Freud's Free Clinics

1919
earlier the same year (1919) by the renowned architect Walter Gropius, are
generally better known today but are comparable in intent to the Wiener
Gemeindebauten. Like Gropius’s buildings, Vienna’s Gemeindebauten celebrated
modern mechanization with standardized and even prefabricated
units designed to enhance human efficiency without sacrificing the equally
human need for aesthetic gratification. The Viennese and the Weimar housing
projects shared an underlying social democratic logic, that of the prewar
theories and practices of Loos, Peter Behrens, and Bruno Taut. Art and craft
together, functionalism joining aesthetics, reason and passion, Germany’s
Bauhaus studio school (in some ways like the Vienna Werkstätte) merged
fine and applied arts to produce an exhilarating array of designs for furniture,
lamps, rugs, pottery, jewelry, typefaces and book designs, dance and music.
With the power of a heroic German myth, Gropius’s theory and practice of
communal “total architecture” envisioned the “new building of the future,
which will be everything together, architecture and sculpture and painting, in
a single shape, rising to heaven from the hands of millions of craftsmen as a
crystal symbol of a new emerging faith.” 6 The same could be said of the
Wiener Gemeindebauten, the exceptional construction program that would
rehouse thousands of families over the next fifteen years and was, as early as
1919, the centerpiece of Red Vienna. In Germany and Austria these expansive
and beautifully designed buildings were fully congruent with the social welfare
orientation of the psychoanalysts.
This housing campaign became a flashpoint in the political tensions between
the city’s ruling left-wing party and the nation’s conservative, proclerical,
and vehemently antisocialist majority. The Christian Socials—among
them the conservative psychiatrist Julius von Wagner-Jauregg—also saw
themselves as defenders of the average working-class family, still championing
their enormously popular anti-Semitic platform originally promoted
by Karl Lueger, Vienna’s powerful mayor from 1897 to 1910. When Hitler was
living in Vienna, from 1908 to 1913, he absorbed Lueger’s vengeful hatred of
socialists and Jews as well as the mayor’s community-oriented rhetoric. Paradoxically,
Lueger’s administration also strengthened the city’s public infrastructure
and centralized the distribution of gas, electricity, drinking water,
and the Stadtbahn, the sleek municipal railway with stations designed by Otto
Wagner. And Austria had in place a national health department (a section of
the ministry of public welfare) with remarkably modern sanitary laws, controlling
water supplies and sewage, food inspection, communicable diseases,
and building irregularities since 1870. Other large Central European cities saw
comparable urban rebuilding plans developed after the 1918 revolutions
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