IN 1895, THE MUSEUM DER VOLKSKUNDE (Museum of Folklore) was established in Vienna, a year after the constitution of the Verein für Volkskunde (Association for Folklore), which sought to understand a particular form of popular culture — traditional folk culture — from the vantage point of historical anthropology. Programmatically, the first issue of the association's journal, Die österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde (The Austrian Journal of Folklore), included articles by Richard von Kralik titled “Zur österreichischen Sagenkunde” (The Study of Austrian Legend and Myth”) and Alois Riegl titled “Das Volksmäßige und die Gegenwart” (The Folkish and the Present). The whole undertaking was essentially an exercise in documenting the traditional folk culture of the Habsburg Monarchy, but it was being carried out in a period that was witnessing significant sociocultural change as industrialization brought about large-scale migration from the countryside, the location and object of these ethnographical studies, to the city. While academics devoted their attention to one form of popular culture, a different manifestation of that culture was gaining in importance. The twin processes of industrialization and urbanization brought in their wake a new form of popular culture, mass commercial culture, which developed as a result of new technological possibilities coupled with the people's experience of living in rapidly expanding cities. The First World War and the subsequent dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy served merely to intensify this dynamic; after 1918, particularly in Vienna, mass commercial culture appeared as the dominant form of popular culture. This development was, however, not without its critics and challengers.

Old and New Cultural Forms

The roots of mass commercial culture in Austria extend back into the nineteenth century and can be found in popular theater and variety theater, as well as in the “illusory world” of the Prater. The latter, in particular, often appears in Austrian literature of the first decades of the twentieth century, functioning as an alternative to the bourgeois world of high culture. After the First World War into the 1930s, the Prater remained a prime location of popular culture, home to a permanent amusement park, as well as a large number of circuses and variety theaters.