Tres Lambert

Red Vienna’s American Dreams

This project examines the impact of America and Americana— literary and cultural products that capture the spirit of 1920s-1930s America—on the working-class literary imagination of Red Vienna, and especially in the works of Hugo Bettauer, Hermynia Zur Mühlen, and Felix Salten. At the center of my argument is the thesis that America’s mythical status, with towering skyscrapers and gold-paved streets, furnished a corresponding mythological and aesthetic vocabulary for Red Vienna’s own literary self-representation at a time when the party—and Austria itself—sought to redefine its identity after World War I and the Habsburg monarchy. America’s status as land of technology, progress, and promise is simultaneously iconic and antagonistic, foreign and familiar, and drives the creation of new (Viennese) socialist mythology that fuses American and (Red) Viennese visions of prosperity: the foreign cultural context of America offers an aspirational model for the civilization of the future and a geographic and political “Other” for displaced cultural criticism that provides a relatable, yet mediated framework within which Red Vienna’s own social and cultural obstacles can be depicted, debated, and critiqued.

Tres Lambert is Associate Professor of German Studies at Gettysburg College.