Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918–1938 by Janek Wasserman (review)

Insofar as interwar Austria — that agglomeration of rump German territories erected on the ashes of the Habsburg Empire — receives attention from historians, much of it has been paid to Red Vienna: the socialist bulwark capital city, a site of progressive social policy, and an oversized red dot in a largely hostile Austrian terrain of Catholic conservatism. But not only was Vienna not representative of Austria; Red Vienna, as Janek Wasserman successfully argues, was not entirely red. Wasserman revises a monochromatic portrait of interwar Vienna by portraying the intellectual world of anti-democratic Catholics and radical nationalists, a milieu he terms Black Vienna.

Wasserman’s “intellectual history of a city” (10) actually explores both its red and black political circles. While following a rough chronological outline, the odd-numbered chapters focus on different loci of Black Viennese life — the intellectual-scientific groups, journals, and social organizations that attracted anti-democratic and racist German thinkers. It was actually in these circles that “Red Vienna” first emerged as a popular term, used pejoratively to smear the leftist politics of the city as Bolshevist-Jewish. Wasserman’s even-numbered chapters on Red Vienna largely eschew the titans of interwar thought (Polyani, Freud, Kraus, etc.), focusing rather on foot soldiers fighting an uphill battle against the entrenched powers of Austrian radical conservatism.

What were the guiding ideas of Black Viennese thought, and what were its bases of power? One of Wasserman’s strengths is to ground Black Vienna in its institutional settings. Its main luminaries preached from perches of traditional authority, particularly universities. The academic society known as the Leo-Gesellschaft served as conservative social gatekeeper to professorships. Universities effectively sidelined socialist thinkers in many departments, which became bastions of integralist, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, and anti-Semitic thought. The influential philosopher Othmar Spann, the centrepiece of chapter three, was an unabashed German racial supremacist and anti-democrat who promoted a philosophy of totality. He became a minor star in the Austrian academy, with his own circle of orthodox followers: the Spannkreis.

The movement also extended to academic and intellectual periodicals. Das Neue Reich (The New Reich), a journal founded by Joseph Eberle in 1918, presented the new rump Austria as under attack by Bolshevists, Freemasons, and capitalists — all groups supposedly under Jewish influence. In attracting both traditional Christian Socialists and more radical nationalists to his journal, Eberle brought the two political camps closer in the bitter aftermath of Imperial collapse. As Wasserman makes clear, reactionary Black Viennese culture was nurtured from the first days of the First Republic.

Wasserman deftly traces the institutional contours of conservative associational and intellectual life, but devotes less analysis to the ideas which drove them. This can be chalked up largely to the vacuous and discredited political philosophy that undergirded their movement. Despite seemingly significant intellectual bases of power, many Black Viennese thinkers and writers traded as much in slogans as theories: Austria was a “Jewish Republic,” all culture was Volk culture, and “true democracy” required a Fu¨ hrer. Tracing the intellectual roots of such odious or twisted claims is a thankless task, one Wasserman largely avoids. The result is an intellectual history that follows the development of organizations as much as ideas.

Half of the book is devoted to Red Vienna, but here the socialists take on the role of righteous antagonists resisting the dark pull of Black Viennese thought. Socialist intellectuals founded new research institutes and expanded alternative adult education learning in order to combat the bases of conservative power. They sought the support of a self-styled class of “intellectual workers” composed largely of white-collar professionals through appeals to empiricism and scientific rationality. But many Red Viennese intellectuals also abandoned the Austro-Marxists for their tepid and ineffective political leadership. The fracturing left, as Wasserman argues, was no match for a unified Black Vienna. Wasserman’s portrayal of a struggling Red Viennese milieu...