Sexual Knowledge

Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900-1934

Britta McEwen

• Editore: Berghahn Books
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857453389
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Historia
• Categoria: Historia europea

Vienna's unique intellectual, political, and religious traditions had a powerful impact on the transformation of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century. Whereas turn-of-the-century sexology, as practiced in Vienna as a medical science, sought to classify and heal individuals, during the interwar years, sexual knowledge was employed by a variety of actors to heal the social body: the truncated, diseased, and impoverished population of the newly created Republic of Austria. Based on rich source material, this book charts cultural changes that are hallmarks of the modern era, such as the rise of the companionate marriage, the role of expert advice in intimate matters, and the body as a source of pleasure and anxiety. These changes are evidence of a dramatic shift in attitudes from a form of scientific inquiry largely practiced by medical specialists to a social reform movement led by and intended for a wider audience that included workers, women, and children.

Chapter 1

CITY HALL AND SEXUAL HYGIENE IN RED VIENNA

In late November 1920, one of the few pre-war chaired Jewish professors of Vienna’s University Medical School was appointed to head the municipality’s 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 amtsführenden Stadtrat für Wohlfahrtswesen und soziale Verwaltung der Stadt Wien. Tandler’s unofficial title was no less impressive: within a few years, he was popularly known as “the medical pope of Social Democracy.”¹ As head of interwar Vienna’s Welfare Office, Tandler shaped municipal health and welfare policy into a particular form of social medicine designed to strengthen and replenish the city’s population. To do so, he stressed public sexual hygiene and private responsibility as crucial to the city’s 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 Tandler’s 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 Vienna’s City Council and the Christian Social Party that controlled the provinces. In a period of almost continual political and economic crisis, Julius Tandler’s mandate was to heal a war-broken population and engender neue Menschen—literally, new people—whose healthy, orderly lives would help rebuild the nation.

Austrian historiography is rich in biographical studies of the SDAP party members who shaped interwar Vienna’s 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 Vienna’s Social Democratic city council would persuade their fellow countrymen to vote for the SDAP. Deeply committed to this “democratic revolution,” Austromarxism was critical of both the communist and fascist revolutions that took place among Austria’s 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, Vienna’s popular interwar mayor; Otto Glöckel, who democratized Vienna’s educational system; Hugo Breitner, who developed “Red” Vienna’s 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 Vienna’s 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, Tandler’s interwar municipal welfare and hygiene innovations were plainly concerned with the regeneration, through sexual reproduction, of Austria’s 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.

Vienna’s reputation as a city suffused with illicit and/or venal sex has been well established for the fin-de-siècle period.⁴ In Austria’s First Republic, however, “healthy” 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 Vienna’s socialist municipal health and hygiene system.⁵ The Municipal Marriage Advice Center, mothers’ clinics, venereal disease testing centers, and family support offices that Tandler helped to develop all contributed to an official language of healthy sexuality. Furthermore, Tandler’s failure or refusal to work to change Austria’s 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 Vienna’s social body and developed municipal policies designed to heal it. Tandler’s innovations in the fields of family, maternal, and children’s 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 individual’s reproductive choices and extend, through the family, outwards to the polis.

Social Medicine: Tandler’s 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 Vienna’s 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 city’s 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 Zuckerkandl’s assistant even as a medical student and took over teaching obligations for his friend and mentor in 1907. The Anatomy of the Heart, Tandler’s 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). Tandler’s 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 Austria’s 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 “War and Population.” In it, he identified the current war as a “true war of the peoples,” different from preceding European national skirmishes in its size and its causes.⁸ The Great War, he told his audience, was “neither a war about races or nations, but was rather, above all, an economic war.”⁹ 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. Tandler’s apatriotic stance is interesting, but “War and Population” is most useful in establishing Tandler’s professional views vis-à-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 Tandler’s 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, “War and Population,” 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 Tandler’s later work, “War and Population” 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: “Those 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.”¹¹ 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 “War and Population” that Tandler began referring to the population of a given state as its “organic capital,” 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 “qualitative” and “quantitative” 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...