Visions of Vienna: Narrating the City in 1920s and 1930s Cinema (Web Exclusive)
by Alexandra Seibel. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. 260 pp., illus. Hardcover: $120.00.

Reviewed by Christoph Huber

For seven decades Carol Reed’s noirish postwar classic The Third Man (1949) has been considered the iconic Vienna film, both abroad and at home. There’s a “Third Man Tour” through Vienna’s canals (where the film’s celebrated showdown takes place) that’s touted as a tourist attraction, and the movie is still screened at least three times a week in the city’s traditional Burg Kino. But as Alexandra Seibel, herself Viennese, points out at the beginning of her book Visions of Vienna, Reed’s film marked a clear “break with a global myth of Vienna, which circulated in the first part of the last century and proved durable in international cinema.” Quoting the short film Orson Welles’ Vienna (1968) in her introduction, Seibel notes how one Vienna myth—or cliché, if you will—came to replace another. In this short curio, Welles evokes not only his own famous role as villain Harry Lime from The Third Man, but also both the imperial past of Old Vienna and its later Cold War image as a hub for international intrigue: “Well, this town isn’t all whipped cream and waltzes. There was a time at least when Vienna was to the spy industry what Detroit is to automobiles.”

Seibel’s interest, however, is strictly with the former, as borne out by her book’s subtitle Narrating the City in 1920s and 1930s Cinema: this global myth of imperial Vienna under Habsburg rule was a standby for “Viennese films” of the interwar period. As Seibel argues convincingly, the break that The Third Man (with its striking imagery of a bombed out city) represents “could only occur because the image of cinematic Vienna had been so firmly and well established in the preceding decades.” That image was defined foremost by the stereotype of “the city of music,” with Vienna being the home of classical composers such as Haydn, Mozart, or (actually German-born) Beethoven, not to mention the Strauss dynasty, associated with the operetta and the waltz, surely the two musical genres considered most Viennese. Add the famous pastries, baroque grandeur, and the (grand)fatherly image of a benevolent Kaiser ruling, and this mythic Vienna acquires a timeless, cozy quality as, in Seibel’s words, “a dreamy and sentimental pleasure garden,” where officers and aristocrats meet cute with Süße Mädel—sweet girls—for singing, seduction, and wine drinking at the so-called Heuriger.

Important Austrian writers such as Stefan Zweig and Arthur Schnitzler added more modern and darker undercurrents to the fin-de-siècle-image of the city, but in the popular imagination mythic Vienna remained a haven out of time, filled with waltz and schmaltz. Indeed, aren’t those emotions of blissful eternity and untroubled nostalgia precisely what is suggested by the waltz (or, to cite another iconic Viennese symbol, the famous Ferris wheel in the Prater amusement park) with its circular movement? But as Seibel sets out to demonstrate, the escapist allure of mythic Vienna allowed for highly ambivalent filmmaking, at least in the hands of major auteurs. Only occasionally, and interestingly, her study will also delve into some lesser known “Viennese” films of the period—those quotation marks might figure throughout, but are abstained from in the name of easy legibility, as most films discussed here aren’t even Austrian, but German and American productions, their imaginary Vienna constructed abroad, and sometimes spiced up with location footage, whether expressly shot for the occasion or archival material. But at the core of Seibel’s analysis are canonized classics, worked through in four chapters (there are five altogether, counting the lengthy introduction, which establishes context, themes, and method).

The first of these is devoted to Viennese émigré Erich von Stroheim’s Hollywood productions Merry-Go-Round (1923) and The Wedding March (1928)—for although the former was taken out of Stroheim’s hands and finished in a softened version by Rupert Julian it still bears enough auteurist trademarks to identify it as the brainchild of the man Photoplay called in a 1928 article “Hollywood’s One Real Genius—Von” (quoted in Seibel’s footnotes). Another focuses on Max Ophüls’s Berlin-shot Liebelei (1933), with detours to films by Jacques Feyder, Willi Forst, and Werner Hochbaum. The next chapter considers a Viennese-set classic of Weimar cinema, directed by an Austrian: G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925). And finally there’s Ernst Lubitsch’s Paramount musical The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), productively compared to an eminently successful German silent version of the same Oscar Straus operetta, Ludwig Berger’s A Waltz Dream (1925).

The discussion of Stroheim’s works allows Seibel to establish the two crucial factors of her argument. At the core is (quite literally) the spatial arrangement of the city, whose topography mirrors the power positions of imperial Vienna in a concentric arrangement. The city center—which is also the power hub and home of the upper classes—is surrounded by the circular Ringstrasse, with its great representational buildings like the city hall and houses of parliament (both prominently featured in the opening stock shots of The Wedding March) signifying, per Seibel, “the constituents of a liberal bourgeoisie in alliance with the bureaucratic empire,” while functioning as “a social isolation belt against the outskirts,” which are the home of the lower classes.

It is among these that the second key subject of Seibel’s book is found: the so-called Wiener Mädel. This “Viennese girl,” a prototype generated in literature by Schnitzler, is a stock character of the Viennese film. Destined to fall for an upper-class male, usually leading to victimization and tragedy, she suffers exclusion from the official culture of which her lover is a part. But despite this clichéd setup, Seibel discovers a subversive edge in the figure of the Viennese girl, pointing to the contradictory elements in her conception. For instance, she’s caught between tradition and modernity—no longer the sentimental heroine or fallen woman, but neither yet a modern flapper or a femme fatale—and although the men are drawn to her (supposed) authenticity, her “Viennese-ness” can be seen as a form of role playing, fitting perfectly into the theatrical world that’s part of the operetta aspect of the Viennese myth. As Seibel points out, key elements of the conception of the Viennese girl change from film to film, and part of the allure of her analysis are the (very) different meanings she teases out from the divergent use of this seemingly well-contoured but actually quite malleable figure.

Stroheim famously invented an aristocratic autobiography replete with an army career as imperial officer once he arrived in Hollywood, and his Viennese films bear out a similar fascination for the old myths of his homeland, including full-on appropriation of Schnitzler’s submissive sweet young things and the theatrical grandeur of imperial pageants. But there’s also Stroheim’s characteristic double-edged stance, criticizing the decadence he so elaborately restages—as Seibel notes, the epic Technicolor scene in The Wedding March is presented as an upper-class spectacle “as if to underline the fact that the lower classes had only been granted points-of-view in black and white.” Similarly, she’s attentive to Ophüls’s specialty for meaningful mise en scène (and early mastery of sound), pointing out how what in the diegetic world of his film is foregrounded as “reality” is immediately presented as a form of theatricality at the beginning of Liebelei. With his refined sense of arrangement, Ophüls has an opera performance, marked by its socially rigidly hierarchized seating, intersect with imperial spectacle, thus stressing the element of performance and ceremony that’s part of the Viennese myth and also defines its upper-class military caste. Ultimately, Liebelei was seen as heavily criticizing the associated martial mindset as the fascists were starting to mobilize for war, with the Viennese girl sacrificed as collateral damage.

Pabst’s The Joyless Street makes for an interesting detour as it is based on a contemporary novel by Hugo Bettauer, a controversial key writer of Austria’s “literature of inflation,” dealing with the economic and social crises of the young First Republic that had replaced the mythic Habsburg monarchy. Accordingly, the concentric model for power distribution showcased in Stroheim has been replaced with a classical vertical structure—in Pabst’s film, class becomes an upstairs/downstairs affair, while the entire society is caught in “a process of commodification,” skillfully underlined by the mise en scène. (Seibel notes its affinity to the modern ideas of architect Adolf Loos.) Meanwhile, for the poor Viennese girl, there is no choice but to accept her transformation into a commodity.

As sharp as Pabst and his collaborators are on this point, other elements of The Joyless Street seem less radical, with censorship battles and mutilation ensuing—and as no intact version of the film has survived, the maker’s original intentions remain elusive to a degree. But Seibel astutely points out that, already at the script stage, all the novel’s references to Jewish life were eliminated. In his descriptions, Bettauer had catered to anti-Semitic prejudices (as a Jew who converted to Protestantism, he clearly had a conflicted stance toward Jewish identity, also having written The City Without Jews, a satiric response to anti-Semitism; he died in 1925 after being shot by a Nazi). This detail can be seen as emblematic of why Pabst’s film feels like the odd one out in this context. Although nominally still set in Vienna, culturally it feels fully displaced to the world of Weimar cinema, whereas Bettauer’s novel was grounded in the life of the city.

But maybe this only shows that the more distant world of mythic Habsburg Vienna was easier to replicate elsewhere than contemporary city images. After all, its imperial universe always seemed to exist in close proximity to the fictional country of Ruritania. Certainly, this is true of Ludwig Berger’s The Waltz Dream, a worldwide success as the quintessential Viennese film of the mid-1920s—though made in Germany. Its story of a naughty love triangle can be seen as the Viennese girl’s last hurrah. Here, she teaches her romantic opponent how to practice that Viennese magic—and proves completely replaceable once her mission is accomplished. In an extension of the commodification portrayed by Pabst, it’s all about props and performance to enhance the sex appeal. As Seibel dryly notes, in Berger’s film “the Viennese myth in general, and the Viennese woman, in particular, are presented as a special effect of cinema.”

If Berger’s version still bemoans the loss of originality—his Viennese girl is a well-meaning innocent who does not realize what she’s doing—Lubitsch’s sound remake The Smiling Lieutenant has a more cynical and sophisticated approach. It savors the irony that in the process of commodification only appearance counts and style naturally triumphs over substance. Seibel stresses that the elegant furs that are part of the female makeover in Lubitsch’s film are from “Mandelberg and Greenbaum,” performing her own act of transformation by drawing on Jewish sophistication—“which is rooted in the experience of assimilation and knows about the necessity to adapt to the norms of a dominant culture.” As Seibel herself admits, “it might seem a stretch to connect” Lubitsch’s light, fairy-tale operetta “to the Jewish experience of otherness”; but arguably things come full circle here. After all, the fin-de-siècle modernity of Viennese culture was an eminently Jewish affair—apart from Schnitzler one could name Freud, Wittgenstein, Schönberg, and so on. Jewish creativity was crucial for high culture as well as popular mass entertainments like operetta and the Wienerlied: “Jewish sophistication, then, shaped the myth of Old Vienna as much as the Catholique Baroque of the Habsburg tradition,” concludes Seibel. As anti-Semitism and fascism were on the rise in the interwar years, many artists emigrated—and Seibel’s book also wants to trace how these experiences shaped their filmic reactions, even in a genre as seemingly out of time as the Viennese film.

Christoph Huber is Curator of the Austrian Film Museum.

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