The experiment with socialist municipal governance in interwar Austria’s capital was brief. Lasting a little over a decade, it came to a cataclysmic end shortly after the collapse of the country’s beleaguered democracy. Yet Red Vienna has generated a constant stream of historical studies, testifying to its enduring relevance for reflections on the present. While some scholars interpret Red Vienna through the prism of its promises of modernization, social justice, and welfare, others foreground its darker side, embodied in paternalistic and disciplinary policies, as well as in the eugenic ideas underpinning its biopolitics. Reinhard Sieder’s new monograph, Biopolitik und Alltagsleben im Roten Wien, positions itself firmly in the latter camp while breaking away from its top-down, idea-centered approaches.
Sieder makes the compelling choice to write the history of biopolitics in Red Vienna from below. With meticulous attention to ordinary people’s experiences and agency, the book seeks to show how biopolitics was applied, negotiated, and resisted in everyday life. The most compelling parts of the book, distilling many years of the author’s research, focus on the traumatic experiences of disabled and non-normative children as they encountered eugenically inflected biopolitics and the total institutions in which they were confined. The strength of these sections lies in their successful weaving together of critical analysis of contemporary biopolitical writings, archival research, and oral history interviews.
Sieder’s exploration, however, is more ambitious still, seeking to encompass everyday life in Vienna across a wide range of social arenas. Red Vienna’s signature achievement, the large-scale construction of public housing, features prominently. However, Sieder’s approach also decenters it by turning attention to youth subcultures, marriage strategies, patriarchal households, the workplace, and more. Inevitably, such an account must be selective, and it contains some surprising omissions. For instance, the reader does not find detailed discussion of either the explicitly eugenically driven municipal marriage counseling and sex education programs or policies toward disabled veterans and the elderly; the latter could have revealed more about Red Vienna’s attitudes to labor, productivity, and disability. Despite the stern and austere façade of Vienna’s crematorium featured on the book’s cover, phenomena associated with the end of life are likewise absent. One might also have wished to learn more about the experiences of Romani and Black Viennese residents, as this could have raised the question of whether racialized constructions of whiteness played a role in shaping Red Vienna’s biopolitics.
Across these manifold arenas of everyday life, the resulting picture is as surprising as it is ambiguous. High-modernist biopolitical interventions appear to have barely scratched the surface of power relations structured around gender, class, and race, and to have had limited impact on struggles shaping everyday life in Vienna at the micro level. Change in these structures occurred only in the longue durée, a point reinforced by the author’s use of sources and testimonies ranging from the late imperial period to the mid-twentieth century. Such is the inertial weight of everyday life that Red Vienna’s biopolitical ideas and policies at times recede from the analysis, which consequently becomes a fascinating, albeit somewhat descriptive, account of everyday life as such.
The overall portrait that Sieder presents is dark, arguably excessively so. Not only does he argue that biopolitics was intrinsically necessary to socialist governance (47), but he goes as far as to conclude that Red Vienna unwittingly prepared the ground for Nazi biopolitics by fragmenting the political community: “The Social Democratic rhetoric of the ‘New Man’ introduces the first divide into the concept of the ‘people,’ even though it is ultimately intended to be socially and culturally integrated and civilized. At least, a residue of humanist thought initially blunts the sharpest teeth of ‘socialist eugenics.’ In Nazi discourse, […] they reappear all the more sharply” (340–41). Yet such harsh criticism underestimates the extent to which Red Vienna emerged in a context of deep, preexisting divisions, fueled, among other factors, by the virulent rhetoric emanating from Vienna’s city hall in the late imperial period, as well as by the social upheaval of the wartime years and the collapse of the empire.
Indeed, and without diminishing its painful effects, one could read Red Vienna’s biopolitics as an attempt—paradoxical, limited, and ultimately failed—to bridge such divisions. One important clue is that even though interwar Vienna remained a multi-ethnic city, there is little to suggest that the biopolitics of the Social Democratic municipal government specifically targeted or deliberately excluded its citizens on the basis of ethnicity. This is true even of its eugenically inflected policies, which were based on optimistic neo-Lamarckian assumptions about human plasticity and the capacity of the environment to transform citizens into modern socialist subjects. Put differently, the book would have benefited from a more sustained examination of the complex interplay between Red Vienna’s formally universal biopolitics, ethnic classifications, and local practices through which national indifference may have been enacted.
Even though the book repeatedly asserts a strong continuity of biopolitical discourses and practices across the historical breaking points in Austria’s twentieth century (e.g., 64, 111–12), this problem would likewise merit more detailed exploration. Between the politics in a new key that characterized late imperial Vienna, Red Vienna’s Austro-Marxism, the anti-modernism of Black Vienna, and ultimately the violent eruption of Nazi biopolitics, a more fine-grained analysis might have highlighted significant reconfigurations. These shifts were likely both ideological and epistemic, encompassing very different concepts of community and territory, as well as divergent biological constructs of human nature and inheritance.
These shortcomings, however, do not diminish the importance of Sieder’s book, which lies in taking a first step toward a bottom-up history of biopolitics in the late imperial and post-Habsburg context, and demonstrating its considerable potential. It is hoped that this impulse will be taken up not only by historians of (post-)imperial Austria and its capital, but also by historians of eugenics in East Central Europe; such a development could bring these fields closer together in mutually inspiring ways.
