A revolutionary housing project that symbolises Vienna’s socialist history, the massive Karl Marx Hof complex celebrates its 80th birthday this week as one of the city’s most striking features.
“When we are no more, these stones will tell our story,” the Austrian capital’s mayor Karl Seitz said on October 12, 1930 when he inaugurated the fortress-like project, a highlight of a policy to improve working class lives.
And so it has been: Karl Marx Hof has endured the 1934 civil uprising, the Nazi invasion, Allied bombardments and other ravages of time to remain as a symbol of the socialist side of Red Vienna.
Boasting a kindergarten, pre-school, paediatric care, laundrettes, lawns and shops, the sprawling complex offers low-cost housing in a now posh northern district that fetches high rents.
It stretches for a kilometre and is topped with six turrets resembling watchtowers; Karl Marx Hof is written in stark red letters above massive yellow and ochre arches that swallow pedestrians and cars alike.
Inside this small city, about 1,300 housing units fed by 100 staircases open onto green courtyards.
Doris Nasty came to live here as a baby in 1930 and has never left.
“We had running cold water and toilets in the flat, electricity, gas: it was a huge improvement at the time,” she says of what has been described as a “working class Versailles”.
The apartments are not large, on average measuring just 40 square metres, but rent in even the best equipped units is just about €450 for 45-40 square metres.
This is a fraction of the cost of housing in the otherwise swanky district of Doebling, where a similar area would be rented out for roughly double the price.
Doris Nasty has a particularly good deal, paying a mere €365 for her “double” flat of 83 square metres.
A city within a city that initially housed 5,000 people but now is home to about 3,000, the complex includes a small museum that documents Vienna’s social housing efforts.
Karl Marx Hof was the architectural highlight of the Social Democrats housing platform of its day; it set in stone the party’s policies to lift the working classes out of their cramped and unsanitary living conditions.
The Social Democratic government, still in power, built 65,000 such housing units across the city between World Wars I and II – a real revolution for the time.
The Austrian capital has had a Social Democratic mayor since 1919, except between 1934 and 1945 when it was under Austro-fascist Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss and then the Nazis.
Last weekend, on October 10, the Social Democratic Party again won municipal elections, with strong support from Vienna’s 220,000 social housing units, home to about a third of its population.
Designed by architect Karl Ehn, Karl Marx Hof’s turbulent history started with conservative opposition to its construction between 1927 and 1930.
During the 1934 clashes between socialists and conservative fascists – a days-long civil war – the army fired cannons against the edifice, where leftist insurgents had sought refuge.
In the following decades, it witnessed other dark events such as the expulsion of its Jewish residents starting in 1938, the arrival of the Nazis, Allied bombardments and raids by Soviet soldiers.
“Many are not aware they live in a historic place,” said residents’ representative Michaela Bauer, who fell in love with the complex 11 years ago.
Bauer’s concern today is deteriorating relations between residents and the neighbourhood.
“The atmosphere has cooled down,” Doris Nasty acknowledged with nostalgia. She puts this down in part to the arrival of foreigners, especially from Turkey and former Yugoslavia, who now make up about a third of the complex’s residents.
Anti-immigrant sentiment in Austria has been fanned by the far-right Freedom Party to win votes.
Last Sunday it took advantage of this resentment to win almost a third of the ballots in regional elections, denying the SPOe an absolute majority and loosening – even just slightly – its hold on Red Vienna.