The workers' movement and cultural patterns on urban housing estates and in rural settlements in Germany and Austria during the 1920s

This paper focuses on the cultural aspects of new housing in the 1920s, especially on the large housing estates such as Berlin-Britz or Frankfurt-Westhausen. These housing estates played the role of prototypes and models for the possible development of society and more or less illustrated trends of dealing with modernity in general. After surveying the financing and construction of new housing in Germany and Austria, the context of Social Democratic housing policy is discussed. On the one hand, 'good housing' was regarded as a means of compensation for 'the bad world of labour'; on the other, it was embedded in the Social Democratic strivings to edify people (Kultursozialismus). Ennobling efforts aimed at a 'clean modernity', and were directed towards upgrading and modernizing people's taste and behaviour and rationalizing and hygienizing the everyday life of the tenants, as well as professionalizing women's housework. Comparing the German Social Democratic cultural strivings on the housing estates with those in Vienna, there is a striking difference to be seen between the political culture cultivated in Red Vienna and that developed on many new German housing estates. Furthermore, ties were loosened between the well-paid skilled workers moving into the new German housing estates on the edge of the cities and the mass of the working class mostly living in the centres of the cities or in older working-class neighbourhoods. For the former group this did not mean a separation from the workers' movement but a leap into cultural fragmentation of the working class itself.