Almost thirty years ago, Carl Schorske's masterpiece on fin de siècle Vienna met abundant academic reception and widespead approval both in Anglo-American and Continental scholarship that had an important influence on the city's scholarly and also popular image.Footnote ¹ Still, in contrast to Schorske's comprehensive focus on the relations between politics and culture, most of the studies on “modern Vienna” (Wiener Moderne) concentrated on selected aspects of the metropolis's history—on the arts, science, and high culture, as represented, for example, in the successful Dream and Reality (1985) exhibition that found attention far beyond Austria's borders and may be regarded as characteristic of the spirit of the 1980s.Footnote ² As a consequence, not only was “the other side” of the city—to paraphrase the subtitle of the book by Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner under review here—obscured, but at the same time a strangely affirmative concept of “modernity” was constructed neglecting marginalized groups as well as popular culture. “Rethinking Vienna 1900”—as the title of Steven Beller's (2001) collection of fine scholarly work has it—within the more comparative framework of Central Europe has therefore been an issue at least for the last decade.Footnote ³ Still, mutual reception of the growing body of scholarly work on both sides of the Atlantic seems to be scarce. All these were reasons for a constant discomfort and thus a central motif of the authors’ thorough examination of “the other side of fin de siècle Vienna”.

Searching for this so far undiscovered “other” Vienna and its residents, Maderthaner and Musner started their fieldwork literally with an onsite inspection of the working-class districts of the neighbourhood of Ottakring to fill in the blank spaces in traditional historiography's representation of fin de siècle Vienna. Drawing on an impressive amount of written and pictorial sources, the ethnographic–topographical approach characterizing the book, first published in German in 1999, is exemplary of an approach to cultural history that began to develop in the Austrian intellectual community about two decades ago, which is also evidenced by the other books discussed here. This development in fact clearly connects to the international debates of the 1990s: the fundamental theoretical debates within the humanties and social sciences criticizing teleological progress-oriented concepts of modernity and modernization, the success of the new cultural history, the reception of British cultural studies in the German-speaking world, and diverse paradigmatic “turns” all form the background of Maderthaner and Musner's book, which may duly be seen as a pioneering work in the field of urban and cultural studies in Continental European scholarship.

Unruly Masses, the felicitous English paraphrase of the German subtitle “Die Anarchie der Vorstadt”, tells a story of Vienna between the 1870s and World War I, aiming at doing justice to the city's suburbs with their different forms of popular und mass culture hidden by the focus up to now on urban elites and the centre. The terms “suburbs” and “suburbia” (the literal translation of the book's subtitle would be “The Anarchy of Suburbia”) refer to the outskirts of the city, respectively the ever-growing living environments of the working classes, the majority of them migrants from all parts of the Habsburg monarchy. Hence the narrative uncovers Vienna's history from the margins, concentrating on the integral interrelations between politics and culture already indicated in Schorske's subtitle.

Maderthaner and Musner's cultural history of the social concentrates on the environments, living conditions and daily routines of the Viennese lower classes, thus reconceptionalizing the relations between material and symbolic space and trying to read social space as social text. Long before the “spatial turn” became common coin in the wake of the plethora of “turns” following the most prominent among them, the “linguistic turn” and the “cultural turn”, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu developed the concept of social space to analyse the relations between social structures and human actions. According to Bourdieu, space cannot be conceived as primarily constituted by its material quality. Rather, the social world can be represented as a multidimensional space based on specific principles of distinction constitutive of the distribution of societal power. Individual actors are thus characterized by their relative positions within social space defined by the allocation of different sorts of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital.Footnote ⁴

Thus social spaces are constructed within social relations that are at the same time their preconditions: people create social space via their perceptions, visions and actions. The interface of this mutual dependence of social structures and human practice is the habitus—“generative schemes governing people's actions”.Footnote ⁵ Bourdieu's praxeological approach and his relational concept of space make it possible to go beyond functional definitions of seemingly “objective” structures and attributions of “subjective” individual agency. Rather, they enable us to focus on the interactions between spaces and people, their actions and structural preconditions, without privileging one specific aspect. As human agency, these relations become effective in specific places where thus at the same time power relations are constituted and negotiated.

In a similar way, if not directly referring to Bourdieu, Maderthaner and Musner relate crucial aspects of historical change at the turn from the nineteenth century to the twentieth without analytically or narratively disconnecting specific societal fields, such as economy, politics and culture. In fact, this type of cultural history takes cultural representations as seriously as social practices and thereby connects Raymond Wiliams's comprehensive concept of culture as a “whole way of life” with the critical claim of another pioneer of British cultural studies, E. P. Thompson, to conceive of culture as a “whole way of struggle”.

But the book is more than a history of Vienna's working classes and their culture. Its major aim is an analysis of the complex interactions and conflictual relations of power, politics, and popular as well as elite cultures, for which urban space is the condition and at the same time the effect. The value of this sociocultural concept of space in rethinking cultural history becomes visible not least in the authors’ methodology: Meticulous topographical descriptions of the city serve as a critical methodological tool, as central to this approach as thick descriptions and complex analyses of paradigmatic historical events drawing on the rich source material in the archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and in police and contemporary press reports. Two such events shape the narrative frame of the study. It starts with the grand “hunger revolt” (1911), when more than a hundred thousand people demonstrated against repeated price increases, and closes with an account of the tramway strike of 1888, when Vienna's tramway coachmen, led by the social democrat Victor Adler, protested against unbearable working conditions. The reverse chronology seems programmatic, as the authors explicitly argue against an all too unequivocal periodization, and instead draw the reader's attention to fluent transitions. They map out a politics of transgression (127 ff.) between—in their words—traditional popular modern politics (89) and the beginning of an organized mass politics.

For while the antecedent tramway strike can already be read as an expression of political organization, the “hunger revolt” of 1911 seems exemplary of a still largely unorganized agitation without any major political goal: with the escalation of events and their spatial shift from the centre to the Ottakring outskirts, large parts of the suburban population joined in the protest. Adolescents and children, mothers and other women articulated their grievances with their living conditions and the authorities’ economic decisions in what seemed at first glance to be merely vandalistic acts against public property of all sorts. Strikingly, however, their rage was not only directed against public institutions in general, but specifically encompassed all representations of literacy: apart from lanterns and shop windows they particularly destroyed schools and paper shops, books and brochures, but also street signs as symbols of written order and representations of modernity. What social and cultural significance, what symbolic content, did these acts have? How did this cultural formation suddenly arise, and what traditions did it draw upon (19)? And how did it relate to the cityscape of Vienna?

One of the authors’ hypotheses is that the emerging spatial and sociocultural polarity between the city and the countryside, or, more precisely, the suburbs, can be understood as an opposition of literacy and oral culture. Against the background of the agricultural and industrial developments that had led to an enormous growth of the Viennese population since the 1848 revolution, urban topography serves as a key to the analysis, whose objective is defined as a “phenomenology of the suburban” (21).

Within only a few decades Vienna's population had more than doubled and totaled 2 million in 1910, of which 65 per cent had immigrated and mostly lived in miserable suburban conditions. In a perspective clearly committed to postcolonial theory—the suburban “Other” is conceived as constructed by the elites as a “dark continent” (31) and as a projection of bourgeois anxieties and phantasies—the authors present the relation between centre and periphery as a topography of social space: one of the most remarkable differences between Vienna and other European metropolises is that the splendid bourgeois architecture of Vienna extended well beyond the Ringstraße and the centre and into the suburbs. However, hidden behind representative facades lay the overcrowded slums of the labouring migrants stemming from all parts of the Habsburg monarchy. That their misery, described in painful detail by police and journalists’ reports, was concealed behind magnificent facades is not a coincidence. Rather, the representative exterior was deliberately meant to suggest a unity between centre and periphery, while simultaneously fulfilling a “policing function” (56) as the interior sustained the social distance between the inhabitants of the buidings. Just as noteworthy is the synchrony of “premodern” provincial and emergent urban built structures and ways of life characteristic of neighbourhoods such as Brigittenau, which within only a few years developed into an industrial and a working-class district, at the same time retaining its traditional character as a location of popular spectacle by then attracting thousands of visitors.

These thoroughly researched and well-argued examples of simultaneous and overlapping ways of life and their spatial and cultural articulations, however, seem somewhat at odds with one of the book's hypotheses on the emergence of “mass culture”, which posits an all too rigid dichotomy of a consistent rural-versus-fragmented urban, oral-versus-literate, premodern-versus-modern culture that allegedly became visible and critical through the migration of previously provincial groups into the suburban slums. Thus the authors seem to reinforce an idealized “naturalness” of provincial life, celebrated by contemporary writers such as the Viennese essayist Felix Salten, as well as a notion of a homogenized premodern popular culture. Characteristically, these passages draw on relatively little source material, but rely on theoretical models (e.g. M. Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque) that are no longer uncontested in contemporary research on early modern popular culture. Rather, “premodern” popular culture is widely conceived as characterized by a simultaneity of different ways of life. This has been comprehensively documented by research on the crossovers between forms of literacy and orality that coexisted from the Middle Ages, or, for instance, on the relationships between early modern authorities and the people that were in no way as “organic” (89) or “static” as Musner and Maderthaner claim, but largely marked by conflicts that had consequences for ways of life and cultural articulations.Footnote ⁶

The bourgeois writer Felix Salten, by the way, was one of the few exponents of Viennese elite culture who showed some interest in the lower classes and their life. Most of the other famous authors influential on today's image of fin de siècle Vienna, such as Arthur Schnitzler or Stefan Zweig, either completely neglected these aspects of urban living or else used “suburbia” as a foil for projections of bourgeois fears of disease, criminality and prostitution, mixing anxieties, resentments and (sexual) desire. Hardly any subject worried the elites—essayists such as Salten, the presumed author of Josephine Mutzenbacher, doctors and police lawyers alike—as much as spreading prostitution in the city's outskirts, while at the same time contemporary surveys show that up to 75 per cent of young middle-class males had their first sexual experiences with prostitutes, followed by maidservants (96).

Elitist romanticism mixed with disgust met the emerging suburban mass culture and its popular traditions, a phenomenon Maderthaner and Musner call the “popular-modern” (89). They use this term to describe the processes of transformation of a premodern popular culture into a mass culture characterized by its forms of production, working conditions, infrastructures and communication. Sites of this transformation are the Viennese taverns (Gasthäuser), with their traditional amusement culture, as well as the Prater, still today the city's biggest amusement park, as they were gradually changed by new “sensation and imagination technologies” (89). Another example, of course, is the triumph of the cinema: between 1900 and 1914 six cinemas opened in the Prater, and thirteen in Ottakring, many of them established in former taverns. Until the 1930s, though, the programmes provided the spectators with a melange of movies and artistic song and dance performances (93), another example of the coexistence of traditional and new forms of cultural articulation.

These features of transition are also symptomatic of contemporary conflict cultures: adolescents appropriated open suburban spaces that were coded and utilized in multiple ways. The best-known example is the Schmelz, both a recreation place for lower-class families spending their Sundays and a military training area, as well as a meeting place for local gangs and thus a site of juvenile deviance. The gangs expressed a rather random mockery of the hegemonic order, in the tradition of outlaws admired by the common people. The most prominent local hero was Johann “Schani” Breitwieser, the “Robin Hood of Vienna”, whose criminal career was supported by people's hopes and whose funeral—after he was shot by the police—was attended by thousands. Breitwieser was a paradigmatic figure of a traditional “culture of resistance” (102), which was not yet transferred into political agency. In fact, according to the authors, organized political mass agency is an effect of modernity. The best examples are the increasingly organized upheavals, such as the tramway strike, which made the street a site of a politics of the masses. The two persons who almost simultaneously “invented” and directed this politics, though representatives of contrary ideologies, were the social democrat Franz Schuhmeier and the leader of the Christian Social Party and Viennese mayor Karl Lueger. Both were sons of the suburbs and became suburban icons as representatives of political transition, standing for the end of the liberal era in fin de siècle Vienna, for the stage of transgression, “a process of change and renegotiation of social, political, and economic hegemonies and a new cartography of the urban terrain” (128).

Both were popular and populist patriarchs and used this potential status to organize the masses. Lueger succeeded in uniting the city's petit bourgeois and middle-class segments into an antiliberal, antimodernist, urban Catholic imagined community with latent as well as open xenophobic und anti-Semitic elementsFootnote ⁷. Schuhmeier represented belief in progress and the political utopia of a transition towards a better life for the working classes, whose site would be the suburbs—thus a “terrain of politics” (142). Both politicians’ funerals were staged as enormous events with hundreds of thousands of visitors, and both events became early articulations of the new political mass movements and their initial organization. Maderthaner and Musner embed their paradigmatic analysis of these two controversial politicians, comparable despite their ideological differences, in a concluding discussion of the decisive economic and political developments at the turn of the century, thus once more raising the issue of the relation between (Viennese) modernity and its “other”:

At this very point and even at the same historical site, Franz Schuhmeiers’ funeral in 1913, Lutz Musner's recent book on Vienna's “culture and habitus” in the twentieth century picks up the thread. Once again, his project is a social and cultural history of urban processes of modernization. Therefore the title of the introductory chapter, “Vienna Is Different” might seem somewhat deceptive, for Musner's point is exactly not to tell a story of the city's singularities: behind this slogan of the 1980s expressing Vienna's self-image, lurks the “typically Viennese” as a symbolically differentiating feature in the tradition of Lueger's imagined community of the Viennese petit bourgeoisie. Hence Musner's aim is to analyse the central elements of the imagery of “Old Vienna” in the context of the twentieth century—Vienna as a city of music and culture, its architectural heritage, the alleged singular quality of life, the legendary Gemütlichkeit and its culture of taste. He continues to tell the history of Vienna as one of tensions between modernization and timeless residues and their popular functions. Again, cultural history becomes a translation of social facts into cultural formations, as the “entanglement of the symbolic sphere with the material cityscape” (8).

Against the background of current debates in urban studies, but clearly at a critical distance from an all too functional global-cities approach, Musner strives to trace the interrelations of culture, economy and attitudes to life, the connections between aesthetics and everyday life that form the “symbolic added value” (24) of a city and articulate its habitus. The city is by no means a container to be filled with arbitrary contents; rather, the “culture of a city” is the sum of its cultural resources and traditions, its political and economic developments, its conceptions of space and their significance (36).Footnote ⁸ Thus, even in a globalized world, a city's symbolic economy, an emotional value, is based on its specific history.

This time explicitly drawing on one of the most influential concepts in the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, Musner conceives of the “habitus of a city” as an organizing principle forming perceptions and interpretations of spaces and places. According to Bourdieu, habitus can be understood as “embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history . . . the active present of the whole past of which it is the product.”Footnote ⁹ Terminologically relating to W. Mitchell's concept of landscapes, Musner thus takes as his point of departure the assumption that “cityscapes” not only signify power relations, but also constitute them, as they can be conceived as instruments of the embodiment and naturalization of historical, topographical and social constructions.Footnote ¹⁰ Such processes of naturalization formed the backbone of the highly emotionalized debates about innovative architectural projects and measures of urban renewal in Vienna during the 1980s und 1990s, all of which met resistance because they did not correspond to the canonized, historically grown and seemingly natural images of the city, mostly going back to artistic representations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “Views of the city are views of the world”, and modifying them causes irritation (64).

Using plentiful pictorial and textual material, Musner analyses the complex and long-term constructions of Vienna as a historical city embedded in “nature”. For instance, one of the lieux de mémoire merging history, topography and cultural attributions is the Leopoldsberg in the north of Vienna, a low hill whose pictorial representation by Rudolf von Alt (1883) had become an iconic symbol and identity marker of the city's rescue from Ottoman siege by a Bohemian relief force two hundred years earlier (69). This idealized image of the city as a conjunction of “nature” and “culture”, “history” and “present” has had enduring effects, one of them being the nostalgic topos of “Old Vienna.” At the turn from the nineteenth century to the twentieth the topos already served as a romanticized condensation of the past, fixing a number of emotional attributions that henceforward served as a reservoir of antimodernist affects.

Against this background Musner analyses a number of representations of the city in film and literature, theatre and popular culture influential during the twentieth century. The examples have a wide range: the disputes between Hermann Bahr, Felix Salten and Werner Sombart about the different habitus of Vienna and Berlin; the critical, but still nostalgic, reflections on Vienna by authors displaced during and reimmigrating after the Nazi era, such as Friedrich Torberg and Hilde Spiel; and the fundamental and formative critique of Thomas Bernhard, with its painful representations of the downside of a harmonious Austrian and Viennese culture and its functions of suppressing or trivializing the horrors of National Socialism and the involvement of the Austrian population in it.

However, this ambivalent imagery of Vienna—nostalgically glorified on the one hand, critically morbid on the other—has a long tradition in its own right that starts neither with Thomas Bernhard nor with the biting comments of Karl Kraus more than half a century earlier. It is already traceable in the tradition of the Wiener Lied, with its typical fusion of lust for life and longing for death. One thinks of the simultaneity of the glorifying film productions of the 1940s and 1950s by Willi Forst, amalgamating Wiener Lied and operetta with Habsburg-nostalgia and local patriotism, and Carol Reed's Third Man with its gloomy representations of the social abysses of postwar Vienna.

“Vienna, city of music” and “Viennese Gemütlichkeit”—still two particularly popular topoi of “Old Vienna”—are discussed in respective chapters. In her important book on the role of music in constructing the image of the city, Martina Nussbaumer shows how music served to mutually connect essentialist rationales—climate, landscape, habitus of the people—with historical arguments stressing a continuity from the “great classics” (Mozart, Haydn), operetta-culture and waltz-culture to the Wiener Lied and the Schlager.Footnote ¹¹ These clichées are still at work in advertisements for contemporary festival culture, such as during the Mozart Year 2006 or the Haydn Year 2009, though Musner, drawing on Nussbaumer, is perhaps too pessimistic in interpreting these forms of “retro-coding” (171) as exclusively representative of contemporary public representations of Vienna.

The fact that it is almost impossible to adequately translate the term Gemütlichkeit points to its complexity and ambivalence. Indeed, it covers a spectre of meanings including aspects of leisureliness, mentality and atmosphere,Footnote ¹² and—within the matrix of factors constituting the habitus of Vienna—it stands for the ambiguous principle of “live and let live”: a relaxed attitude of (apparent) tolerance that also implies ignorance, lack of empathy and retraction from the political public into the private sphere characteristic of the “Biedermeier”, the historical period between 1815 and the “revolution” of 1848. Again, the two books discussed so far communicate with each other. Relating his analysis to the hypotheses about the change of premodern forms of popular culture in Unruly Masses, Musner explains the nostalgic discourse of loss as represented by the Wiener Lied as typical for periods of transgression and for its identity-generating function, as in Lueger's petit bourgeois, populist imagined community: “Lueger made das Gemütliche an ornament of mass politics” (195)—and likewise Gemütlichkeit could easily and even more radically tilt over into malevolence, intolerance and eventually open brutality, as portrayed by Ödön von Horvath in his Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald or by Helmut Qualtinger's performance in Herr Karl, displaying all possible facets of petit bourgeois perfidy.

Popular places such as the fin de siècle Prater and the contemporary “museums quarter” as a “landscape of amusement prototypical for late modern urban development” (218) finally are juxtaposed against a comparative analysis of “landscapes of taste”, defined as interfaces of urban development, topography and culture (205). As in Unruly Masses, the last sections of the analysis are dedicated to a theoretical reconciliation of the book's specific issues with their socioeconomic context. Narratively, this is achieved by means of a twofold historical “cut-back”: to relate current imageries first to the political changes since the 1950s, then—to close the circle—to the period of transgression around 1900 formative of Vienna's landscapes of taste.

These last two chapters explicitly rely on the corresponding sections of the third volume of the monumental History of Vienna, issued between 2001 and 2006, which can in its own right be considered a milestone as a comprehensive urban history of an individual city. If Maderthaner and Musner's, and Musner's, programmatic books are theoretically pioneering in urban studies, then this work, edited by Peter Csendes and Ferdinand Opll, comparably integrates traditional and innovative urban history. For, if this work is clearly committed to the classic “handbook” tradition, aspiring to encyclopedic breadth (together the three volumes comprise more than two thousand pages), it is nevertheless also indebted to an interdisciplinary social, cultural and urban history. Still, it would have done no harm to articulate this commitment more explicitly in at least one of the introductory chapters, the more so as it is met in almost all of the twenty-six contributions of in-depth scholarship from different disciplines. Also untypical for the handbook genre, all of them are characterized by a readable, sometimes even essayistic, style, at the same time drawing on an amazing amount of written sources skilfully interwoven with the texts, and displaying plentiful pictorial and graphical material as well as historical maps that serve not only as illustrations, but also as material basis for the arguments and interpretations.

If the structure of all three volumes is rather traditional according to the standards of the genre, this is balanced by their integral interdisciplinarity, as well as by the chronologically comprehensive character of the work. Long before interdisciplinarity became a catchword, collaboration between archaeology and topography, cartography and socioeconomic history played a crucial role in urban history, especially where concerned with premodern times, as particularly demonstrated in the first two volumes. Moreover, in each volume there are occasional departures from he handbook structure. The second volume, dealing with the early modern Habsburg residential city of Vienna, for instance, features, in its section on socioeconomic history, a small survey by Andreas Gugler on the “Viennese supper”, giving detailed information on daily eating habits. The first volume, covering Vienna's history until the beginning of the sixteenth century, closes with a beautiful essay by the two editors, who reconstruct how a medieval wayfarer at the end of the fifteenth century would have experienced his walk towards the city, thereby making methodologically visible the work of medieval urban studies.

As most of the recent contributions in urban history concentrate on the twentieth century,Footnote ¹³ I will conclude by focusing on these first two volumes’ coverage of the city's medieval and early modern history to show specific points of reference to the strand of urban studies discussed above. Methodologically referring to Max Weber's seminal text on premodern cities’ autonomy and self organization, international urban studies had long been directed towards the medieval beginnings of the “free” urban communes and to questions about urban communities’ impact on processes of emerging “early modern states” from the turn from the fifteenth century to the sixteenth.Footnote ¹⁴ In the last two decades, though, research interests have changed considerably, and now focus particularly on the power relations, conflicts and contested spaces both between different social groups constituting urban communities, and between representatives of the city and the cities’ rulers, and on the constitution of individual and collective urban identities. All this took place in specific spatial contexts. Just as in the two essays on Vienna's history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries examined above, medieval and early modern urban history conceives of urban space as social space, where sociocultural processes of construction and distinction played as important a role as topographic conditions and material structures. Cities are thus seen as sites of communication and cultural interaction, whose significance for local as well as “global” relations and processes of exchange should not be underrated.Footnote ¹⁵

Hence the first two volumes of the History of Vienna accentuate the mutual relations of politics and culture, and do not treat “culture” as an accessory matter, but as an integral part of economic and political history. Exemplary for this approach is the introductory chapter to the second volume by Karl Vocelka on Vienna as an early modern residential city, analysing the crucial role of princely representation, such as courtly festivities and the chase, music and theater, for the city's development. At the other end of society, the interest in marginal groups and processes of marginalization has a tradition in medieval and early modern urban history that goes back to the 1960s and 1970s and since then has been increasingly differentiated, such as in research on the categories of gender and religion. First and foremost, the history of urban Jewish communities has to be mentioned here, treated comprehensively in all three volumes.

* * *

Thus, for “modern” and “premodern” history alike, the cultural turn has opened up new integrating perspectives on people's entire ways of life, their perceptions, their visions and the symbolic processes of making sense of their lives. Altogether, the two programmatic studies and the more encyclopedic volumes represent, thematically and methodologically, a spectrum of the last decade's achievements in both urban history and urban studies on Vienna's history, which is also confirmed by the excellent bibliographies in all of the works reviewed. None of them, though, can be said to chronologically or methodologically antecede or follow the others; rather, both the studies of Maderthaner and Musner and the volumes edited by Czendes and Opll are results of the specific moment in the changes within the humanities and social sciences at the end of the twentieth century characterized by the term “cultural turn”. Yet it seems some bridges still wait to be built: one task for the new century might be a closer communication of, and stronger cross-referencing between, urban history and urban studies, integrating and strengthening their achievements. It seems even more necessary to accompany this integration with a chronological extension of comparative research, as the traditional divide between “modernity” and “premodernity” still lives on, perpetuating exactly those topoi that have to be put at a critical distance if they are to be deconstructed. This is where a dialogue between methodologically advanced medieval and early modern urban history and theoretically refined research on urban modernity promises to open new perspectives and pose new questions. For this, the (urban) history of Vienna might serve as an exemplary model.