Das Rote Wien: Schlüsseltexte der Zweiten Wiener Moderne, 1919–1934 by Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler and Ingo Zechner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Das Rote Wien: Schlüsseltexte der Zweiten Wiener Moderne, 1919–1934 by Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler and Ingo Zechner Viktoria Pötzl Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler, and Ingo Zechner, editors. Das Rote Wien: Schlüsseltexte der Zweiten Wiener Moderne, 1919–1934. De Gruyter, 2020. 956 pp. Cloth, $57.99. English translation: The Red Vienna Sourcebook. Camden House, 2020. 804 pp. Paper, $49.95; cloth, $120.00. In late spring of 2019, I walked through an exhibition at the Wien Museum at the city hall titled Das Rote Wien: 1919–1934 (Red Vienna: 1919–1934). Along with this exhibition came a catalog, Das Rote Wien: 1919–1934. Ideen. Debatten. Praxis (2019; Red Vienna: 1919–1934. Ideas. Debates. Practice). Not only the title and the extensive amount of material displayed and covered but also one of the editors, Georg Spitaler, are elements that the exhibition catalog and this sourcebook have in common. The editors of Das Rote Wien offer an almost thousand-page tome of primary sources that draw a vivid picture of interwar Vienna, a period [End Page 123] that witnessed intense political and intellectual activism. This rich sourcebook includes not only key texts from well-known authors such as Gina Kaus and Stefan Zweig but also those of lesser-known, nearly forgotten authors such as Eugen Höflich (who would later change his name to Moscheh Ya’akov Ben-Gavriêl) or Hermynia zur Mühlen, the author of Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen (1935; Our Nazi daughters). Clearly, the editors have labored to introduce diverse women’s voices by including the likes of Therese Schlesinger, Käthe Leichter, Else Feldman, and Joe Lederer, among others. Nevertheless, the ratio remains underwhelming and we are left with a sourcebook dominated by male authors at roughly 60 percent, with the remaining 40 percent evenly divided between women authors and unknown authors or anonymous sources. Indeed, a better ratio could have been achieved in this otherwise indispensable sourcebook by including women such as Klara Blum/Zhu Bailana, a prolific writer who published extensively in Die Arbeiterzeitung (Workers’ newspaper); Minna Lachs and her pedagogical texts; and Bertha Pappenheim, founder of the League of Jewish Women, to name just a few. Das Rote Wien covers thirty-six chapters across twelve sections. The different themes, such as political violence, architecture, and sexuality, are crisply introduced and contextualized by a set of respected scholars. The book’s well-organized structure allows us to navigate with exceptional ease. It stands as a great source for everyone interested in Vienna’s intellectual and cultural life before World War II, as it makes a variety of key texts—from newspaper articles to party pamphlets and literary texts—accessible to a broader audience for the first time. Surprisingly, Jewish life or women’s movements are not limited to their respective chapters. One can find texts centering on or related to Jewish life in every single chapter, and every section includes one or more female perspectives on its particular thematic focus. One may wonder at first why a book titled Das Rote Wien includes the writings of a National Socialist, anti-Semitic author like Grete von Urbanitzky, who ironically wrote one of the earliest-known Austrian lesbian novels (Der wilde Garten, 1927; The wild garden). The answer is simple: she too, and unfortunately many like her, were part of this checkered legacy of a Red Vienna, which ultimately gave rise to its own destruction. By additionally showing the downside of a glorified and mystified Red Vienna—anti-Semitism, misogyny, and the early roots [End Page 124] of National Socialism—it is exactly here that Das Rote Wien shows its strengths. Yet the editors were also conscientious by not giving voice to prominent anti-Semites like Georg Schönerer or Karl Lueger, choosing instead to reference them only when necessary. Das Rote Wien succeeds in displaying the cultural and intellectual richness of a complex period without falling prey to excessive glorification—juxtaposing progressive and critical texts with prejudiced ones. The sources collected in Das Rote Wien present an alternative history that speaks to our present. They should be read not as failed concepts of a distant past but rather as viable...