Chapter 1
CITY HALL AND SEXUAL HYGIENE IN RED VIENNA
In late November 1920, one of the few pre-war chaired Jewish professors of Viennaâs University Medical School was appointed to head the municipalityâs newly created public health and welfare office. Dr. Julius Tandler was a professor of anatomy, a founding member of the Austrian Society for Population Politics, and the creator of a scientific journal dedicated to research into improving the human constitution. He had served on various health committees in the fledgling Austrian Republic before ascending to his new title as amtsfĂŒhrenden Stadtrat fĂŒr Wohlfahrtswesen und soziale Verwaltung der Stadt Wien. Tandlerâs unofficial title was no less impressive: within a few years, he was popularly known as âthe medical pope of Social Democracy.â1 As head of interwar Viennaâs Welfare Office, Tandler shaped municipal health and welfare policy into a particular form of social medicine designed to strengthen and replenish the cityâs population. To do so, he stressed public sexual hygiene and private responsibility as crucial to the cityâs collective health.
World War I dramatically altered political and material conditions in Vienna. At the end of the war, Vienna stood as the capital of a truncated rump state that no native political party supported. The three years following the war brought starvation to much of the city, which also suffered from one of the most severe housing shortages in Europe. Families separated and were abandoned in the former Imperial capital of Vienna, as homecoming soldiers either failed to return at all or sought economic advantage in the former crown lands now organized into discrete countries. According to a special wartime commissioned report from the Austrian Society of Doctors, venereal disease, tuberculosis, alcoholism and infant mortality rates had risen to new levels.2 Perhaps the greatest threat to Vienna, however, was the collapse of the fragile coalition government ruling the nation. During Julius Tandlerâs fourteen-year tenure as Minister of Public Health, a Kulturkampf was waged between the Social Democratic Workers Party (henceforth SDAP) that held the majority on Viennaâs City Council and the Christian Social Party that controlled the provinces. In a period of almost continual political and economic crisis, Julius Tandlerâs mandate was to heal a war-broken population and engender neue Menschenâliterally, new peopleâwhose healthy, orderly lives would help rebuild the nation.
Austrian historiography is rich in biographical studies of the SDAP party members who shaped interwar Viennaâs political culture. The theory of political change they developed, Austromarxism, rejected any form of dictatorship (including dictatorship of the proletariat) in favor of democratic election. The Austromarxists believed that the material and cultural progress achieved by Viennaâs Social Democratic city council would persuade their fellow countrymen to vote for the SDAP. Deeply committed to this âdemocratic revolution,â Austromarxism was critical of both the communist and fascist revolutions that took place among Austriaâs interwar neighbors: Bavaria, Hungary, Italy, and Germany. The texts of Social Democratic ideologues Victor Adler, Karl Renner, and Otto Bauer have been anthologized, analyzed, and psychoanalyzed.3 Historians have called attention to the critical roles played by SDAP leaders Karl Seitz, Viennaâs popular interwar mayor; Otto Glöckel, who democratized Viennaâs educational system; Hugo Breitner, who developed âRedâ Viennaâs progressive income and luxury taxes; Theodor Körner, who argued (unsuccessfully) for an armed seizure of power in the face of increasing paramilitary violence; and Robert Danneberg, who oversaw the construction of over 60,000 new apartments in Vienna. Although Viennaâs welfare system was famous in interwar Europe, Julius Tandler has not received the same historical attention as his SDAP peers. The very aspects of his career that make him so central to this work have, I believe, discouraged other researchers from including him in the historiographical pantheon of Social Democratic leadership. As this chapter will illustrate, Tandlerâs interwar municipal welfare and hygiene innovations were plainly concerned with the regeneration, through sexual reproduction, of Austriaâs population. He, more than any other SDAP leader, was responsible for transforming scientific sexual knowledge into social programs designed to reshape Viennese ideas about sex.
Viennaâs reputation as a city suffused with illicit and/or venal sex has been well established for the fin-de-siĂšcle period.4 In Austriaâs First Republic, however, âhealthyâ sex became both a state concern and a popular reform movement that stressed national regeneration, smaller but healthier families, and disease-prevention education. This chapter explores the process of sexual sanitization. Sex was explicitly discussed throughout the creation of Viennaâs socialist municipal health and hygiene system.5 The Municipal Marriage Advice Center, mothersâ clinics, venereal disease testing centers, and family support offices that Tandler helped to develop all contributed to an official language of healthy sexuality. Furthermore, Tandlerâs failure or refusal to work to change Austriaâs divorce and abortion laws reveals the limits of Social Democratic investment in sexual reform. In this chapter we shall situate Tandler within a tradition of social reform that increasingly called upon medical doctors to heal entire populations, rather than individual clients. As a doctor and anatomist Tandler diagnosed Viennaâs social body and developed municipal policies designed to heal it. Tandlerâs innovations in the fields of family, maternal, and childrenâs services were manifestations of the sexual hygiene system he created. This chapter mines the discourse of municipal socialism for the seam of sexual responsibility that runs beneath the surface of clinic and welfare development, paying particular attention to the eugenic messages that Julius Tandler and the SDAP used to educate the masses about sexual hygiene. Eugenic thought in Social Democratic welfare practice was an essential element in the creation of SDAP sexual doctrine: personal and civic Verantwortlichkeit, or responsibility, that was to begin with an individualâs reproductive choices and extend, through the family, outwards to the polis.
Social Medicine: Tandlerâs Early Career
Julius Tandler was born in the Moravian village of Iglau in 1869 and moved to Vienna as a toddler. He attended a poor-relief primary school in the working-class district of Ottakring and prepared for University studies at a Realgymnasium in the Leopoldstadt. He attended the University of Viennaâs medical school and began teaching anatomy there in 1903. In 1910, he became a full professor, serving eventually as Dean of the Faculty until 1917. From May 1919 to November 1920 he was the Undersecretary of National Health for the new Austrian Republic, while at the same time serving as an elected SDAP representative on the Vienna city council.6 At the end of this period, he was named City Counselor and Director of the Vienna Welfare Office, a post he maintained for the remainder of the Republic. Along with other leading socialists, he was imprisoned after the civil war of 1934. In 1936, he was released to Moscow, where he had been called to help restructure that cityâs health system. He died within the year; his ashes were transferred to the Vienna crematorium after World War II.
Tandler first drew attention when he was named the Chair of Anatomy at the University of Vienna. This post had been previously held by the esteemed Emil Zuckerkandl, who died in 1910. Tandler had been Zuckerkandlâs assistant even as a medical student and took over teaching obligations for his friend and mentor in 1907. The Anatomy of the Heart, Tandlerâs first book, appeared in 1913, followed by The Biological Principles of Secondary Sexual Characteristics that same year, and The Topographical Anatomy of Emergency Operations in 1916 (reprinted in 1923). Tandlerâs magnum opus was a textbook, Systematic Anatomy, which he worked on for ten years before publishing it in 1929.7 Concomitant with his service to the city, Tandler remained the head of the Institute of Anatomy at the university. His anatomy lectures, dissection rooms, and the Institute itself were repeatedly attacked by anti-Semitic student protesters throughout the First Republic.
Tandler did not participate in the war-fever that swept Austria-Hungary in 1914. He spent the war years organizing Lower Austriaâs medical care system for injured soldiers, beginning in February of 1916 with the creation of a clinic at the University of Vienna for the war wounded. In March, Tandler presented a paper at the Vienna Society of Doctors entitled âWar and Population.â In it, he identified the current war as a âtrue war of the peoples,â different from preceding European national skirmishes in its size and its causes.8 The Great War, he told his audience, was âneither a war about races or nations, but was rather, above all, an economic war.â9 His response to this war was as a doctor, and he urged his fellow doctors take a strictly biological approach to what the war would mean for the populations they served. Tandlerâs apatriotic stance is interesting, but âWar and Populationâ is most useful in establishing Tandlerâs professional views vis-Ă -vis population control and eugenic thought before he assumed the responsibilities of Minister of Welfare Services in 1920. Even in 1916, many of the hallmarks of Tandlerâs interwar welfare and hygiene approaches are present. Furthermore, his pre-war position as University professor allowed him to be more polemical in his formulation of these eugenic themes than his interwar political position allowed. Finally, âWar and Population,â along with the discussion that followed it, was quickly reprinted and widely disseminated in multiple medical specialty journals.10 For these reasons, and to allow comparisons with Tandlerâs later work, âWar and Populationâ deserves a closer look.
In the fall of 1916, after a brutal summer of trench fighting had destroyed any hope of a conclusion to the war, Tandler asked his medical audience to begin planning for the post-war population crises he outlined as inevitable. First and foremost, Tandler identified the cohort presently fighting for the Empire as the most worthy and reproductive of the present population. In a Darwinian sense, Tandler described the war as destructively selecting out the fittest component of society: âThose in danger, those who have fallen, or are injured, are the bravest and the strongest, the best [of the entire population]; those who have stayed at home beyond the reach of danger, who remain alive and are not injured, are those who are the least suitable for the struggle for existence.â11 This is the first, and the gravest, population crisis that Tandler identifies in his work. He organized the remaining crises under two subheadings: quantitative and qualitative. In doing so, Tandler uses for the first time a rhetorical framework popularized by Rudolf Goldscheid, a Viennese sociologist and economist whose work was widely cited by the Social Democratic Party. It is also in âWar and Populationâ that Tandler began referring to the population of a given state as its âorganic capital,â a term coined by Goldscheid in his 1911 study The Woman Question and the Economics of Humanity: Laying the Ground for a Social Biology. We will see Tandler return to the categories of âqualitativeâ and âquantitativeâ work later in his career. In 1916, these categories allowed him to highlight the coming post-war population crises.
Tandler focused on the mortality rates of the present generation and what that meant for its ability to produce the next generation. He outlined the quantitative losses of the present war: live births in Vien...