Professor Matti Bunzl

Greg Clark

Why don't we start with your big-picture view? What makes Vienna, Vienna?

Matti Bunzl

Vienna has a very, very intriguing history having to do with both its geographic location, at once at the heart of Europe but also at the very edge of Western Europe during the Cold War. It has a fascinating history in terms of its religious history, becoming the seed of, you know, with an archbishop. It has an even more interesting history as a residence, as a residential city, for the Hapsburgs.

All of these things – combined with the history of migration, which is in some ways a fairly standard European history of constant mingling – all of that produces the things that are unique to Vienna. Probably the location at the context or at the crossroads of various linguistic fault lines, and to some degree, cultural and religious fault lines, is what makes it most distinctive. And here, like many of us, we often think about Vienna in comparison to Berlin. And it's just because it was the capital of a multi-national empire versus Berlin being the capital of mono-cultural empire. That probably is the single greatest difference that characterises Vienna.

Greg Clark

And Matti, one of the important geological features of Vienna is that it's close to, and was at one point on the banks of, the Danube. How do you understand the role of the Danube in the city's history? 

Matti Bunzl

It's completely essential. I mean, like any major city, it is on an important waterway. This is a waterway that was already relevant in Roman times of Vienna, was built as a Roman fortress because it was basically the border of the Roman Empire, which was the Danube at that point. Beyond that – I'm starting in the high Middle Ages – Vienna became an absolute centre of trade because of the Danube, and obviously various cities being on that river, on that water main, made so much possible. And it was in the 13th century that Vienna gained various privileges in terms of trade, all of which were essentially a function of the Danube.

And it is true that when Vienna was first founded, both the Roman Vienna and the mediaeval Vienna, it was in some ways closer to the Danube because one of the main arms of the Danube basically went right into the city centre. It was in the 19th century that the Danube was essentially straightened out and moved away in a colossal feat of engineering, coincidentally undertaken by the same company that built the Suez Canal, using the very same machinery. And that produced the odd situation that is kind of counterintuitive, that the river doesn't run through the city centre anymore. Instead, only the canal, the Danube canal, goes into the city centre. As I said, that was an arm of the Danube. In fact, it was the dominant arm in the Middle Ages. So Vienna is and isn't on the Danube.

Greg Clark

That's a kind of funny aspect of it. The Danube is the reason that the city is where it is, but the city's moved the Danube. Very clever. 

Matti Bunzl

Yeah. And another geological feature that is quite relevant for, I think, Vienna's history and what has been possible is that Vienna is also at the very edge of the Alps. What we call the Home Mountains Hausberge, which are really a couple of hills that basically line Vienna on the north and northwest, are the farthest reaches of the Alps. So we basically have two geological regions coming together, which is the Alps on the one hand, and then to the east, the plains, the plains that extend all the way into Slovakia and Hungary. And that makes it a very interesting region. It also has huge ramifications for agriculture. Vienna, you know, at least since the Middle Ages, has been a major producer of wine, which continues to the present day, and is also very close to all kinds of other forms of agriculture. It was very close to a lot of husbandry that came out of Hungary. So the various geological features that intersect in Vienna have helped the city prosper as well.

Greg Clark

And I've heard it said that Vienna's one of the few cities in the world that has major vineyards within its municipal border.

Matti Bunzl

Absolutely. Absolutely. And not just that. The scope of Vienna's agriculture is staggering. I mean, there are little fun aspects. And I forget if it's zucchini or eggplant now, but one of them, Vienna is the biggest producer in all of Austria of these vegetables. I mean, there's massive agriculture in the city. We've actually become more aware of it collectively in the context of the Corona crisis, because part of it is food safety. Right? Do we have enough to eat? If, you know, all the borders are closed? Well, turns out we produce a huge amount of food in Vienna itself.

Greg Clark

We're going to come back to that theme in a minute, because I think that's really interesting, very important. But I just want to go back to the history for a few minutes, because, as you described the Roman city, the mediaeval city, of course, we'll come on to the 20th century and all of the upheavals that happened there. Some people describe Vienna as a city of a series of traumas. If you like, the city has laid its role in certain epochs and there's then been a shock to the system. Whether that shock is the siege of Vienna or whether the shock is the First World War, the end of the Austro Hungarian empire, whether it's the Third Reich, whether it's the Iron Curtain. How do you read that interpretation of Vienna? A city of traumas?

Matti Bunzl

It wouldn't be the idiom that I would use. I mean, like any city, there have been moments of tremendous transformation and upheaval, some of which in some ways overtly negative, you know, the plague or cholera or Corona, some also quite glorious. You know, when the Hapsburgs decided to make it its residential city or when, you know, Joseph II hurtled it into modernity in very controversial ways. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Vienna has been more traumatised than other cities. I mean, I'm just thinking of London, which has had very little trauma. But if I think about, you know, Paris has had-- it's constant, there's so many revolutions and the huge destruction, huge upheaval. So many other cities as well. I think it's a constant up and down. Demographically, the city grows and then shrinks at certain times.

And part of what makes history an incredibly fascinating pursuit is to try to ascertain and to interpret what are the key transitions. All the ones you mentioned are fundamentally important. And, you know, there are certain dates having to do with war that are important there are certain dates having to do with public health that are important. And there are many others that have to do with creativity and also diplomatic changes, political changes. I mean, if we look at the recent past, probably the single most important date in the last 50 years, I would say is 1989. Hardly traumatic, but quite joyous, in fact. But I mean, a massive transformation that basically moved Vienna from the absolute eastern edge of the so-called free world into the centre of a newly integrated continent. And I can come up with any number of other dates that are hardly traumatic, that have been profoundly transformative.

Greg Clark

Please do talk about some other dates because that would be fascinating. The thing about 1989, just to finish that, is that of course, it's a change that happens not in Austria and Vienna, but the collapse of the Iron Curtain. It changes the geopolitics of Vienna in the new enlarged Europe.

Matti Bunzl

I'll give you another date that is utterly transformative and completely un-traumatic, is the decision in the 1850s to raze the city walls, which were massive fortresses, which basically separated the city centre from the fast-growing, basically new districts as well as the hinterland. And in 1857, the decision was made to raze those walls and to basically integrate the city into a major modern city. I mean, it is literally the birthplace of modern Vienna. And there was no revolution. No shots were fired. If you look in the 13th century, I mean, there was a basically an urban boom in the 13th century all across Europe. But there was no war or any kind of quagmire that produced that. And it is exactly when, basically building onto the old Roman fortress, basically, the first district was created the way we know it today. A new wall was created, and the streets that we walked today, the various central squares in Vienna, and the streets, are all from the 13th century from an incredibly quick moment, roughly from 1200 to 1250. Again, no trauma involved at all.

Greg Clark

So there's this serious of moments where there's no trauma, but something very important and exciting happens.

Matti Bunzl

Exactly.

Greg Clark

If more come to mind. Matti, please bring them in. But I want to pick up on the social biography for a minute, and just ask you a little bit about the ideas and the behaviours and the cultural laws that you think have been important to the Viennese way of life. What would you identify as being the key strands there?

Matti Bunzl

I do think Vienna is has been shaped in many ways for many centuries by the presence of the Hapsburgs and the Hapsburg court and the resultant presence of all the nobility of the empire, all of whom had home estates, you know, in Bohemia, Moravia, Salzburg, but all of whom had urban palaces in Vienna built right around the Hofburg, the Imperial Palace. So there is a very, very dominant aristocratic culture. There were at the same time various – there's very deep-seated Catholicism, reinforced massively in the Counter-Reformation. Vienna was briefly a Protestant city. The Counter-Reformation was brutal in Vienna and quite successful. So it's a deeply Catholic culture.

And then industrialization in the 19th century happened a little later than in other places, certainly neater than in Britain. But that basically produced a classic sort of class distinctions, modern class system created, which in Vienna was heavily ethnicized, because a huge part of the emerging working class were Czechs from especially Bohemia, but also Moravia. You basically have a culture that is a very classic aristocratic culture, very religiously, deeply intertwined. You have in the 19th century an emerging bourgeoisie in the context of industrialization. You have a moment right in the middle of the 19th century of a brief real ascendancy of the burghers, of the middle class. But then you have, really by the late 1880s and then by the 1890s, you basically have various modern strands of the political movement, various forms of democratisation, basically pushing the liberal elites aside. And then ever since you have the basic political and social structure that we still have today.

Greg Clark

Wonderful history, and very, very fast-tracked lineage. 

Caitlin Morrissey

With Vienna's long DNA, are there any kind of big current cultural events that really link back to any of these strands, or are there any festivals, markets, celebrations, parades that have endured for a very long time that are now a big part of Vienna's current DNA?

Matti Bunzl

Well, I mean, there are some things that have endured. I mean, I could name you a couple. I'm not sure they are particularly important. So there are certain religious festivals that were very, very important in the Middle Ages, and they're still being celebrated. And, of course, in our largely secular society now, they're almost more sort of throwbacks, they have a certain kind of nostalgia associated with them. What we have more of is in the sort of Hobsbawm sense of inventive traditions, we have tons of those. And in fact, you know, the fact that Vienna feels so imperial is, of course, in contrast to the fact that we have no empire and in fact, we have no aristocracy, it was formally abolished in 1918. Nonetheless, you know, there are untold museal spaces, you know, glorifying the Hapsburgs, you know, from Maria Theresa to Joseph to Francis Joseph to Sisi. And there is a sense in which Vienna is more involved in revelling in its history, real and imagined, than many other cities of its kind.

And so there are any number of moments, whether they are touristic or whether they are cultural, that hearken back on these things in one way or, you know, or the other. And there is a kind of persistent strand of modernists who want to break with all of that. But there's so much riding economically riding on this kind of glorious history. I mean, you know, setting aside Corona right now, Vienna is so deeply dependent on tourism and tourism is so deeply connected to the Hapsburg sort of memory that it would be economically foolish for Vienna to be all about the new. It's too invested in the old.

Greg Clark

So are you saying there's a kind of economic lock-in with a sort of celebration of nostalgia in a sense?

Matti Bunzl

Well, I do think that. Yeah. Yeah. In a way that you don't have in, say, in Berlin.

Greg Clark

Yeah. Berlin's much keener to embrace the new, and it realises it has an economic interest in doing so.

Matti Bunzl

Right. Exactly. Exactly right.

Greg Clark

I want to ask you just for a minute about the intellectual history in Vienna. Are you suggesting that in a sense, Vienna's not the city that invented the ideas that shaped the West, or it's not the city of political philosophy, psychoanalysis, Marxism and everything else, or is there something distinctive about Vienna's intellectual inheritance?

Matti Bunzl

I do think so. I mean, I think Vienna is quite conventional for much of its history, intellectually speaking, with the exception of the late 19th, early 20th century, where at the crucible of these rapidly modernising forces, as well a massive influx of the city. A really interesting question of the Jewishness of all of that. You had a concentration of intellectual avant-gardism that rivalled any other place at the time and arguably superseded it. I mean, at the time, Vienna was one of the five largest cities in the world. We're talking Vienna 1900 roughly. So it's not all that surprising. It was an absolute centre of academic learning. It was one of the wealthiest cities. There was a quite progressive – or strands of a progressive middle class that supported all kinds of cultural experimentation, be it in art or literature. And that precisely was the moment when, you know, you have figures like Freud and Klimt and Schiller emerge, Schoenberg, Mahler, and, you know, do things that have been recognized as being globally relevant. It is, I would say, the only moment in which Vienna played such a front role, such a leading role in global intellectual culture, notwithstanding the fact that both before and after, you have moments that are truly glorious. I mean if we think about the Vienna of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, certainly extraordinary. We have a Nobel Prize winner in literature living in Vienna right now. It's not like all these things don't exist, but there is nothing that rivals roughly the period of 18 – let's say 1890 to 1914 in the density of intellectual transformations. I'm an absolute faithful admirer and adherent to Carl Schorske's brilliant interpretation of all this in his book Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. It's a masterful description and interpretation of how all this came about.

Greg Clark

Matti, let's come on to the Vienna of today. I want to ask you a kind of odd question, which is how many different Viennas do you think they are today, given the sort of changes and the fluxes and the flows that exist in the city?

Matti Bunzl

I think Vienna is like any truly exciting, modern, cosmopolitan space, full of different Viennas. I mean, but again, that is not distinctive to me. I mean, there are so many – waves of migration have produced various, you know, vaguely ethnic Viennas, there are class-based Viennas, there are aesthetically grounded Viennas, there are professionally organised Viennas. Again, none of this strikes me as particularly distinctive. I happen to think that it's lovely and wonderful. If I have to think about what makes Vienna distinctive, today's Vienna distinctive, I think it is ultimately the fact that the city has been more successful for various historical happenstances to hang on to a broadly social democratic model that really came to the fore in the inter-war years and that regained its power after the two fascist interludes. First, the Austrofascists from 34 to 38, and then, of course, National Socialism, Nazi Germany. And I mean, not that social democracy in Vienna is flawless, but it has had essentially an uninterrupted reign.

Austria became democratic in 1918. This is when full franchise was established. The first actually free election was held in 1919. And ever since, every single free election. Again, this is – we're not talking 34 to 45. Every single free election produced a social democratic majority and Mayor, I don't think Vienna is the only city in the world. – I mean, I have to check that – but there are not that many cities in which you have that kind of political continuity. And as problematic as so much of this party is, there are basic commitments to, you know, fairness in housing, you know, public health care, schooling for everyone. And these things were created or were established in the inter-war years, they were buttressed like everywhere else in the glorious decades of the social welfare state after World War Two, and here's the distinction – and this is now is a long way to get to what I think makes Vienna unique – neoliberal restructurations of the 80s and 90s, Thatcherism, Reaganism, etc., also hitting a lot of the German cities, Vienna, because of the conservatism of Viennese social democracy, Vienna didn't go there. And we're now reaping the benefits, because we know – and I'm talking to two people living in London, I hate to say that, with an NHS, that is – I mean, I'm terrified.

Look, to make this very, very, very much about this current moment, Vienna and Austria has been under persistent criticism over the last 10 years for the great number of ICU beds that we have. There was enormous pressure to reduce those beds with the argument that we simply don't need them. We have not had a crisis. We never even got close to full - this is what we're talking about. I mean, we have the resources and it works.

Greg Clark

Could you define what makes Vienna unique today?

Matti Bunzl

What makes Vienna unique? It's is the absence, the relative absence of the neoliberal shrinking of the public sector. The fact that the city – as well as the country, but especially the city – has continued to invest in the public infrastructure. Again, making this very concrete, a lot of cities at various points in the 20th century, especially after World War II, built public housing, housing that is under the ownership of the government. In the context of neoliberal reforms – all of which made sense, I'm not saying this was all crazy, but – a lot of this public housing was sold to private entities. Vienna never did that. We still have 60% of Vienna's population living in public housing or publicly supported housing. That's a huge number. And it's in moments of crisis when the state is ultimately the fallback that you see the power of that. And it's the same in the health care. It's the same in old age care. It's the same in schooling. Again, as a cultural anthropologist, I would go to Britain as the counterexample. And I mean, Britain and Austria had the same level of social welfare in roughly 1970, 1975. And look at what's going on now.

Greg Clark

Why is it that social democracy in Vienna has proved to be so resilient and so continuous?

Matti Bunzl

I think because – oddly, because Vienna is deeply conservative and not a place of innovation. So when the vanguard was the diminishing of the state, I mean, there were all these arguments. Thatcherism had an argument, right? Thatcherism had an argument that we're in stasis because we're overwhelmed and weighed down by bureaucracy, and the state can't do anything. And so it seemed very avant-garde and clever to, you know, slender up that state and get to work. And Vienna was like, well, we don't need to be avant-garde. We're quite happy to be, you know, who we are and we're just not going to change it much.

Greg Clark

There's a curious irony that a kind of innate conservatism promotes and sustains a social democratic ideal.

Matti Bunzl

I think that's true at this point. I'm not saying this is all good. I mean, Vienna is not a place – I mean, if you're a start-up company – I mean, I think I think we have start-ups in Vienna and more power to them, but it's not the most obvious place to go. I mean, it's really complicated, bureaucracy is complicated, the municipal structure is complicated. There are, I can tell you from my professional experience, absurd situations – we're a municipal institution, essentially, and we're running from office to office to office to office because the bureaucracy is massive. I mean, I'm not uncritical of this situation. But there are certain moments in which you realize that there are real advantages to it.

Greg Clark

Yes. And one of those real advantages, of course, is celebrated in the affordability of the housing stock, another is celebrated in the ubiquity of the transport system, another one in the social mobility we achieved at the school system. 

Matti Bunzl

Actually, the last one, I wish it was such. Social mobility, the numbers that we have are not great. All the other ones I'm with you 100%. And as I said, we're not perfect at all. And actually, the question of social mobility and education remains a truly potent one, especially when it comes to various migrant communities.

Greg Clark

That's interesting. We should explore that in a minute. But are you in a way saying that the social democracy that's ruled in Vienna for all these years makes it more ready for a turbulent future, or will it prove to be not as nimble as it might need to be?

Matti Bunzl

It depends what the future brings. I mean, if the future brings more pandemics, Vienna is your place. I mean, you know, if the future brings, you know, entrepreneurship, that becomes the end all and be all, then Vienna might not be your place.

Greg Clark

How do you think the end will emerge from this Covid crisis? Do you see any particular linkages with its climate change response or its other positional geopolitics more generally?

Matti Bunzl

I mean, assuming we will all come out of it in one way or another, Vienna will come out of it much stronger because the degree of trauma that is being inflicted on our population right now is minuscule compared to Britain and especially the US. I mean, we're going to have a running start. Ecologically speaking, Vienna and Austria are already at the forefront. But the problem with the ecological crisis is that that truly is a global crisis in which you cannot shut down the border. I mean, we shut down the border like everyone else did, and we instituted the lockdown, etc. That, you can actually do at the level of the nation state, but large-term ecological reform, Vienna and Austria are too insignificant for that. In the realm of what we can control, we're doing fine.

Greg Clark

Can you imagine the circumstances, Matti, in which the Social Democrats do not continue to win the city elections, and what might those circumstances be?

Matti Bunzl

Well, the greatest threat to the Social Democrats in Vienna has been Right-Wing Populists, and Right-Wing Populists thrive, as we know, ironically, on situations in which the actual general numbers of well-being are actually quite high. And right now, I'm quite calm about. Right-Wing Populists, because in the face of real, you know, hardship, they tend to do poorly because people realise that they have no answers. So right now, we're going to have an election in the fall. And I'm quite calm about it, assuming that that, broadly speaking, rational and progressive forces will prevail. At the last election – that was in the fall of 2015 – we had very, very different circumstances. Vienna was doing incredibly well. People essentially had no real problems. Then we had the refugee crisis, which also didn't harm us in the slightest, but was, of course, the perfect breeding ground for Right-Wing Populists. And they managed to get 30%. And the last poll I saw from this week is they're at 13%.

Caitlin Morrissey

I'm interested in your views on the main tensions and concerns in Vienna at the moment.

Matti Bunzl

Well, housing, I mean, the question of housing and affordable housing is a global urban issue again. I mean, all the numbers bear this out. We have probably the least – of all the major truly global cities, we probably have the least problem with that, in part because we have such a huge stock of public housing that actually is at a number where it can really affect the market. I mean, part of the problem is that, I mean, there's public housing everywhere. But if the public housing is five% of all the housing, then, you know, the city, the municipality is not a player in the market. Well, with 60%, we are. I mean, we, the municipality is, you know, so housing is a huge issue. Rents and rents going up is a huge issue. Of course, migration is a huge issue. I mean, there is – it's one thing to be right-wing populist assholes, you know, basically mobilising resentment and stirring resentment for absolutely cynical reasons. I mean, that is one thing. And it needs to be fought. But on the other hand, you know, it's not without complications that you have lots of people with lots of different languages in one city. I happen to think that it's fabulous and incredibly enriching. But there are complications when you have, you know, school classes in which 80, 85, 90% of the kids don't speak German at native level, regardless of what they speak at home.

I don't think this is insurmountable, but it's certainly an issue. I mean, if you are a teacher or principal in the Viennese schools, I mean, you face challenges, you face the challenges of a truly ethnically diversifying city. And those of us who don't want to resort, obviously, to right-wing populism about it still have to find models and answers to how this is all going to go. And this is going back to what I was saying earlier, I wish the educational system were more successful than it actually is in offering sort of ladders up the class system.

Greg Clark

I want to pick up on this education point, because in a way, this issue about social mobility and education and migrancy, you could say that part of the Vienna promise is that a good school system would bring people into social mobility and into more shared prosperity. Why doesn't it, and why doesn't the city government do something about that?

Matti Bunzl

The city government is trying, and it's not that it's never successful, but compared to Germany, I think there has been less success in social mobility, and it has something to do with the history of migration, but it also has something to do with class mobility, even absent migration. Part of it is, again, being a conservative society, a conservative country, it makes class mobility less likely. If we look at the numbers, the number of people of working-class background who go on to university is quite small. It needs to be higher.

There's also an educational system that still has a traditional separation of – a bifurcation at the age of 10, which is highly problematic. So everyone goes to the same elementary school and then at the age of 10, you either go into what's called the Gymnasium, which takes you onto the track of A-levels and university, or you go into what's called middle school, Mittelschule, which is basically a vocational track and ends at fifteen. There's been a longstanding attempt to reform that, there's complicated politics involved, but that still exists and it's certainly not the kind of system that is very amenable to class mobility.

Also, we still have to catch up on the availability of both kindergartens and childcare opportunities that really make it possible for women to enter the labour market in the most effective ways possible. That too obviously has a correlation with social mobility, because if women are basically kept down, broadly speaking, by the system, there tends to be much more of a reproduction of traditional social structure. So those are some of the factors that need to be worked on. People here are aware of it. It's not that people don't see it, but it's one thing to understand the situation, analyse it, and then come up with really forceful remedies.

Caitlin Morrissey

So we spoke earlier about the fact that the future is uncertain. But I'm really keen to know what kind of strands of Vienna's DNA you see being at the forefront in the next 20 - 25 years in our near future? 

Matti Bunzl

Well, I do think one of the things – I mean, we have metrics for this, right? I mean, Vienna is consistently ranked as one of the most liveable cities in the world. I mean, everything we've been talking about, I think, has something to do with that, both from where it's located and geology. Climate is changing, but it's still very favourable. The social democratic tradition, etc. I think Vienna has the chance to be one of those places that people really want to live in. And this involves both the people who are already here and Vienna being a magnet for migration in all kinds of ways. And if the city plays its cards right, it can become an absolute hub of a kind of sustainable creativity that is rooted in a social connectedness, and in its best moments that is how Vienna comes across.

I mean, I'll give you a specific example. Vienna has two phenomenally good arts academies, and those arts academies draw a truly global studentship, of whom many decide to stay in Vienna. And if you look at Vienna's contemporary art scene, which I know a little bit, because, you know, my job, it is just a flourishing location, because if I'm a young artist and I came from Nigeria, I came from Peru or I came from, I don't know, Azerbaijan and I went to the Vienna Academy, I'm, in theory, just as likely to go on to Paris or Berlin or London to try to make my career there. But the greater the draw is to remain in Vienna, the more likely a scenario where the next great artist or the many next great artists are in Vienna, not in New York. And in the quality of life, in the security, in the organizedness of the city. I think Vienna has real potential. No question about it.