Comical Modernity: Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna by Heidi Hakkarainen (review)

One of my favorite cartoons reprinted in Heidi Hakkarainen's new book Comical Modernity: Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna, appears on page 118. It is a two-paneled image. The top, "Wien—vor der Verschönerung," depicts a beautiful park scene, with dozens of well-dressed strollers beneath tall, lush trees and the old city walls and hazy skyline of the capital on the far horizon. On the bottom, "Wien—nach der Verschönerung," we see just five figures, each in a different state of distress beneath six bare tree trunks, a harsh sun overhead and the city—bereftof its medieval wall—starkly outlined on the empty plain just behind them.

I love this cartoon for many reasons, but especially because, for anyone with even a passing familiarity with urban park restoration, it is immediately comprehensible. By making light of "beautification" and then passing judgment merely on the one aspect everyone agrees is atrocious—that it is quite a bit worse to stroll beneath harsh sunlight than beautiful trees—the cartoon is magnanimously inclusive, inviting empathy from all its viewers. A Viennese glancing at this edition of Kikeriki displayed in a street stall, or pulling it from her mailbox, or sitting beside a man reading it on the train, would know exactly what this picture is about. That is the magic of great cartoons.

Yet, as Hakkarainen argues, satirical magazines (Witzblätter) are about so much more than the single amusing caricature. Rather, the ability to use humor as a mode of conversation and comment, especially about the greatest changes affecting everyday life in the hubbub of the urban metropolis, is the very lifeblood of the satirical magazine in the modern era. To be humorous and jolly, absurd and outlandish, to make even the strangest, oddest, cruelest, or most unapproachable parts of life seem comprehensible, even intimate or quaint—these are the qualities that modern satirical magazines best exemplify. And such magazines reveal, writes Hakkarainen, "hints about mental patterns and experiences [of what it is like to live in the midst of the maelstrom of modernity] that have otherwise been leftout of the documentation" (10).

Hakkarainen's book focuses on the sorts of quotidian experiences brought about by the new urban environment of the middle and late nineteenth century—strolls in denuded parks, say, or encounters with police patrols or foreign tourists or ladies wearing the newest fashions or indeed, with any of the myriad tiny interactions with the urban landscape and its denizens that are commonly leftundocumented by larger social histories. Cities changed enormously from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century, a fact that is often discussed in history books but still nearly impossible for anyone alive today to fathom. Taking Vienna as her case site—a wise choice, since in the nineteenth century the Habsburg capital underwent an urban reconstruction second only to Paris—and three of its widest-circulating satirical magazines (Der Figaro, Der Floh, and Kikeriki) as her main material, Hakkarainen sets out to understand "what aspects of the transforming city were either seen or portrayed as comical or as targets for satire; how humour was used as a way to understand and negotiate change in the everyday environment, and to create meanings and identities in a situation when earlier spatial and social relations were falling apart" (2). As she describes it, "the rebuilding of the city shook the old spatial and social structures and brought into existence a new urban community that created and consumed popular culture" (5).

This is Hakkarainen's main argument: that popular culture, and especially the liminal cultural space inhabited by satirical magazines (neither highnor lowbrow), can give us one more scholarly framework through which to understand the vast and amorphous yet startling and undeniable phenomenon called modernity. Unfolding across five chapters, each focused on a...