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

The idea of Vienna as an important intellectual center is one with a long pedigree. The traditional view of interwar Vienna is a triumphant bastion of Austro-Marxist and avant-garde thought, associated with names such as Freud, Popper, and Adler. Solidly socialist Red Vienna was then a bulwark against a sea of German nationalism and political Catholicism based in the Austrian hinterlands. In Adam Wandruszka’s classic formulation, these three groups—the Socialists, the Catholic Socials, and the German Nationalists—formed the three Lager, or camps, which together constituted interwar Austrian politics.

Janek Wasserman’s monograph Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918–1938 offers a deeply researched and fascinating revision of our understanding of interwar Viennese intellectual life. Far from being a Socialist monolith, Wasserman presents intellectual life in interwar Vienna as being dominated by a “Black” (that is, conservative Christian) cultural field—the Austro-Marxists and their avant-garde allies were numerically inferior and, at least among the Austrian population, largely out-argued. More, this Black Vienna was made up of both Christian Socialists and German nationalists in an essentially unified conservative bloc. This bloc was collectively committed to “defeating social democracy, replacing democratic, capitalist Austria, excluding Jews and foreigners, and restoring German and Austrian greatness” (8). Thus rather than a tripartite politics, interwar Vienna was actually the scene of two competing intellectual, cultural, and political coalitions.

Wasserman’s methodological approach draws first on Karl Mannheim’s emphasis on connecting knowledge to its historical and social origins. This conception of the sociology of knowledge offers a way for Wasserman to connect intellectual history, social position, ideology, and political action. He then views these elements through Antonio Gramsci’s model of hegemony in order to “better understand the dynamics of ideological conflict” (10). The two cultural fields, “interpreted as dynamic, historically contingent constellations of thought,” competed for control of the public sphere and ensuing hegemony (12). This competition shapes Wasserman’s entire narrative, which unfolds in a clear and effective way.

Black Vienna is organized in a bipartite fashion that reflects Wasserman’s understanding of Black Vienna facing of against Red Vienna. Chapters alternate focus between Red and Black figures, organizations, and ideas in a broadly chronological fashion, typically focusing in on one figure or group in order to draw out the interconnections which make them salient. He begins with two general overviews. First, he introduces the main figures of Black Vienna—the Christian Socialist Leo-Gesellschaft; Josef Eberle and his two newspapers Das neue Reich and Die schönere Zukunft. His next chapter broadly considers the Austro-Marxist relationship with intellectual workers in the early postwar years, anchored in a discussion of the Socialist journal Der Kampf.

The philosopher Othmar Spann and his voluminous circle, known as the Spannkreis, is the focal point for the following chapter, in which Wasserman argues that the Spannkreis “won the battle for philosophical and scientific hegemony in Vienna” contributing to the popularization of “anti-Semitic, antiliberal, antidemocratic, ultranationalist, conservative, and fascist discourse” (77–78). Spann’s Universalist philosophy privileged authority, order, and a corporatist religion-inflected worldview, which, as Wasserman demonstrates, lent substantial support both to the development of Austrofascism and to the Nazi Party.

Wasserman pairs his treatment of Spann with a treatment of the development and activities of the Verein Ernst Mach, founded by the Freethinkers’ Association in 1928. Incorporating atheists, monists, and the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, the Ernst Mach Society served as one of the focal points of Red Vienna. It also served as an enemy of the Austrofascist state, which suppressed the society in 1934.

The monarchist group Österreichische Aktion, the Austrian analogue to the French Action Française, brought together Habsburg monarchists behind a fascist political program “at the intersection of Catholic conservatism and German nationalism” (151). As such, the free play of their ideas across these two areas evinces the fundamental continuity of the Black cultural field...