Between 1919 and 1934 Vienna was governed by the Social Democrats with an absolute majority, in a country governed by the right. The city used that gap to build, and what it built is still standing and still lived in — which makes Red Vienna the rare political experiment you can visit.
The problem
Post-1918 Vienna was in a bad way. The empire it had been built to administer no longer existed, the population was hungry, tuberculosis was widespread, and housing was appalling: Bettgeher, bed-lodgers, rented a bed by the shift in flats already overcrowded, and a large proportion of dwellings had no water or lavatory inside them.
What they did
The city became its own federal province in 1922, which gave it the power to levy taxes. It introduced a steeply progressive set of them — on luxury, on servants, on horses, on large flats — under the finance councillor Hugo Breitner, and used the revenue to build directly rather than to subsidise landlords.
Between 1923 and 1934 the city built around 65,000 flats, housing something like a tenth of the population. It also built kindergartens, laundries, clinics, libraries, swimming baths and the Kinderfreibad open-air pools.
The design principle was consistent: perimeter blocks around large planted courtyards, with communal facilities on the ground floor, at low density on the site so that every flat had light and air. Rents were set at around four per cent of a worker’s wage.
Karl-Marx-Hof
The emblem. Karl Ehn’s block in Heiligenstadt, finished in 1930, is 1,100 metres long — over a kilometre, spanning four tram stops — with 1,272 flats, and covers only about a fifth of its own site. The rest is courtyard. It has arched gateways, flagpole towers and a colour scheme of ochre and terracotta that is unmistakable.
It is on the U4 at Heiligenstadt and there is a small museum, Das Rote Wien im Waschsalon, in one of the communal laundries. It is open limited hours and is worth planning around.
Other blocks worth seeing: Reumannhof and Metzleinstalerhof on Margaretengürtel, Sandleitenhof in Ottakring, the largest of all, and Rabenhof in Landstraße.
How it ended
Austria’s politics polarised through the 1920s into armed camps with paramilitary wings on both sides. In March 1933 Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss used a procedural crisis to suspend parliament and rule by decree, establishing the Ständestaat — an authoritarian, clerical, corporatist regime usually called Austrofascism.
In February 1934, an attempt to search for weapons at a Social Democratic building in Linz triggered a general strike and four days of fighting. In Vienna, the army and the Heimwehr shelled the housing blocks with artillery — Karl-Marx-Hof and Reumannhof among them — with families inside. Several hundred were killed. The party was banned, its leaders imprisoned or exiled, and Red Vienna was over.
Dollfuss was himself murdered by Austrian Nazis five months later. In March 1938 came the Anschluss.
Why it matters now
Vienna never sold the flats. The city and its housing associations still own or influence a large majority of the housing stock, and roughly six in ten Viennese live in social or subsidised housing — an ordinary, unstigmatised arrangement with mixed incomes in the same buildings. This is the single biggest reason Vienna keeps winning liveability rankings, and it is a direct inheritance from the 1920s.
Go and look at Karl-Marx-Hof. It takes twenty minutes on the U4 and it explains more about the modern city than most of the palaces.
Seeing it in half a day
Take the U4 to Heiligenstadt for Karl-Marx-Hof; the museum in the old communal laundry, Das Rote Wien im Waschsalon, opens limited hours and is worth checking before you go. Then the U6 down the Gürtel, which passes a run of 1920s blocks, to Margaretengürtel for the Reumannhof and the Metzleinstalerhof, the first of them all.
That is about three hours including travel and it costs the price of a transport pass.
The architecture argument
Red Vienna’s blocks are not modernist. While the Bauhaus was building white boxes, Vienna built heavy, ornamented, symmetrical perimeter blocks with towers and archways, deliberately monumental. Contemporary modernists disliked them for it; the city’s architects argued that workers’ housing should look important rather than machine-made, and that a courtyard was worth more than a flat roof.
Both positions have aged interestingly. The blocks are still fully occupied and desirable a century later, which is more than can be said for a good deal of the housing that criticised them.
Reading
Helmut Gruber’s Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture is the standard English account. For the end of it, Ilse Barea-Kulcsar’s writing and Eva Priester’s are contemporary. Otto Bauer’s own explanation of why the party did not fight sooner is worth reading against the outcome.