Politics and Space: Creating the Ideal Citizen through Politics of Dwelling in Red Vienna and Cold War Berlin by Margarete Haderer A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Political Science University of Toronto © Copyright by Margarete Haderer 2014 Politics and Space: Creating the Ideal Citizen through Politics of Dwelling in Red Vienna and Cold War Berlin by Margarete Haderer, Doctor of Philosophy Thesis, 2014, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto. Abstract To wield direct influence on the everyday lives of citizens, new political elites have often professed a profound interest in shaping the politics of dwelling. In the 1920s, Vienna’s Social Democrats built 400 communal housing blocks equipped with public gardens, theaters, libraries, kindergartens, and sports facilities, hoping that these facilities would serve as loci for “growing into socialism”. In the 1950s, housing construction in Berlin became a site of the Cold War. East Berlin’s social realist “workers palaces” on Stalinallee were meant to serve as an ideal flourishing ground for the “new socialist men and women”. In contrast, West Berlin's modernist Hansa-Viertel was designed to showcase an ideal dwelling culture and an urban environment that would cultivate individuality. This dissertation examines three historically situated and ideologically distinct responses to the housing question: social democracy in Red Vienna, state socialism in East Berlin, and liberal capitalism in West Berlin. It illuminates how political promises of a radical new beginning were translated into spatial arrangements—the private scale of the apartment and the urban scale of the city—as well as how citizens appropriated the social, political, and economic norms inherent to the new spaces they inhabited. More specifically, the following analyses demonstrate the fact that inherited social, technological, and economic practices often subvert political visions of a radically different future. This was the case with pedagogy in Red Vienna’s Gemeindebauten, instrumental reason in the form of Taylorism and Fordism in East and West Berlin’s mass housing, and gender relations in Red Vienna’s and East Berlin’s politics of dwelling. At the same time, this dissertation examines counter-spaces that emerged from the dialectics between political promises and actual ii socio-spatial realities, counter-spaces that both reflect critically on past hegemonic “politics of dwelling” and that foreshadow alternative political imaginations that are still relevant today. Of particular interest are counter-hegemonic practices of dwelling that embody possibilities of emancipation—of experiencing oneself as subject instead of object of social transformation, justice—of emphasizing considerations of equality and recognition, and radical democracy—of questioning power relations and of forming alliances among disadvantaged groups to transform everyday life. iii Acknowledgements First and foremost I thank my supervisor Margaret (Peggy) Kohn. I greatly appreciate the time, ideas, and constructive criticisms that she has provided throughout my graduate degree that have made the Ph.D. experience productive and stimulating. I am thankful for the excellent role model she has provided as an open-minded, eloquent, and prolific female professor and political theorist. I also thank my committee members Frank Cunningham, Kanishka Goonewardena, and Jeffrey Kopstein. Frank was always supportive of writing a dissertation that cuts across different disciplines, an undertaking that I found simultaneously exciting and intimidating. I am particularly grateful to Frank for coining the term “low political theorist” in one of our conversations, a term he used to remind me that it is perfectly legitimate to be a theorist who is not only interested in conceptual work but also in everyday practices. By now, I feel at home with this “designation” and I am confident about the meaningfulness of, for instance, analyzing floor plans in conjunction with political theory. Kanishka’s course on urban design introduced me to critical geography. I found the readings and discussions extremely stimulating and they have profoundly shaped my dissertation and thinking. I would also like to thank Jeffrey Kopstein for encouraging me to be particularly attentive to historical and sociological details. His expertise of European politics and German history was a great resource to draw on. Finally, I greatly appreciate the constructive and insightful feedback I got from my external reader Loren King, feedback that will play a crucial role in turning my dissertation into a book. I am particularly grateful to Joseph Carens. Throughout the Ph.D. program, Joe has repeatedly reminded me to keep things in perspective. As his long-term teaching assistant and as my internal reader, I’ve experienced Joe as a thoroughly thought-provoking academic as well as an utterly well- rounded human being—a combination that makes a great professor. I would also like to thank my family away from home, my friends, who have played a crucial role in the years spent in Canada, most importantly: Edda Wilde, Ozgur Gurel, Maya Eichler, Govind Rao, Martina Wadl, Patricia Greve, Kai Krueger, Brenna Enright, Gregg, Dan, and Stacy Lewis, Joerg Wittenbrinck, Carol Futtermann, Janna Luettmann, Jason Moore, Amy Nugent, James McKee, Leah Soroko, and Christiane Martin. To my friends and colleagues, Natasha Barykina, Andrea Cassatella, iv and Adrian Atanasescu I am particularly thankful for numerous stimulating discussions and for sharing the emotional burden and intellectual privilege of being a Ph.D. student. I’d like to acknowledge the great support of my parents who, due to the lottery of birth and historical circumstances, never had the access to the kind of education I have had access to. They have always proven to be convinced and understanding of my undertakings. I appreciate their open- minded support particularly not least because in their everyday life engaging with material things weighs much more than engaging with immaterial things, such as words, arguments, and texts. I am also grateful to my nieces, Lena and Hanna. We read each other countless stories over the phone when we could not sleep, be it due to perceived monsters or argumentative impasses. Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank my husband Philipp, whose moral support, encouragement, and truthful optimism were crucial for bringing this dissertation to a conclusion. And even though to my son, Iliya, this dissertation is irrelevant, as is entirely appropriate for his age, I owe him thanks as well. His natural rootedness in the present has revealed itself as truly refreshing. v Table of Contents 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Space, Ideologies, and Everyday Life ................................................................................... 10 1.2 Lived Experience: Spatialized Rationalities and Counter-Spaces ......................................... 13 1.3 The Urban: A Locus of Mediation ......................................................................................... 16 1.4 Space and Time .................................................................................................................... 17 2 “Little Red Brick, Build the New World”: Public Housing and Socialist Counter-Culture in Red Vienna (1919-1934) .............................................................................................................................. 21 2.1 Writing and Re-Writing Urban Space: From the Ringstrassen Era to Red Vienna ............... 24 2.2 For a “Slow Revolution”: On the Austro-Marxists' Concept of Democratic Socialism and its Influence on Housing Policies .......................................................................................................... 31 2.3 Building for the “New Men” ................................................................................................. 38 2.4 Toward a Socialist Dwelling Culture? ................................................................................... 48 3 Post-WWII Berlin: From Great Berlin to the Divided City ............................................................ 80 3.1 Tabula Rasa for Great-Berlin? Nature and Utopia: 1945 to 1949 ....................................... 87 3.2 East Berlin: Constructing Socialism .................................................................................... 102 3.2.1 From the City Landscape back to the Beautiful German City .................................... 102 3.2.2 Building Socialism and Socialists: In Between Construction and Transgression ........ 108 3.2.3 From the Workers’ Palace back to the Dwelling Machine ......................................... 119 3.2.4 The Allotment Garden as the Platte's Antidote? ....................................................... 130 vi 3.3 West Berlin: Constructing a Liberal Society ....................................................................... 155 3.3.1 The “City of Tomorrow” as the “City of Yesterday”? The Normalization of the Functional, Decentralized City after 1945 .................................................................................. 156 3.3.2 West German Social Housing Policies: Toward a Neo-liberal Governmentality ........ 163 3.3.3 Standardized Dwelling, Normalized Living ................................................................