Abe Streep

Link 2: The development of the Ringstrasse and its immediate effects upon Vienna’s social structure.

In 1857 the Hapsburg Emperor Franz Joseph announced the beginning of construction on the Ringstrasse area, which had long served as an empty buffer zone between the inner and outer cities. This commencement went along with a series of mildly liberal reforms that were enacted following the failed revolution of 1848. The monarchy and the army firmly defeated the student and bourgeois rebels who swarmed the streets during that year, but the liberals had made it clear that they were no longer going to watch the city’s stagnant elitism sit on its high horse without hearing a peep from down below. As a result, several liberals were elected to the city council, and in 1850 a municipal statue was passed. This piece of legislature gave the citizens of Vienna the ability to lay claim to the broad glacis that was to become the modern Ringstrasse in the years immediately after the emperor’s announcement. Before the Ringstrasse was even developed it was evident that the everyday Viennese man would be able to make his mark and stake his claim on it; this fact would shape the evolution of the broad glacis are, its culture, and its politics.

Yet even with this municipal statute, Vienna was still clearly socially conservative in her promotion of Ringstrasse growth until 1866. The nobility was moving out into high class apartments and luxurious parks, initiating change, just as they had when they had begun to buy "country" houses in the suburbs in earlier centuries. This early aristocratic dominance of the Ringstrasse was evidenced by the 1854 construction of the grandiose Opera House. The social dynamic of the Ringstrasse changed, however, with the Austro-Prussian war. With the Austria and her mighty army weakened by foreign battles and defeats, the Hapsburgs were forced to give way to a liberal constitution (what the revolutionaries of 1848 had originally desired), and this led to the election of a city council with a distinctly liberal majority. Once the liberals were in power, the bourgeois, secular culture that was to identify the nineteenth century Ringstrasse flourished. First, the liberals won a major victory in the construction of the new Reichstat, or parliament building. The parliament, which was constructed next to the large, gothic Rathaus (city hall) was originally supposed to be housed in two separate buildings. The architect for the Reichstat had participated in the 1848 revolution, but had since fallen under aristocratic influence. He wanted to construct two houses, with the House of Lords being grander and more impressive than the House of Representatives: the House of Lords was to be in classical Greek style, and the House of Representatives was to be in the Renaissance style. Yet, this plan was thrown away after the war: the liberals decided on one building, constructed in the grandiose Greek mode, for the parliament. Thus, though the Reichstat was built in a domineering style that by no means identified with the lower echelons of the city, the representatives from the landed nobility and the representatives from the new bourgeoisie were at least united.

Next, the new Ringstrasse liberals won a major victory by getting the University placed next to the Rathaus and Reichstat, and thereby creating an environment in which secular learning and the unpredictability of potentially rebellious students were situated next to the center of the Viennese government. The site of the University was an old parade ground that had long been controlled by the Austrian army. Following the tumult of 1848 the military held no sympathy for the University or its students, and so acquiring the army’s land for the University seemed at first to be impossible an impossible task. Yet once the monarchy was weakened by the war and the liberals were empowered, the goal of having the University sitting right next to the Parliament became attainable.

What were the effects of all of these liberal victories? What happened as a result of the bourgeois control of the Ringstrasse? There was an increase in secular thought and learning, and a new importance was placed upon urban efficiency and the purpose, instead of the beauty, of the city. Commerce between the inner city and outer suburbs was increased with the construction of the Ringstrasse: the two were no longer physically separated. Manufacturers and artisans were brought closer to the city walls, as was evidenced by the growth of non-elite neighborhoods such as the Textile Quarter within the Ringstrasse. The textile quarter was in the northeast area of the Ringstrasse, and it housed the businesses and homes of many textile entrepreneurs. Yet, even though members of a non-elite industry were brought closer to the city in this way, the real working class people were still left out in the southern suburbs: most factories and manufacturers, including those that produced textiles, did not make their homes in the Ringstrasse. Another moderately liberal, and somewhat significant change that the development of the Ringstrasse brought about was the growth of apartment buildings. Four to six story high apartments filled up most of the Ringstrasse. These homes helped to urbanize the city, but they did not serve to integrate classes. The poor were cramped into small apartments in mostly poor regions, and the richer members of the bourgeoisie held apartments or town houses that were larger and more spread out, and situated in more luxurious, high class neighborhoods. Thus, the most important immediate change that was brought to Vienna by the Ringstrasse was a new way of thinking and a new, upper-middle class of liberals. Some of the social stagnancy that had for so long been held up by Vienna’s fortifications melted away with the walls themselves, but the growth of Ringstrasse liberalism certainly did not prove to wipe clean the city’s class differences and socio-geographic divisions.

Top Left: The Reichstat (parliament building), Top Right: Inside the Parliament

Bottom Left: The state Opera House, Bottom Right: Rathaus City Hall