Abstract

In Vienna after WWI, the newly empowered Austro-Marxists took it upon themselves to bring about “new socialist men” by democratic means. The provision of much-needed housing was key to this undertaking. Within less than a decade, the Austro-Marxists did solve the housing question by building municipal housing, which has been shaping Vienna ever since. The Austro-Marxists’ specific approach to turning citizens into new men was, however, deeply indebted to bourgeois traditions and pedagogy: the imparting of knowledge ‘from above’. An alternative to the latter did exist in the form of the ‘Wild Settlers’, a housing movement that was also committed to the goal of socialism but opted for ‘revolutionary practice’ (Marx) instead of bourgeois pedagogy to achieve this goal.

Keywords: Red Vienna, municipal housing, Austro-Marxism, settlement movement, democratic socialism

[a] type of man who grows up in overcrowded apartments where everyone sleeps next to someone else, where everyone wishes to escape from others, where everyone is happy when they do not see anyone anymore, as they are so tightly locked up together; men who spend their leisure in inns, numbing themselves with beer and wine […], men whose potential and natural talents are poisoned and destroyed by alcohol; or do we want to educate a type of man who flourishes in sunlight and air, a type who perfects himself in tranquility, which is essential to intellectual maturing yet unavailable in overcrowded apartments; a type of man who flourishes whenever the objective condition for intellectual development and growth is provided, that is, a place that is no longer a mere bedding but a real dwelling? [my translation] (1976d, p. 608)