic careers and promote popular tourism, ignores “the world of the suburbs, the lives of immigrants, proletarians, and urban pariahs” in the same way that modernist Viennese literature ignored those worlds (1). Although it is difficult to accept that such a Freud-and-Fiaker view of the Viennese fin de siècle has been so dominant in academic and scholarly circles, even ten years ago, Maderthaner and Musner nonetheless offer a truly innovative, if not always entirely successful, methodology for investigating and interpreting the “other” Vienna.

Guiding the reader across the Ringstraße and into working-class suburbs like Simmering, Neulerchenfeld, and Ottakring, the authors propose to “transcribe” this other Vienna “as a social text” (2–3). Opening their book with an arresting narrative of the September 1911 Ottakring riots, and citing the rioters' penchant for attacking and destroying kiosks, stationery shops and streetcar timetables, the authors argue that what was interpreted even by Social Democrats as a “hunger revolt” and by the authorities as “grotesque” and “senseless vandalism,” was in actuality “more than just the political economy of suburban poverty, … and more than just a struggle for territorial control” (19). Instead, they argue, the riots were a self-conscious “attack on the symbolic order of modernity” itself, which sought “to rupture the power and violence of modernity by attacking its public manifestations” (20). With fine sensitivity for ambiguity and contradiction, they describe such examples of suburban violence, along with organized criminality, youth gangs, and popular entertainment like dance halls, movie houses, and the Wurstelprater, as on the one hand simultaneously rooted in an elemental rejection of authority and elite culture, which contains within itself a kind of cooptation into that same authority and culture by accepting and glorying in the identity as the social and cultural “Other,” and on the other hand liberating expression of an alternative, utopian modernity—an alternative vision fueled as much by the workers' rootedness in the “feudal-popular” as in their new-found suburban “popular-modern” (80, 89).

It is, they tell us, the “segregation and integration, cultural difference and identity, power and impotence,” which constitute the essential nature and character of the suburbs, at once the necessary alien Other against which the dominant society and culture define themselves, and at the same time the germ of its replacement by a new, more egalitarian society (21). Turn-of-the-century proletarian rage, they argue, must “be placed in the whole spectrum of suburban life-worlds in which developing ‘class consciousness’ is interwoven with unconsciousness, refractoriness with indifference, morality with deviance, secularizing spirituality with anarchistic practicality, and suburban proletarian insolence with rural fearful conservatism” (118), a feature of Austria's “late” capitalist modernization, which they characterize with the somewhat unsatisfying term “transgression” (128).

That this is the result of a collaboration between two similarly motivated, but methodologically and generationally very different scholars is discernible not only in the book's intriguing marriage of social history's focus on institutions and masses with cultural history's interest in individuals and cultural difference, but also and more problematically in the tension between the book's essentially Marxist notions of class-based historical progress and the post-structuralist proclivities of its methodological approach which favors ambiguity and shuns linearity. The frequent disjuncture between the theoretical claims and the ability of the evidence presented to support them can be frustrating. The idea that the lower class's interest in “kitsch and junk,” described with great sensitivity and nuance, represents conceptually “less a difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture than a cultural strategy as part of an economy of survival” (101) is intriguing, but is not convincingly supported by the evidence. That the activities of the ubiquitous pimps, hustlers, thieves, and ruffians of the working-class districts amounted to “a kind of ‘plebiscite’ of the marginalized,” an “attempt to turn the symbolic order of the city—the separation of periphery and center—upside down” (109) is likewise interesting; but a phenomenological interpretation is in this case no less plausible. The burden of proof for asserting that a cigar is something other than just a cigar must lie with those making the assertion. The wealth of sociological data amassed in earlier parts of the book does little to support or enrich this kind of analysis. It is invigorating theory, but speculative history.

The authors do offer a great deal of anecdotal, contemporary cultural commentary, but these examples come, almost without exception, from Social Democratic activists writing in a genre of social reportage that deliberately aimed to fixate on and exaggerate social divisions, creating starkly black-and-white caricatures of “bourgeois” and “proletarian” culture to serve polemical-political ends. To use these voices as objective proof of such stark disjunctures seems at odds with the book's otherwise salutary appreciation for ambiguity, multiplicity, and overlap. It is an old labor-historical bias which has long been replaced by much more sensitive and nuanced research, very little of which seems to have found its way into the authors' conceptualizations.

The “immigrants, proletarians, and urban pariahs” (1) whom the authors seek to rescue from oblivion are in this volume, sadly, still silent; still represented for the most part by voices other than their own. Nonetheless, Maderthaner and Musner do offer an at times frustrating but at its best deeply provocative and suggestive paradigm for overcoming the tensions between social and cultural history and for thinking about the forces of modernization and the position of the socially and culturally marginalized in that process.