Till the Rusting of Guns

"Great blocks of manstone, built by people for people"

 

The Austrian Civil War ended 90 years ago today. I think really it was over in just a day or two; most of the fighting was in Vienna, where the Schutzbund (the leftist militia) held out for not much longer than 24 hours. Stephen Vincent Benét wrote an indelible poem about it, which I think about probably once a week most weeks, but more often in February.

"Red Vienna," the era of democratic socialist government which ended with the Civil War, was one of the great socialist success stories of the 20th century and left a mark on the city that even four years of fascist rule followed by seven years under the Nazis (and several under a rain of Allied bombs) couldn't erase, especially in the form of an astoundingly ambitious social-housing program. Today, Vienna is one of the most affordable, livable cities in the developed world in part thanks to that legacy: a majority of the population lives either in public housing in or government-subsidized cooperatives.