Red Vienna’s progressive movement was crushed then absorbed into Nazi Germany

Evidence

By the early 1930s, with the Social Democratic Workers’ Party having held power in Vienna for over a decade, fascist forces were gaining ground in the Austrian countryside. In 1933, those forces eventually seized power and quickly moved to ban rival political parties as well as trade unions. Many fought back to defend the gains of Red Vienna, but after a brief civil war, the Austrofascists took the city. By May 1934, the entire country was under the control of the Fatherland Front and, four years later, Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany. Red Vienna’s era of progressive experimentation was definitively over. Socialist leaders, many of them Jewish, fled into exile. Some who stayed, including the utopian theorist of liberated childhood Otto Felix Kanitz, would eventually be murdered in Nazi death camps. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 689

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up the historical bedrock for the chapter’s central metaphor: Nazi programs as doppelgangers of Red Vienna’s child welfare programs — this is the actual historical case that Klein’s whole doubling device is built to illuminate.
• SHARE: For someone into the Red Vienna story or Austrian interwar history, the detail that Otto Felix Kanitz, a utopian theorist of childhood, was later murdered in a death camp is a striking juxtaposition.