The Legacy of Red Vienna

The Vienna that Richard Cockett explores is not a sensuous city or a grand city of art. It is, as the subtitle of his book makes clear, a cerebral city, a “city of ideas.” I’m wary of subtitles in which the subject “created the modern world,” and in this case I’m sure other cities could make the same claim, but Cockett is engagingly persuasive, pulling a number of threads from the tangled history of early-twentieth-century Vienna and showing how they are woven into Western culture and politics. The array of dazzling intellectuals can at times feel almost overwhelming. But “cerebral” does not mean austere. Ideas are not detached from the people who held them, and the book is full of striking personalities, love affairs and quarrels, suffering and triumphs.

Cockett locates the source of the city’s influence in the distinctive “critical rationalism” and the pluralist, collaborative ethos of its thinkers and planners. The crucible is the socialist Vienna of 1919–1934, but the combustible elements were inherited, perhaps surprisingly, from the early years of the century, the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This was Vienna’s golden age, “the glittering metropolis of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Gustav Mahler, Adolf Loos, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil and Gustav Klimt.” Emperor Franz Joseph, with his muttonchop whiskers, penchant for cold water dousings, and love of hunting, seems remote from the modern world. Yet during his long rule, absolutism was succeeded by constitutional monarchy, while the December Constitution of 1867 guaranteed equality and freedom of expression and worship for all the empire’s subjects. Vienna’s population was swollen by waves of migrants from other parts of the empire leaving their villages and towns to seek a better life. With this influx, it became a vibrantly multiethnic capital, its openness demonstrated by the demolition of the massive medieval city walls to create the encircling boulevard known as the Ringstrasse. Within it, major institutions—the parliament, the university, the city hall—were rebuilt in a mix of historical styles: classical Greek, neo-Renaissance, and neo-Gothic. Cockett calls this “bourgeois triumphalism in stone and mortar.”

For those bourgeois families, education was a secular, democratic version of the German tradition of Bildung—“intellectual self-improvement.” At the University of Vienna, students could cross boundaries between disciplines, which produced extraordinary polymaths and encouraged the integration of diverse fields:

There were no arbitrary divisions between “science” and “humanities”—all was “philosophy” in its purest sense, the study of fundamental questions. A student was encouraged to shape his or her own epistemology, and thus fortified, the university’s alumni would continue to do so for the rest of their lives.

University education was supplemented by independent seminars and salons. Discourse in these formal as well as informal centers was colored by the phenomenalism of the physicist Ernst Mach, appointed chair of philosophy in 1895, whose attacks on German idealism were accompanied by the insistence that all inquiry—scientific, artistic, social, erotic, psychoanalytic—must be evidence-based, grounded in experience. Inclusivity and empiricism underpinned Viennese modernism in literature, music, and art, as well as academic life.

Many of the leading figures were assimilated Jews, and as Cockett chronicles in his section on “Black Vienna,” from the 1890s onward they faced a dark tide of antidemocratic nationalism and antisemitism. (“Black was generally the color of fascism,” he notes.) The anger and despair of workers in the poverty-stricken outer suburbs fed the rise of the powerful Pan-German movement based on resentment that Austria had been “left out” of Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s unification of German states in 1871 and a growing insistence on the “purity” of the German race. Social democracy was “Jewish politics,” capitalism a Jewish conspiracy; demagogues heralded an Austria “cleaned” of Jews. These were the views that Hitler imbibed when he lived in Vienna from 1907 to 1913. The arrival of thousands of Jewish refugees from the east during World War I, escaping Russian pogroms in 1915 and then fleeing war-torn regions, inflamed hostility. Chillingly, the nationalist right also attracted academics and intellectuals like the group of aggressively antisemitic professors known as “the Bear’s Den.” It became increasingly impossible for Jews, leftists, and women to teach or study.

This poisonous undercurrent flowed on after the war. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled. Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary all declared their independence, leaving, in Stefan Zweig’s words, “a mutilated torso bleeding from its arteries.” Spiraling inflation led to near starvation and reliance on foreign aid. When socialist politicians triumphed in Vienna’s municipal elections in May 1919, after a new suffrage law gave the vote to everyone over twenty, including women, they had a mandate to plan society, following the scientific approach of pre-war liberals. The city became an ideological island within Austria, which was governed, beginning in 1920, by a coalition dominated by the conservative, Catholic, antisemitic Christian Social Party.

“Red Vienna,” writes Cockett, was “the most ambitious democratic political project in the world of its time.” Its many programs were largely inspired by Otto Neurath, the forceful polymath who set up, with others, the Vienna School Authority in 1922. This interlocking network of research institutes and discussion groups was crucial in the dissemination of ideas. The grandiose aim was to transform the lives of all classes of citizens at every level, private and public, creating what the lawyer, politician, and social philosopher Max Adler called die neuen Menschen—“new humans.” To do this, Cockett writes,

Red Vienna set out to utilize all the latest techniques and insights from social science, biology, economics, psychology, psychoanalysis and mathematics, forging an exceptionally close relationship between theory and practice.

Public health was a prime concern, with reform efforts led by the physician and professor of medicine Julius Tandler, who saw “health” as including psychological, sexual, and nutritional as well as physical well-being. Tandler oversaw the creation of child-guidance clinics, welfare centers, and kindergartens, as well as the growth of organized sports, leading to the impressive International Workers’ Olympiads held between 1925 and 1931. Linked to health was the need for good housing. Here the energetic and optimistic Neurath, “the presiding genius of Red Vienna,” worked with leading architects on replacing the shantytowns of the suburbs with permanent housing, and then on constructing “huge, dense housing estates, the Gemeindebauten (translated as ‘community buildings’).”

The most impressive of these, the Karl-Marx-Hof, stretched over two thirds of a mile and housed five thousand people, with apartments, laundries, clinics, schools, playgrounds, and open space. It inspired projects elsewhere, including the Quarry Hill Flats in Leeds. There were, inevitably, problems. Lack of money meant that things weren’t finished, didn’t work, or couldn’t be maintained. And managing projects on this scale led to countless rules and prohibitions. Instead of enhancing individual life, which had been the aim, micromanagement threatened to stifle it, Cockett writes: “An organic culture had been supplanted by a planned society, with often disastrous consequences, precipitating sometimes violent conflict between workers and welfare officials bent on enforcing the rules.”

Methodological austerity—what the mathematician Kurt Gödel saw as a reliance on “truly exact thinking and truly exact methods”—penetrated many apparently unrelated aspects of life. The same rigor, it can be argued, is to be found in Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone sequence in music and Neurath’s planning, as well as in the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, whose slim manifesto of 1929 bore the title The Scientific World Conception, or even Nazism. The Vienna Circle, attracting the interest of the British philosopher A.J. Ayer and the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, laid the ground for “analytic philosophy,” one of the targets attacked by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man (1964) as creating a “totalitarian universe of technological rationality.”

The systematic application of research, summed up by the management theorist Peter Drucker as “the knowledge economy,” characterized many disparate but overlapping fields. The ideas of the Vienna Psychological Institute, for example, set up in 1922, fed into the work of the mathematician Paul Lazarsfeld’s Research Center for Economic Psychology, which in 1933 published a harrowing report on the consequences of long-term unemployment in the textile town of Marienthal, blighted by the Great Depression. In a very different field, the radical vision of second-generation psychoanalysts lay behind the “Sex-Pol” movement and Wilhelm Reich’s claim in The Function of the Orgasm (1927) that “sexual expressiveness,” as Crockett puts it, “would vanquish both neurosis and patriarchal capitalism.” This strand was epitomized by Reich’s “Orgone Energy Accumulator,” a metal booth that used different layers of organic material to trap what Reich saw as the creative life energy of the universe, or “orgone energy.” When someone sat inside it, they would absorb this force, feeling released and revitalized—an idea that would later be feted in 1960s America as a mode of antibourgeois rebellion.

One particularly fruitful exchange was between philosophy and mathematics. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, announced in 1930, when he was still a young Ph.D. student in Vienna, offered a breakthrough, thinks Cockett, “that ranks with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in terms of its transformational effect on mathematics, physics and science more generally.” In the circle known as the Mathematical Colloquium, Gödel also worked on the idea that logical statements could be expressed as numbers and then a “primitive algorithm” could be employed to convert them back to symbols—the basis of computerized coding and decoding. Meanwhile another colloquium member, Abraham Wald, was exploring probability statistics. With Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann, Wald developed the entirely new field of game theory, later so influential on cold war strategy. (Morgenstern and von Neumann published their Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944, after they moved to Princeton.)

The mathematicians worked closely with the economists of the Austrian School, as it became known, which grew out of heated arguments at wide-ranging meetings led by the formidable Ludwig von Mises at the Chamber of Commerce. A keen devotee was the young Friedrich Hayek, whom Mises established at Vienna’s Institute for Business Cycle Research, where global statistical data were analyzed for economic forecasting, a hotly disputed new discipline. The Austrian School’s critique of socialist economies as unworkable and its emerging concept of the free market as essential for prosperity echoed through the years, for good or ill. From early on, however, this approach was challenged by Karl Polanyi, who saw trust in the market and price mechanisms as worryingly detached from the real needs of people and the environment.

There are difficulties in organizing a book of this scope. With such heterodox disciplines, how can one fit everything in? Red Vienna was notable for the alliance between socialists and feminists, for example, yet Cockett places women in a separate chapter rather than integrating them, as Viennese “inclusivity” would seem to demand. His biographical sketches do, however, illustrate the extraordinary range of Viennese concerns, stretching from Margarete Lihotzky’s radical redesign of the kitchen (certainly a feature of the modern world) to Herta Herzog’s work as a founder of modern advertising and Lise Meitner’s research with Otto Hahn on nuclear fission. The startling juxtapositions continue, from Hedy Lamarr’s extraordinary dual career in films and as the inventor of “spread spectrum” technology—a forerunner of Bluetooth that was used in military communications—to Anna Freud’s later drive for children’s rights.

In 1933 Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss abolished the national parliament and declared martial law; freedom of the press and rights of assembly were also quashed. Early the following year there were violent armed clashes on the streets, and the Socialist Democratic Workers’ Party that effectively ran the city was banned. Red Vienna collapsed.

From that point on, Jews were excluded from many areas of intellectual life, and the Vienna Circle, the theoretical heart of the scientific approach, was effectively dismantled. Within a day of the Anschluss in 1938, Germany’s race laws were applied. Research institutes were brutally closed down, including the Vivarium, where Paul Kammerer had led work on “positive eugenics” in the belief that

rather than reproducing as many as possible of one (Nordic) type at the expense of everyone else, by changing the environment in which all young children were raised the genetic stock could be improved more evenly.

The savagery of the city’s mobs on Kristallnacht in 1938 was worse than anywhere in Greater Germany. Around 100,000 Jews fled Vienna in the first three months after the Anschluss, driven out by Adolf Eichmann, head of the city’s Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration, who stripped them of their wealth and property as they left. Nearly four thousand Jews committed suicide in the first year, and soon 64,000 died after deportation to the east.

Cockett tends to overemphasize the positive aspects of Viennese approaches in the interwar years and underemphasize their contribution to fascism. Yet he does show how integrated thinking, total planning, and scientific rigor could be turned to evil ends: Odilo Globocnik, who Crockett says may have been “the officer who first suggested the idea of industrial-scale mass-murder,” gathered a “genocide think-tank” of experts, “very recognizably a Viennese project, stirring a variety of different disciplines together to produce a terrifying new praxis.” The innovative researcher Hans Asperger worked experiments with children at the deadly Am Spiegelgrund clinic. Asperger’s 1944 paper on autism, identifying children who found social interaction difficult and thus “did not fit into the greater German Volk,” sprang from this work.

The latter part of the book takes us overseas. The diaspora accelerated by the Anschluss had begun long before, especially to the United States (which the Viennese exiles found mind-numbingly conservative) and to Britain (which seemed to them laughably cozy). Architects and designers arriving in the US in the 1920s included not only the creators of gleaming West Coast modernism but Joseph Urban, the creator of lavish Jugendstil film sets for William Randolph Hearst and the interiors at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach for the heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, which remains, as Cockett says, “a glorified film set” suited to Trumpian ostentation. California was a magnet for artists, composers, and filmmakers. Max Steiner and Erich Korngold composed for Hollywood, while Schoenberg taught at UCLA, played tennis with Charlie Chaplin, learned slang, and followed college football. In cinema—a more familiar story—Fritz Lang, Fred Zinnemann, and Billy Wilder (all from Berlin studios) and Otto Preminger launched their conscious assault on hidebound values and taboos.

Vienna follows multiple tracks, from eugenics and physics to Arnold Deutsch’s application of Reichian insights to the recruitment of spies, including Kim Philby and the rest of the Cambridge Five. The overall balance, however, is unavoidably affected by Cockett’s own interests. He writes knowledgeably on film but relatively briefly on music, art, and literature: sketches of Walter and Eva Neurath founding the publishing house Thames and Hudson (named after the rivers of the cities of refuge) in 1949 and of Ernst Gombrich “approaching images as mental constructs” left me impatient to know more. But unsurprisingly, since Cockett is a senior editor at The Economist and was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton while writing the book, the main focus is on economic life.

Four books, he claims, “have defined the main contours of Western political discourse over the past seven or so decades”: Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), with its ringing endorsement of the entrepreneur; Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (both 1944); and Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). All these books continued debates the authors had engaged in for years. Hayek’s thinking was born not from but in opposition to Red Vienna’s scientific rationalism. As a professor at the London School of Economics from 1931 to 1950, he opened hostilities with a critical review of John Maynard Keynes’s A Treatise on Money, arguing that the overvaluing of reason—the idea that societies can be designed from scratch, and that one can argue and predict from history—posed a dangerous threat. From a different standpoint, Popper also rejected historicism and the validity of “scientific” planning. The crucial link between them, Cockett suggests, lies in the application of Popper’s “falsification principle”: the idea that

in the end, only free societies could test policies in government until they were proved wrong—Liz Truss’s disastrous six-week spell in Downing Street in 2022 being an excellent case in point.

He writes vividly about the friendship between the “short, fiery and forceful” Popper and the urbane, diplomatic Hayek, while noting that Popper, who believed social engineering could happen only piecemeal, never joined the call for full, uncompromising free market economics.

The engrossing narrative of controversies, quarrels, and influence moves from the founding of Hayek’s think tank, the Mont Pelerin Society, to the links with Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, and on to the skirmishes with the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School—particularly Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. Familiar figures reappear in new settings, and earlier ideas are revived, including Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory (GST), derived from the interdisciplinary mood of liberal Vienna, which held that all complex systems shared common principles that could be modeled mathematically. This was picked up not only by inventors, architects, and futurists like Buckminster Fuller but also by the US military, anxious to judge its success in Vietnam. As Cockett points out, GST and the entire notion of integrated strategic thinking was brilliantly skewered by Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove (1964).

A second strand of the book pursues the impact of psychoanalysis on American marketing, advertising, and sales, beginning with Freud’s “dapper, convivial and irrepressible” nephew Edward Bernays, who showed firms how to invest products with “emotional meaning and psychological significance.” The darker ramifications of this would later involve false “fronts” for companies to recommend their own products and disastrous political involvements. Bernays’s disinformation campaign for the United Fruit Company, warning that Guatemala was tending toward communism, resulted in Eisenhower’s engineering of the coup that plunged the country into its long civil war. Viennese methods of assessing and quantifying motivation were also powerful tools in market research, while Ernest Dichter’s idea of consumers as seething with unrecognized desires led to the exploration of brands’ emotional appeal and the blatant recognition that “sex sells.” These ideas then penetrated the marketplace. Retail stores should be revamped to create demand, declared the designer Friedrich Kiesler: “You must stimulate desire.” A further step, propelled by Victor Gruen, another designer who had flourished in Red Vienna, was the birth of the shopping mall, which he explained as an attempt to alleviate the alienation of America’s suburban sprawl with centers that reflected the streets and cafés of his native city, something “organic, more democratic and intimate.”

The backlash—the attack on consumerism in the “Great Refusal” and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s—drew on a contrasting Viennese heritage in which Reich once again became a force to be reckoned with. God, wrote Norman Mailer in 1957, is “energy, life, sex, force…the Reichian’s orgone.” In time, however, companies offering alternative lifestyles, such as Richard Branson’s Virgin, began to align with conventional capitalism, creating a new mainstream. Gradually, too, “the emancipatory political economy of the New Left dovetailed neatly with an upcoming generation of libertarians, later to be grouped as the New Right.”

The star of the Austrian School rose again: Hayek shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974, and Milton Friedman was awarded it two years later. A network grew, from the British Institute of Economic Affairs, founded in 1955, to the later Manhattan Institute and the Atlas Network, which linked five hundred think tanks in one hundred countries. In the Reagan and Thatcher era no one could miss their impact on policy. Thatcher apparently used to bang Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty on her desk “in front of recalcitrant colleagues. ‘This is what we believe in now!’ she would bark.”

Viennese neoliberalism held sway until it was fatally weakened by the crash of 2008, leading to a new “round of economic nationalism, led by a fresh wave of populists such as Donald Trump in the US, Boris Johnson in Britain, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Viktor Orbán in Hungary.” In opposition, many on the left turned back to Polanyi, who had forecast the failure of self-regulating markets and set out to search for a “third way” between collectivism and free market ideology. His analysis of the commodification of nature—such as the use of fossil fuels—has come to seem ever more relevant in a time of environmental crisis. The pendulum swings once again.

Cockett’s research is meticulous, and he is generous in acknowledging the work of many other scholars. He also has a knack for making difficult ideas comprehensible without reducing them to false, diagrammatic simplicity, which is vital to a book of this range and complexity. The lasting impression gained from his lively, thought-provoking survey is of a Viennese cast of mind as much as of individual achievements, “a willingness to take on and use the full diversity of knowledge allied to a relentless pursuit of truth through methodological rigor.” Beyond this—despite the persistent whiff of intellectuals telling the rest of the world what is good for us—one can detect a brave refusal of totalitarian thinking, a willingness to mix, to listen, to argue, and to collaborate. If we can’t endorse all the conclusions that Viennese thinkers came to or applaud all the policies they provoked, this denial of artificial pigeonholes and categories is something to inspire and admire.