Farm animals were everyday sights in early modern European cities. Cattle dealers drove livestock through city streets to large open-air markets and butchers slaughtered cows, calves, pigs, and sheep in courtyards and alleys. Urban meat consumers were thus surrounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of animals alive and dead. This all changed from the middle of the nineteenth century with the institution of central slaughterhouses and other measures designed to remove all contact between city dwellers and the animals that eventually ended up on their plates. Lukasz Nieradzik's innovative monograph charts this process using the example of Vienna's (and Europe's) largest abattoir in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the St. Marx complex in the Landstraße (3rd) District that opened its premises in 1851. In the years before World War I, St. Marx never experienced the same proto-Fordist rationalization of production and concentration of capital that characterized Chicago's world-leading meat industry around the same time. Craftsmen butchers, after being required to in 1851 (Schlachthauszwang), still made up the bulk of those using the facility. Yet St. Marx was a “paradigmatic place” (21, 60, 262) for the city's breakneck modernization, a place where the interests of a wide range of groups intersected and where progress—both scientific-technological and moral-ethical—was pursued and measured. The abattoir became a “specifically urban phenomenon of modernity” (21), embodying modernity's achievements as well as—as the author points out, following the lead of Foucault and the Frankfurt School—its horrors.

Most of the book is taken up by two lengthy chapters. Chapter five investigates the occupational, economic, and societal context of the St. Marx slaughterhouse, while chapter six examines the multifaceted transformation that this world underwent in the years 1851‒1914. If butchers were skeptical, even hostile, toward directives from Vienna's expanded post-1848 administration, they also showed themselves capable of adapting to and profiting from the new circumstances. Increasing numbers of butchers devoted themselves solely to meat processing, especially the production of sausages and smoked meats. The communal abattoir's strict isolation of the act of slaughtering from other aspects of the trade facilitated this shift; so too did the tripling of pork consumption and halving of beef consumption to meet the demands of a city population that quadrupled over the course of the nineteenth century.

But most of the transformations that Nieradzik describes were beyond butchers’ control. New spaces, technologies, and perceptions of bodies (his three analytical leitmotifs) conspired in disciplining the denizens of St. Marx. The slaughterhouse's compartmentalizing architecture subjected labor to new regulatory oversight. Technologies designed to improve hygiene and reduce animal suffering put butchers’ work under close surveillance and even, as in the case of the bouterolle mask for slaughtering cattle, threatened to de-skill them. At the same time, Viennese consumers were increasingly shielded from the realities of meat production: trains brought livestock from across the monarchy directly into the St. Marx premises, obviating the need to drive animals through busy streets. The abattoir thus assumed the aura of a “magical place” (138) where unclean animals went in and certified clean and fresh meat came out. Although the author does not use the term, modernity's capacity for reenchantment is evident here as well as in butchers’ self-representation as a traditional craft community based on skill, manliness, and solidarity; this in spite of ascendant discourses of hygiene and efficiency that subjected their bodies and the bodies of the animals they slaughtered to new forms of scrutiny and control. Moreover, the process by which rationalization of meat production and new scientific-medical discourses “disenchanted animals” (223) was halting and not always unidirectional. In one of his illuminating asides, Nieradzik describes the case of Dr. Sigismund Eckstein, who believed bathing in the entrails and blood of freshly slaughtered cattle could cure a variety of ailments. In 1859, with the backing of the University of Vienna's medical faculty, fourteen “Tierbäder” went into operation adjacent to the St. Marx slaughterhouse hall and Eckstein treated 363 patients in the first year.

Overall, however, rationalizing and disciplining trends were unstoppable and, in Nieradzik's telling, they could hardly be otherwise given the rigorous theoretical framing of his study. With so many undertheorized historical monographs, his efforts in this regard are refreshing. But at times substance seems to have been sacrificed for conceptual ambition. The author undercuts his discussion of butchers’ self-styling “narratives” and the “handworker butcher narrative” (247) by failing to provide examples of meanings conveyed in narrative form. Nor is the evidence conclusive for butchers’ self-disciplining within the surveillance-enhancing topography of the abattoir. Their defiant posturing in the evocative images that Nieradzik includes and analyzes might bespeak something different—a coalescing class ethos, for instance. Unmentioned is the fact that access to meat was also a combustible issue in fin-de-siècle Vienna's social-political ferment; the city's most violent riots since 1848 erupted in September 1911 in part because a ban on imported Argentinian beef was upheld.

What is ultimately at stake in this book is a judicious critique of industrialized meat production (“from which the carnivores among us still benefit” [269]) as a quintessential site of urban modernity. And in this the author succeeds admirably. No less commendable is Nieradzik's original reconstruction, through resourceful research and in meticulous detail, of an entire “world of labor” that formed an integral, if rarely historicized, component of the modern metropolis. Readers of the Austrian History Yearbook can hope that more such insightful monographs will appear in Böhlau Verlag's young series Ethnographie des Alltags.