Capturing Difference: The Wurstelprater Photobook in Turn-of-the-Century Vienna

Abstract

Abstract Published in 1911 Vienna, the Wurstelprater photobook offered a very different image of the city from the one people were used to finding in postcards. The book toured readers through the Wurstelprater, the amusement section of the larger Prater park, focusing on its eclectic attractions and diverse crowds. Wurstelprater combined text written by future Bambi author Felix Salten with 75 pictures by photographer Emil Mayer. Those words and images had appeared earlier in separate forms, but the photobook brought them together for the first time. While many saw the Prater as a space of blight, Salten and Mayer cherished its distinctiveness from the rest of the city. The Prater had a special significance for Vienna’s Jews. It was not only a place of entertainment, but also a space where rigid Viennese social hierarchies could be suspended. Scholars have detailed Jewish involvement in the production of spaces, performances, and literatures in ‘Vienna 1900’. The emergence of the photobook as a medium of Jewish difference has, however, remained underexplored. This article analyses how Wurstelprater fused two Jewish genres, the feuilleton and street photography, making the experience of a disappearing Prater durable and portable. Assembling words and images in an unprecedented format, Wurstelprater constructed a sense of movement, nostalgia, and outsiderness. It presaged what most associate with interwar photojournalism and photo essays. Wurstelprater also became a tool of history. In the 1960s, those who rediscovered Wurstelprater treated it as evidence of what the late Habsburg empire had been. Originally conceived by outsiders, the photobook came to be a mainstream historical record.