Nearly two decades after Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg published The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, McFarland, Spitaler, and Zechner have produced a welcome volume that is equally comprehensive in its scope. Informed by the work of Kaes and company, The Red Vienna Sourcebook captures the vitality of its era much as the Weimar volume did. Both editorial teams selected documents judiciously to effectively represent key cultural, intellectual, technological, economic, social, and political currents. Whereas the Weimar collection, even with its great attention to Berlin, understandably presented documents from different sectors of a geographically diverse German republic (a considerable and well-executed challenge), the editors here have, as the title indicates, concentrated on Greater Vienna during the period associated with the Social Democratic Worker's Party's (SDAP) electoral success—between the first democratic elections in 1919 and the end of the democratic republic. The Sourcebook reveals the broad, transformative agenda the SDAP and its sympathizers advanced in a circumscribed space and is attentive to perspectives of those who experienced continuity and change in Vienna—including those who bitterly opposed the social democratic project.
The volume comprises over 280 primary sources organized thematically in twelve sections and thirty-six chapters. The editors assembled a transatlantic team of historians, literature scholars, philosophers, and cultural studies experts who contribute the short scholarly essays that precede every chapter, as well as to the introductory paragraphs before each individual document that inform the reader about the selection's author (where possible—some are anonymous) and establishes context. Other features of the volume are a rich bibliography of the scholarly literature devoted to the Sourcebook's topics, a detailed chronology, and useful indices for subjects and persons. The subject index is particularly valuable, given that overlapping themes surface in different chapters. No organizational schema is flawless, and the bold scope of the Sourcebook lends itself to addressing those themes under different categories without creating excessive redundancy.
The Sourcebook establishes the political climate in Vienna at the end of the Great War. The initial sections on the constitutional foundation of the democratic republic and its finance and taxation policies reveal the levers the Viennese SDAP used to advance its goals. While the SDAP's constituency—and those the party sought to win over—suffered greatly from hardships associated with the war and the consequences of the peace settlement, the editors rightly recognize the impact of the city's massive growth in the later part of the long nineteenth century. They underline its role in creating challenges for wages, labor conditions, housing, access to adequate foodstuffs, and other daily strains that were only exacerbated by war and its aftermath. Documents authored by city councilors such as Dannenberg and Breitner make clear both the social democratic emphasis on progressive taxation as a matter of fairness, and as a means to fund transformative projects to advance a just, new society for the benefit of the masses (the venture to cultivate “neue Menschen”)—but, simultaneously, it is shown that SDAP municipal officials’ noted the perils of deficit spending. That the social democratic project could only be undertaken with respect for democratic political principles is revisited in other selections throughout the volume.
Those interested in social history will be rewarded with chapters dedicated to the SDAP's agenda regarding housing, urban planning, healthcare and social hygiene, education, and meaningful free time activities (sports, engagement with nature, continuing education, and everyday entertainment) that both created possibilities and posed challenges. The editors shrewdly include observations on people at the margins of society who did not enjoy the benefits of transformative policy to any significant degree—or at all. Marie Jahoda's investigations into the unemployed in Marienthal and the plight of people living in poorhouses, and Käthe Leichter's examinations of marginalized workers, are important contributions in this respect.
There are other features of the Sourcebook that warrant praise. For example, the editors offer a meaningful focus on ethnicity and identity with respect to Vienna's minorities—Jews, Czechs, Sinti, and Roma—including voices from these communities and perspectives of both those who defended these groups and those who saw them as threats to social order. Consequently, readers gain an appreciation for the capital as one of Europe's most diverse cities. Vienna is featured in international perspective via chapters dealing with changing work and leisure patterns, for ill or for good (in relation to Taylorism, mechanization, Americanization), consumption (products, modes of mass entertainment), cultural exchange (interior design, fine arts, film, literature—the “Second Viennese Modernism”), and in a key chapter that details perspectives on Vienna authored by foreign observers (“Global Resonances”).
Between chapter 6's selections on Austromarxism and parts XI and XII (treating indigenous fascist and Nazi reactions in the former case, and democratic political culture and political violence in the latter), the fraught relationship between law-abiding political contest and conflict is captured in a well-curated series of documents. Nonetheless, it is curious that a selection from Julius Deutsch's Antifaschismus! Proletarische Wehrhaftigkeit im Kampf gegen des Faschismus (1926) does not appear here, nor does coverage of the Justizpalast demonstration. There is no primary source that outlines the organization and purpose of the Schutzbund, although the Sourcebook refers to the SDAP's paramilitary organization in different editorial comments. Arguably a Wahlrede from either Bürgermeister Reumann or Seitz would also have been welcome under “Communication and Propaganda.”
Every critical reader might offer alternatives or identify omissions in any particular chapter, and such criticism does not detract from the consistent quality of the volume. The Sourcebook deserves recognition as a fine scholarly achievement, and as an outstanding resource for students and scholars alike. The primary editors and contributors deserve our thanks and plaudits.
