Unter der Maxime „Wien im Aufbau“ wurden im Ständestaat ab Mitte der 1930er Jahre nicht nur gezielt Altbauten abgerissen, sondern auch die Entfernung historischer Putzfassaden und Gliederungselemente ...gefördert. Neben der Verbesserung der Wohnverhältnisse und der Verkehrsbedingungen versprach man sich davon auch eine „Verschönerung“ des Stadtbildes. Die erste Untersuchung dieser Periode geht der Hypothese eines spezifischen, politisch motivierten, rigorosen Umgangs mit der Substanz und Struktur der Altstadt Wiens in diesen Jahren nach. Sie wertet verschiedene Archivquellen wie Pläne, Fotos und Schriften aus und leistet einen manuellen Abgleich diverser Stadtkarten. Das Buch zeigt den Zusammenhang von Stadtplanung und Politik auf und liefert über Wien hinaus neue Erkenntnisse zum Umgang mit historischer Bausubstanz.
Interwar Vienna was considered a bastion of radical socialist thought, and its reputation as "Red Vienna" has loomed large in both the popular imagination and the historiography of Central Europe. ...However, as Janek Wasserman shows in this book, a "Black Vienna" existed as well; its members voiced critiques of the postwar democratic order, Jewish inclusion, and Enlightenment values, providing a theoretical foundation for Austrian and Central European fascist movements. Looking at the complex interplay between intellectuals, the public, and the state, he argues that seemingly apolitical Viennese intellectuals, especially conservative ones, dramatically affected the course of Austrian history. While Red Viennese intellectuals mounted an impressive challenge in cultural and intellectual forums throughout the city, radical conservatism carried the day. Black Viennese intellectuals hastened the destruction of the First Republic, facilitating the establishment of the Austrofascist state and paving the way forAnschlusswith Nazi Germany.
Closely observing the works and actions of Viennese reformers, journalists, philosophers, and scientists, Wasserman traces intellectual, social, and political developments in the Austrian First Republic while highlighting intellectuals' participation in the growing worldwide conflict between socialism, conservatism, and fascism. Vienna was a microcosm of larger developments in Europe-the rise of the radical right and the struggle between competing ideological visions. By focusing on the evolution of Austrian conservatism, Wasserman complicates post-World War II narratives about Austrian anti-fascism and Austrian victimhood.
Brussels 1900 Vienna examines the complex cultural networks between Austria and Belgium (1880-1930), and situates these interrelations within a wider European context. The collection covers various ...fields, including literature, translation, music, theatre, visual arts, café culture, and architecture.
In the 1990s, Vienna's Jews and queers abandoned their clandestine existence and emerged into the city's public sphere in unprecedented numbers.Symptoms of Modernitytraces this development in the ...context of Central European history. Jews and homosexuals are signposts of an exclusionary process of nation-building. Cast in their modern roles in the late nineteenth century, they functioned as Others, allowing a national community to imagine itself as a site of ethnic and sexual purity. In Matti Bunzl's incisive historical and cultural analysis, the Holocaust appears as the catastrophic culmination of this violent project, an attempt to eradicate modernity's abject by-products from the body politic. AsSymptoms of Modernityshows, though World War II brought an end to the genocidal persecution, the nation's exclusionary logic persisted, accounting for the ongoing marginalization of Jews and homosexuals. Not until the 1970s did individual Jews and queers begin to challenge the hegemonic subordination-a resistance that, by the 1990s, was joined by the state's attempts to ensure and affirm the continued presence of Jews and queers.Symptoms of Modernitygives an account of this radical cultural reversal, linking it to geopolitical transformations and to the supersession of the European nation-state by a postmodern polity.
Matthew Rampley’s The Vienna School of Art History is the first book in over seventy-five years to study in depth and in context the practices of art history from 1847, the year the first teaching ...position in the discipline was created, to 1918, the collapse of Austria-Hungary. It traces the emergence of art history as a discipline, the establishment of norms of scholarly enquiry, and the involvement of art historians in wider debates about the cultural and political identity of the monarchy. While Rampley also examines the formation of art history elsewhere in Austria-Hungary, the so-called Vienna School plays the central role in the study. Located in the Habsburg imperial capital, Vienna art historians frequently became entangled in debates that were of importance to art historians elsewhere in the Empire, and the book pays particular attention to these areas of overlapping interest. The Vienna School was well known for its methodological innovations and this book analyzes its contributions in this area. Rampley focuses most fully, however, on the larger political and ideological context of the practice of art history, in particular the way in which art historical debates served as proxies for wider arguments over the political, social, and cultural life of the Habsburg Empire.
Vienna's Dreams of Europe puts forward a convincing counter-narrative to the prevailing story of Austria's place in Europe since the Enlightenment. For a millennium, Austrian writers have used images ...of Europe and its hegemonic culture as their political and cultural reference points. Yet in discussions of Europe's nation-states, Austria appears only as an afterthought, no matter that its precursor states-the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and Austria Hungary-represented a globalized European cultural space outside the dominant paradigm of nationalist colonialism. Austrian writers today confront reunited Europe in full acknowledgment of Austro-Hungary's multicultural heritage, which mixes various nationalities, ethnicities, and cultural forms, including ancestors from the Balkans and beyond. Challenging standard accounts of 18th- through 20th-century European imperial identity construction, Vienna's Dreams of Europe introduces a group of Austrian public intellectuals and authors who have since the 18th century construed their own public as European. Working in different terms than today's theorist-critics of the hegemonic West, Katherine Arens posits a political identity resisting two hundred years of European nationalism.
Despite its popular association today with magic, astrology was once a complex and sophisticated practice, grounded in technical training provided by a university education.The Crown and the ...Cosmosexamines the complex ways that political practice and astrological discourse interacted at the Habsburg court, a key center of political and cultural power in early modern Europe. Like other monarchs, Maximilian I used astrology to help guide political actions, turning to astrologers and their predictions to find the most propitious times to sign treaties or arrange marriage contracts. Perhaps more significantly, the emperor employed astrology as a political tool to gain support for his reforms and to reinforce his own legitimacy as well as that of the Habsburg dynasty. Darin Hayton analyzes the various rhetorical tools astrologers used to argue for the nobility, antiquity, and utility of their discipline, and how they strove to justify their "science" on the grounds that through its rigorous interpretation of the natural world, astrology could offer more reliable predictions. This book draws on extensive printed and manuscript sources from archives across northern and central Europe, including Poland, Germany, France, and England.
Early in the twentieth century, arguments about "nature" and "nurture" pitted a rigid genetic determinism against the idea that genes were flexible and open to environmental change. This book tells ...the story of three Viennese biologists-Paul Kammerer, Julius Tandler, and Eugen Steinach-who sought to show how the environment could shape heredity through the impact of hormones. It also explores the dynamic of failure through both scientific and social lenses. During World War I, the three men were well respected scientists; by 1934, one was dead by his own hand, another was in exile, and the third was subject to ridicule.Paul Kammerer had spent years gathering zoological evidence on whether environmental change could alter heredity, using his research as the scientific foundation for a new kind of eugenics-one that challenged the racism growing in mainstream eugenics. By 1918, he drew on the pioneering research of two colleagues who studied how secretions shaped sexual attributes to argue that hormones could alter genes. After 1920, Julius Tandler employed a similar concept to restore the health and well-being of Vienna's war-weary citizens. Both men rejected the rigidly acting genes of the new genetics and instead crafted a biology of flexible heredity to justify eugenic reforms that respected human rights. But the interplay of science and personality with the social and political rise of fascism and with antisemitism undermined their ideas, leading to their spectacular failure.
Brahms's self-identity and public identity as a Liberal are the basis for the two historical perspectives in this book. One reconstructs his place in Vienna. The other draws on criticism conditioned ...by Western Marxism, on ideas developed in response to 19th-century Liberalism. Brahms appears not to have recognized a societal problem of late Liberalism: exaggerated emphasis on the individual. He did, however, recognize a related musical problem delineated by Adorno — individualized themes at the expense of the formal whole — and made it central to his lifework. Commentary on Brahms's chamber music draws on other ideas articulated by Adorno and Lukács such as “second nature”, while discussion of ideology of the symphony applies Habermas's explanation of the “public sphere”, in both instances to move between social and musical problems associated with late Liberalism. Emphasis is placed on Brahms's diverse sources of renewal and on an under-explored facet of his music: his mastery of ways and degrees of establishing a key in this late period of tonality. With Brahms's works and his circumstances as exemplars, an addendum to late-style dialectics is proposed: late works are at once an expression of their time and alienated from the contemporary context. For better and worse, Brahms remained an orthodox Liberal. Thus, despite his allegiance to German nationalism he did not succumb to the tribalism that became critical around 1890.
Mit den Neuerungsbestrebungen im Bühnentanz des 18. Jahrhunderts werden primär die Namen Jean Georges Noverre und Gasparo Angiolini verbunden. Dabei hat der aus einer Theaterdynastie stammende Wiener ...Ballettmeister Franz Anton Hilverding (1710–1768) schon um die Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts erste choreographische Gestaltungsversuche jenseits der barocken Formschemata gewagt. Möglich wurde das durch sein einzigartiges Arbeitsumfeld am Theater nächst der Burg bzw. am Kärntnertortheater, die vom beinahe allmächtigen Staatskanzler Wenzel Anton Kaunitz-Rietberg unterstützt und vom Wiener Hof finanziert wurden. Vor dem Hintergrund zeitgenössischer Diskurse zur Tanz- und Theatertheorie und der österreichischen Innen- und Außenpolitik jener Jahre beleuchtet Karin Fenböck erstmals Hilverdings innovative und praxisnahe Auseinandersetzung mit den Aufführungskonventionen des Bühnentanzes.
Karin Fenböck, Dr. phil., hat Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft an der Universität Wien studiert und wurde an der Abteilung für Musik- und Tanzwissenschaft der Universität Salzburg promoviert. Seit Oktober 2019 ist sie wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der FH Technikum Wien.
