Outcast Vienna 1900: The Politics of Transgression

Abstract

On September 17, 1911 a hunger revolt broke out in Ottakring, a proletarian suburb in northwest Vienna. But hunger and deteriorating living conditions were not the only causes of broad public unrest. The revolt was, to a greater extent, a spontaneous political articulation of a new social formation at the periphery of the metropolis composed of “old” underclasses and recently arrived migrants. Both faced miserable conditions of work, consumption, and family life, and the migrants lost their dream of a better life in the city. Mentally still rooted in the rural environments, the “lifeworlds” from which they had come, they experienced a fragmented urban topography driven by a chaotic mixture of sharp-cut urban planning and rationalization, and brutish Manchester-style capitalism. Instead of finding a new “Heimat” in the city, the new immigrants suffered from pauperization and collective estrangement. Their location in the new industrial quarters of the city brought them into misery and—in the perception of the elite—transformed them into the dangerous, amorphous “Other” of urban society. Their material poverty and cultural stigmatization allowed only a minimum of freedom and self-realization within the emerging formation of mass culture. Symbolic discrimination and economic marginality configured a specific suburban lifestyle modeled along the trajectories of assimilation and deviance, lethargy and revolt, power, impotence and emerging mass politics.