Aleksandra Kudryashova
Until recently, you’ve been working on a sourcebook on Red Vienna. Can you tell us more about the project?
This project is indeed a tremendous accomplishment on the part of so many people who found ways to collaborate across continents, disciplines, and all sorts of institutional barriers. And it wouldn’t have been possible without the BTWH network – an international research group that brings together scholars from various US, German, and Austrian institutions, including UC Berkeley (B), University of Tübingen (T), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard University (H), University of Vienna (W), the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) as well as other organizations based in Vienna like the Austrian Labor History Society (VGA) and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History.
The idea for the sourcebook was both simple and extremely ambitious: to publish a kaleidoscopic collection of original documents from the interwar period when the Austrian capital was governed by the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (1918-1934) and when the city, ‘Red Vienna,’ briefly became an arena for all kinds of large-scale social experiments, involving almost all aspects of society and urban life. The select texts were to be accompanied with brief contextualizing introductions and translated into English for the Camden House edition. The result was 36 chapters, 279 documents, and 956 pages of text in total (804 pages in the English-language version). If you flip through the book, you’ll find a few familiar faces, like Adolf Loos, Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, or Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky; but also less prominent figures, like the Austrian reformer and sociologist Käthe Leichter, women’s right activist and politician Therese Schlesinger, or the US-Austrian Montessori pedagogue Lili Roubiczek. What we collectively tried to achieve is to present the public with a panoramic portrait of this uniquely experimental, in many ways revolutionary and pathbreaking period in Austrian and European history prior to fascist occupation.
How is this project connected to your area of expertise and interests?
My own contribution to The Red Vienna Sourcebook focuses on questions of urban development (chapter “Urban Planning”/ “Stadtplanung”), on municipal housing projects and (re)envisioned forms of ‘proletarian’ architecture (“Architecture”/“Architektur”) as well as novel aspects of interior design (“Interior Design”/“Wohnen”). Two of the chapters are co-authored with Viennese art historians, Georg Vasold and Werner Michael Schwarz, who were extremely supportive and resourceful throughout this long journey.
I was always captivated by the amount of power that architecture and urban structures can hold over human beings and how this power can either grow or dissipate over time. Cities like Vienna with their tumultuous history present us with experiments, both successful and less so, in urban development and architectural design as a vehicle of social transformation. Of course, as a scholar of film and literature, I am particularly interested in alternative histories and visions, projects that were never realized or that thwarted their original vision. Svetlana Boym described such histories of modernity as “off-modern:” they exist off-center, thus inviting us to step ‘off’ the beaten path and to explore the realm of “lateral potentialities” and unexpected possibilities (Architecture of the Off-Modern). My dissertation, for instance, looks at such ‘off-center’ moments in the history of another capital, Berlin, in the extended 1980s when the city was still divided by the Berlin Wall. The book investigates the ways in which architecture and urban environment were mobilized by artists and filmmakers and refracted by other forms of creative expression, from music to graffiti art to cinema.
Are there other projects that loom on your horizon?
In the light of recent events and the heated public debates surrounding so-called ‘cancel culture,’ I have become increasingly fascinated with moral panics and the artists and artifacts that catalyze and respond to them. We are all familiar with the more prominent, canonical works that arouse out of these cultural clashes and movements demanding emancipation, such as Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen (English title: La Ronde, premiered 1920), a play that was deemed to be too obscene and even pornographic at the time, or Frank Wedekind’s scandalous drama Frühlings Erwachen (English title: Spring Awakening, premiered 1906), another socially critical text that explored the lives of pubescent children who come to discover their sexuality and the violence inherent in their society. But there are still many artists and writers, especially women and people who belong to marginalized groups, that remain off our radar. There have been some attempts to revisit established scholarly narratives and to reevaluate our approaches to major cultural and artistic movements, such as Expressionism or New Objectivity. The pandemic has certainly delayed or put on hold much of this work that needs to be done in cooperation with archives, libraries, and museums, but we are moving in the right direction. Anke Finger (University of Connecticut) and Julie Shoults (Muhlenberg College), for instance, have been working on a volume dedicated to the ‘maligned’ women of German Expressionism (Women in German Expressionism: Gender, Sexuality, Activism), and I am delighted to be part of this project. My own contribution explores the work of Mela Hartwig-Spira, an Austro-British writer and painter, whose first publication – a collection of novellas under the title Ekstasen (English title: Ecstasies, 1927) – fascinated and repelled the public at the same time. Her works have been recently re-published by the Literaturverlag Droschl (Graz, Austria) and will hopefully generate a lot of interest among literary scholars and educators.