Political and Institutional Factors

THE POLITICAL UPHEAVALS OF 1918–19 — the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the declaration of the First Austrian Republic and the associated threat of Bolshevik Revolution — were accompanied not only by economic crisis and grave material privations but also by widespread sociocultural and psychological disturbance. Austrian identity became problematic for many: deprived of the cohesion provided by the dynastic factor, the rump Republic had little to unite its largely conservative and rural Alpine provinces with an over-large, now geographically peripheral capital city that had long been famed for its cosmopolitanism and for the modernist culture of its predominantly Jewish intellectual elite. As elsewhere in Europe, the aftermath of war saw a destabilization of traditional authority structures and of relations between the sexes, reflected in a relaxation of public morality and of censorship regulations. In the theater, where censorship was immediately reduced and then abolished altogether in 1926, this destabilization allowed many taboos to be broken but also called forth hostile reactions that were all too frequently underpinned by anti-Semitic prejudice. Furthermore, as the rival political camps grew ever more implacable in their opposition to each other, dramatists found it increasingly difficult to stand aloof from the competing ideologies.

The politics of the newly democratic republic had major institutional repercussions for the Austrian, and especially Viennese, theater. Most directly affected were the former court theaters (the Burgtheater and Opera House), which came under state control and as such became the subject of ongoing economic and ideological wrangling between the state government, which was dominated from 1920 on by the Christian Social Party, and, from 1919 until 1934, a Social Democratic municipal authority. While the perceived representative function of the Burgtheater as Austria's national stage meant that its future, which remained uncertain until 1922, was the subject of intense public debate, it became commonplace for private theaters in the capital to change management with disturbing frequency, experience periods of closure (sometimes permanent) due to bankruptcy or be converted into cinemas. This tendency was particularly marked during the early postwar years, which saw not only a shortage of material resources, rampant inflation, and the resultant impoverishment of the middle classes but also, and illogically, an expansion of the entertainment sector that was untenable given a decrease in the overall population of Vienna and ever greater competition from film, radio, and spectator sports.