Urban Myths

ANYONE WHO WALKS ALONG Vienna's Ringstrasse today cannot help but admire the grandiose architecture of the neo-Gothic Rathaus, the neoclassical Parliament, and the neo-Renaissance Opera House and immediately understand the city's reputation as a locus of former imperial glory. However, both the historicist buildings of the Ringstrasse and the memories of the empire that they were built to evoke belie another aspect of the city's history better represented by the four hundred equally imposing yet less centrally located blocks of council housing — the Wiener Gemeindebauten — found in districts beyond the Ring. The Karl-Marx-Hof and similar residential projects initiated by the city's Social Democrat administration during the years 1919–34 aimed to provide new, comprehensive living environments for the city's working class. Today they continue to stand as reminders of the fact that, during the years between the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Hitler's Anschluss, Vienna was the site of lasting cultural changes in areas such as housing, education, and the arts — all designed to rethink, reshape, and revitalize the urban population and to create a city offering the promise of a better life for as many of its inhabitants as possible.

Yet many of those who concern themselves with Vienna continue to overlook these and other changes during the interwar period. Our view of the city is colored by a barrage of clichés that often conceal its complex history as an urban center: its legendary charm and Gemütlichkeit, the coffeehouses and cakes, the notorious Schmäh (ironic wit) and Schlamperei (laissez-faire) of its population, not to mention their fascination with the aesthetics of death (as in the Viennese phrase “a schene Leich,” an attractive corpse).