'Revolutionizing the mind': Social Democratic associational culture in late imperial Vienna (Austria)

"'Revolutionizing the Mind': Social Democratic Associational Culture in Late Imperial Vienna" broadly addresses the relationship between high culture, mass politics, and popular culture at the end of Europe's long nineteenth century. Beginning with constitutional reforms in 1867 and ending with the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy at the end of the First World War in 1918, this dissertation examines how the ascendant Austrian Social Democratic party mobilized its constituency through a conscious appropriation of the language and symbolism of dominant confessional Catholicism. Convinced that only the educated worker was capable of political participation, a liberally educated leadership attempted to impart the party's values to its members by infusing new meaning into Austrian social and cultural traditions. The Social Democratic party organized street demonstrations and founded political and cultural associations modeled consciously on traditional form and ritual in order to cultivate Austrian workers intellectually and spiritually. The dissertation examines the successes and failures of the party's cultural politics using the examples of the Viennese Free Peoples' Theater (1906-1915) and the Workers' Symphony Concert Association (1905-1918).; These associations quickly became focal points of conflict as the popular culture of the party's constituency and the aspirations of the party's leadership intersected in venues that had once been reserved for the city's cultural and political elites. The democratization of the formerly exclusive arenas of politics thus mirrored those of art. This dissertation illuminates several previously unexamined areas of cultural and political conflict that surfaced between workers, Social Democrats, and Liberals in late imperial Vienna. More importantly, this analysis demonstrates that the cultural education of the working classes was not a surrogate for political participation, but instead constituted a deliberate component of the party's efforts to create a more inclusive political culture in Austria.