Red Vienna
[1] This involved implementing policies to improve public education, healthcare, and sanitation, while attempting to create the architectural foundation for a new socialist lifestyle.
[1] The collapse of the First Austrian Republic in 1934 after the suspension of the Nationalrat by Bundeskanzler Engelbert Dollfuß a year earlier, and the subsequent banning of the SDAP in Austria, brought an end to the period of the first socialist project in Vienna.
During the war, the German current within the Social Democrats expressed an interest in the idea of Mitteleuropa proposed by the pan-Germanic nationalist movement within Austria, hoping that a union (Anschluß) with the rest of Germany could stymie some of the major economic problems the new republic was beginning to face.
[2] To the disheartenment of the Social Democrats and pan-Germanic nationalists alike, the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye expressly forbade any future union with the newly founded Weimar Republic, leaving Austria with little territory and limited access to the Hungarian breadbasket that had fed Vienna for decades.
Refugees from Austrian Galicia, including roughly 25,000 Jews seeking to avoid the political and antisemitic violence of the Russian Civil War that had spread to the area, had settled in the capital city.
New borders between Austria and the nearby regions rendered food supply difficult by cutting off the city from lands that had traditionally fed it for centuries.
[5] Recalling the period, Polanyi wrote in 1944: "Vienna achieved one of the most spectacular cultural triumphs of Western history … an unexampled moral and intellectual rise in the condition of a highly developed industrial working class which, protected by the Vienna system, withstood the degrading effects of grave economic dislocation and achieved a level never reached before by the masses of the people in any industrial society.
[2] Their goal was to make Vienna a shining example of social democratic politics, and their ensuing reforms attracted great attention from the whole of Europe.
Conservatives in Austria were heavily opposed, but were at that time unable to counter the success of the Social Democrats in Vienna elections.
"[7] Prior to the founding of the First Republic, the Austromarxist current within the SDAP had largely set aside the problem of public housing, viewing it as solvable only with the victory of socialism.
[1] The number of Viennese citizens without homes living in shelters tripled to 80,000 between 1924 and 1934, but the city's building program housed as many as 200,000 people, a tenth of the population.
[2] These new programs were primarily managed by the newly appointed Julius Tandler, a University of Vienna professor and doctor, and close associate of numerous figures within the SDAP.
[2] In 1921, the SDAP majority Gemeinderat of Vienna approved the construction of the Feuerhalle Simmering at the behest of several advocacy groups, most notably the "Workers' Cremation Association" and the magazine Die Flamme (en: “The Flame”).
The CSP-led national government under Bundeskanzler Ignaz Seipel, pressured by the Catholic Church, ordered the then-Mayor of Vienna Karl Seitz to cease operations at the facility.
[2] Seipel, who earned a reputation for virulent anti-Semitism prior to his election in 1923, held steadfast to the belief that the Jewish population of Vienna, as well as the Jewish members in the ranks of the SDAP (not least among them Julius Tandler, then the health councillor and head of the ‘Welfare Department’ for the city of Vienna that had backed the crematorium's opening), were intending to subvert the Catholic mores that had governed Austrian life for centuries prior.
[2] After the CSP brought suit against the Bundesland of Vienna over the continued operation of the crematorium, Seitz was forced to defend his insubordination against the federal administration in the Constitutional Court.
As time progressed, the reliance on financing from an uncooperative, if not actively hostile, federal government left the Gemeinderat vulnerable to pressure from the CSP to roll back some of the municipal programs.
[2][1] Due to over-reliance on funding from the Nationalrat, these services had to be cut when, in the early thirties, the federal government started to financially starve Vienna.
