The Red Vienna Sourcebook by Rob McFarland Georg Spitaler Ingo Zechner

Abstract

Reviews 184 activities enact the postmodern reality that ‘our representations, disjoined from things in the world, are not stabilized by any theory of how we make them’. The Kakanian elite organizes its representations ‘not with regard to an outer reality [...], but only with fidelity toward what it takes to be its own constructs’ (p. 85). Viewed from a socio-critical perspective, however, these ‘constructs’ are linked to the ‘patterned, prefabricated forms of identity’ (p. 98) that a decadent Kakania seeks to impose on the individual, and which are rejected by Musil’s protagonist Ulrich. Despite his discussion of the Musilian trope of imaginative Möglichkeitssinn versus rigid Wirklichkeitssinn, the main polarity identified by Mehigan in book 1 of MoE opposes the uniquely individual to the general — an opposition in which ‘singularity’ is valorized and ‘science’, with its quest for rules and regularities, inevitably acquires a negative weighting. (Mehigan buttresses his claim for the supreme importance of ‘the premise of singularity’ in Musil’s thought with a detailed reading of the remarkable short piece ‘Das Fliegenpapier’ [The Flypaper], in which the ‘pseudo-scientific gaze of the observer’ yields to ‘a certain humanism’ in the depiction of the death-throes of an individual fly (pp. 96–97).) Thus is the ground laid for the siblings’ escape in book 2 from society’s rules and conventions into the unrestrained Nietzschean individualism and radically subjective ethics of ‘der andere Zustand’. In his conclusion, however, Mehigan rows back from this extreme position and invokes the need for some kind of coming together on ‘an even playing field’ of normative commitments on the one hand and our ‘desire for singularity’ on the other, in the creation of a ‘proper ethics’ (p. 157) for a post-religious age — a task for which, he suggests, imaginative literature offers the ideal arena. Graham Bartram Lancaster The Red Vienna Sourcebook. Ed. by Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler and Ingo Zechner. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020. xxx + 773 pp. £95/$120 (hbk), ISBN 9781571133557; £30/$49.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781640140677. The Red Vienna Sourcebook is the English-language version of Das Rote Wien: Schlüsseltexte der zweiten Wiener Moderne, published by De Gruyter in Berlin, also in 2020. Both are the work of the International Research Network BTWH (Berkeley / Tübingen / Vienna / Harvard). Given that The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (ed. by Anton Kaes et al.) appeared in 1994, a comparable resource for Austrian studies has long been a desideratum. As the trio of editors outline in their introduction, ‘Red Vienna’ was a unique phenomenon. That the Social Democratic Workers’ Party took democratic control of Vienna Municipal Council in May 1919 and retained it until the brief civil war of 1934 allowed a remarkably extensive programme of reforms, encompassing almost every aspect of social and cultural life, to be not only planned but also put into practice, creating an enduring legacy. Action was extensively accompanied by words, as supporters variously theorized, advocated and celebrated policies, while sceptics and opponents criticized or even vilified Reviews 185 them. Consequently, the Sourcebook has no shortage of contemporary published material on which to draw and has turned up much that is eye-catching and will be unfamiliar, even to specialists. The avowed objective of the Sourcebook is to produce not a narrative history of Red Vienna, but ‘a carefully curated series of texts, each analyzed and introduced in their own right and in their relation to other texts’ (p. 9). It is arranged in thirty-six chapters, each comprising between six and eleven (usually excerpted) texts while at the same time being grouped into a dozen larger ‘Parts’. Conceived as presenting different discursive fields, the chapters are the primary units of the Sourcebook and they, rather than the ‘Parts’, have named editors who provide a short introduction and suggestions for further reading (in both English and German). Each text also has a prefatory paragraph. The result is a book that, despite its encyclopaedic girth, is easy to navigate and has a clear overall structure. It opens, unsurprisingly, with ‘Foundations’, ‘Philosophies’, ‘Identities’ and ‘New Values’, before moving on to the different spheres in which ideas were realized: health and welfare, education, housing, sport and leisure, culture and media...