ABSTRACT
In 1927, the most dramatic event in Vienna happened in mid-July when brazen paramilitary groups accused of randomly shooting into a crowd of Social Democrats in Schattendorf, a small town near the Hungarian border, were swiftly acquitted by a conservative court. By nightfall, over 600 protesting workers had been killed and wounded by the Viennese police and the Palace of Justice set on fire. In Vienna’s 13th District, May 1928 saw the Hietzing School complete its full first year of education and validate, as Erik and Joan Erikson put it, “John Dewey’s theory that children learn only where their interest is fully engaged and centered.” The redistributive economic policies of Red Vienna’s financial decision-makers, Robert Danneberg and Hugo Breitner, took hold, and surplus funds were invariably sent to institutions of social welfare. Very few works about the historic educational and psychoanalytic nucleus that the Hietzing School represents are available in English.
