A contested terrain: immigrants and their descendants in Viennese culture

Abstract

Culture in Vienna has become more diverse with successive waves of immigration since the 1960s, but Austrian cultural policies have been slow in picking up this trend. While the federal state has been focusing on maintaining traditional cultural institutions in Vienna such as the Staatsoper, the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the city of Vienna has pushed integration and later diversity in cultural policies since the 1990s, albeit more in discourse than in actual funding. Artists of immigrant origin harshly criticise this dire situation: they claim the place which they have not yet been granted, not only in cultural policies, but also in society.

Keywords:

• migrants
• ethnic minorities
• cultural policies
• literature
• theatre
• Austria

Notes

1. 1. I would like to thank Theodora Manolakos for providing me with data on the educational level of the Viennese population.

2. 2. The following ethnic groups were recognised as autochthonous minorities in Austria after the Second World War: Slovenes, Croats, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks and Roma and Sinti.

3. 3. Vienna is both a federal state and a commune.

4. 4. I have not analysed the whole budget dedicated to cultural initiatives, but only the funding awarded to associations, which constituted more than 90% of the budget in all years analysed here (see column 4 in Table 2). I have categorised those associations as linked to immigrants and their descendants that are immigrant associations or whose projects are devoted to members of immigrant communities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wiebke Sievers

WIEBKE SIEVERS is researcher at the Institute for Urban and Regional Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.