This course will try to give the students a survey of the social life in Vienna in the late 19th and beginning 20th century in different strata of society.
The political structure and their changes form an important background for the life of the inhabitants of the monarchs. The list of historical developments starts with the revolution of 1848/49 and the long-term effect of this event and its ideas. The most important modifications of the monarchy like the wars in Italy 1859 and against Prussia in 1866 and the Balkan politics (culminating in the occupation and annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina 1878 and 1908) will be shortly discussed. The crisis in 1914 and the beginning of the First World War – ending in the dissolution of the multinational Habsburg Monarchy – will be analyzed in the framework of the recent controversy in the year 2014 and the Imperial theory.
Stress will be laid on the social classes in society. The different groups: the dynasty, the old aristocracy and the new one, called second society, the various forms of a bourgeois class, the peasants living on the fringes of Vienna, the exploited workers in the factories and servants in the households as well as the misfits will be analyzed. The course will focus on their influence on or exclusion from politics as well as their life-style (housing, food, drinking, participation in culture, early sports etc.), and talk about their bringing-up, education, behavior, festivities and daily life. The different strata of society lived in different parts of the city, which shows still a socio-topographic structure. Some of these different aspects of daily life can be shown in Vienna today and form the topic of a field trip.
Another matter of social life in Vienna has to do with the multinational and multi-confessional composition of the inhabitants of Vienna. Focusing on the Czechs and the Jews, which formed major groups, their influence on the Viennese identity will be studied. Both groups were not very estimated by the rest of the population in the city around 1900, prejudices against the Czechs and still more radical against the Jews (anti-Semitism) were a daily occurrence. But: what would Viennese specific cuisine – the only one in the world called after a city, not a country! – be without Czech cooks and their dishes? And what would the specific phenomenon of fin-de-siècle culture (the culture around 1900) be without Jewish artists and intellectuals?
At the end of the class a short comparison of the cultural achievements in Vienna with other parts of the monarchy – for Bohemia and Moravia in Prague and Brünn (Brno), for Hungary in Budapest, but also in Galicia in Lemberg (Lviv) – and an outlook to the continuation of the cultural phenomena in the succession states, especially in Austria will be given.
Requirements: Attendance and participation in class discussion constitute 30%, a short account and reflection about one of the field-trips 30% and a written final (essay-type) 40% of the grade.