Time and Order in Metropolitan Vienna: A Seizure of Schedules by Robert Rotenberg

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 187 the education of the entire intellectual elite and “altered mental perceptions of the city” (p. xxxvi). She addresses the fundamental interplay between military technology and Renaissance culture with a synthesizing sweep that rivals the best ofJ. R. Hale’s work. Poliak’s Checklist is a model guide: it is of interest to specialists concerned with military technology, Renaissance studies, or urban history and is capable of awakening in the general reader a desire for more knowledge. I hope other libraries possessing special collections with comparable, but undiscovered, strengths will be stimulated by Poliak’s success to commission similar works. I look forward to future works by Poliak and hope she will continue to study the fortified city in Europe. Michael Kucher Mr. Kucher is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. He is writing a dissertation on the urban infrastructure of late medieval Siena. Time and Order in Metropolitan Vienna: A Seizure ofSchedules. By Robert Rotenberg. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. Pp· x + 262; notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $32.50. This book is both useful and problematic. It provides the specialist with much valuable information about the nature of contemporary Viennese schedules and their relation to everyday life in the Austrian capital, but the why of their origins is not as satisfactorily presented. This stems from the author’s analysis of Austrian history and culture as the basis for his discussion of how things are as they are. The approach is correct, but its execution leaves something to be desired. Robert Rotenberg’s thesis is that the conventional organization of time into schedules represents the creation of “an extraordinary instrument of power and domination precisely because it appears so conventional” (p. 2). When we work, eat, shop, and play shapes the patterns of our lives. Rotenberg applies this contention to Vienna by examining the daily schedules of Viennese from diverse occupations, including an executive, a factory worker, and a housewife. The daily rounds of these people demonstrate that the temporal options of the Viennese are as determined by the dictates of modern industrial, urban life as those of their counterparts in any other developed country. But there are idiosyncracies in the Viennese case, such as early shop closings, shorter work weeks, and an obsession with free time. The occurrence ofevents is influenced by these factors, and they in turn are affected by historical and cultural considerations. Roten­ berg recognizes this and attempts to go beyond his socioanthropological data to explain the process. 188 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE He is most effective in this regard when dealing with the post-1945 period. Rotenberg can point in these years to the decisions by business, government, labor, and agrarian interests in setting work schedules through the corporatist system of Sozialpartnerschaft as crucial to the schedules of everyday life. Since 1955, this has led to a decreasing work week and a rise in free time. The result is a highly structured daily existence embedded in a culture of regulation largely determined by political, economic, and social hierarchies. Rotenberg uses postwar history to account effectively for this recent Alltagsgeschichte of time, but when he strays from this era in search of its more distant origins he falters. Despite an unnecessary discussion of ancient and medieval Vienna, Rotenberg recognizes the baseline importance of the 18th century and its nascent bureaucratic conception of time and order, but in searching for the historical and cultural roots of Viennese schedules he concentrates on the 19th century, where the elucidation of his definition of modernism as change connected with “a greater con­ sciousness of social relations as the source of meaning” (p. 38) is on safer ground. Yet there are false steps here as well. Thus, the Christian Socialist, Karl Lueger, and the Social Democrat, Viktor Adler, are credited with starting the evolution of “a modernist political action program” (p. 44), only to have this contention contra­ dicted in the next six pages by the inclusion of Austrian liberals, such as Cajatan Felder, as coequals in the process. Similarly, Rotenberg confuses the enlightened conservatism of counts Eduard Taaffe and Leo Thun with the liberalism of...