During the 1920s and early ’30s Social Democrats and their intellectual supporters dominated Vienna. Historians have given less attention to the city’s right-wing intelligentsia of that era. Janek Wasserman fills the gap with Black Vienna, which examines ideologues opposed to both socialism and capitalism; disdainful of democracy, they promoted a vision of society grounded in Roman Catholic social doctrine. The “black” (as opposed to “red”) intelligentsia fell across a spectrum, with some supporting the relatively moderate Austrian fascism that governed their country from 1933-1938 but many others pursuing the more radical agenda of Nazism. Ironically, many of the philosophers, pundits and academics whose ideas helped lay the path for Hitler were arrested by the Gestapo once the Nazis seized Austria.
