1POPULAR CINEMA

the topos in an expanded cinematic landscape but also introduces yet another
vantage point from which to rethink the category of the national along
the lines described in Chapter 1.
“Vienna” reemerged as an imaginary city of cinema during a fundamental
crisis in the city’s cultural, social, and political identity. But 1938 was
not the first occasion for such heightened textual productivity; it simply
marked the moment when the existing urban narratives became available
to appropriation by the new institutional and ideological constellations.
From the literary and musical origins of this famous urban myth in the
nineteenth century to its further filmic encoding during the silent and early
sound period, “Vienna” had always functioned as a mediator between political
and cultural practices. However, the convergence of cinema and psychoanalysis
at the turn of the century also enlisted the city in more elusive
constellations of desire and fantasy. Through the modernist designs of Hoffmann
and Loos, the reflections on language by Hofmannsthal and Wittgenstein,
the erotic provocations of Schiele and Klimt, and the dissonant sounds
of Schönberg and Krenek, Vienna established itself as a privileged locus
within the dialectics of mass culture and modernity. Associated with new
artistic, literary, and musical trends, but still embedded in the rituals of tradition,
the capital of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire became
identified with such highly charged oppositions as regeneration vs. degeneration,
innovation vs. conservation, provocation vs. contemplation, and so
forth. Cultural historians have shown how this oppositional structure found
expression in a deep sense of ambivalence in the conception of modern life
that affected everything from aesthetic tastes and artistic practices to social
attitudes and political beliefs. 5
However, the most advanced mass medium did not participate in this
reflection on modern urban life. In fact, Vienna’s liberating effect on avantgarde
practices started a powerful countertrend that gave new credence to
the nostalgic images of the Austrian capital prevalent in popular culture.
Two points seem particularly relevant for an analysis of the Vienna films
made after the annexation: the preference for historical settings and the
close identification of the city with music. 6 In the majority of popular operettas,
folk plays, and genre films, sentimentality ruled; in their artificial
worlds, modernism and modernity seemed never to have occurred. Profoundly
modern in terms of its technological means but deeply invested in
the representational models of the nineteenth century, the cinema continued
to conjure up an imaginary past sustained by stable social relations and
The Annexation of an Imaginary City 151