Abstract
ABSTRACT Old Vienna is today mostly associated with Klimt and coffeehouses, Freud and the fin-de-siècle. This article explores an entirely different aspect of Old Vienna, today mostly forgotten except on a series of public artworks haunting the façades of modern housing complexes. On the basis of a vast collection of photographic, artistic, and documentary materials preserved in the local district museum, it explores the complex entanglements between urban modernization and romantic mythologization that accompanied the gradual demolition of the old neighbourhood of Erdberg in Vienna’s third district in the early twentieth century, as ramshackle old hovels barely fit for human habitation were razed to make room for massive modern housing complexes. It is guided by the two-pronged question of why this neighbourhood was romanticized after it was deliberately demolished, and why a neighbourhood deemed worthy of romanticizing was demolished in the first place. Employing a microhistorical approach in marked contrast to the antiquarian sentiments expressed through the district museum’s materials, the article shows how the myth of Old Erdberg paradigmatically embodies the powerful tensions between urban modernization and romantic nostalgia for a vanishing Heimat.
Published Version
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