The Art of Dwelling in Public.  Domestic and Public Space  in Milena Jesenská’s  Fashion Reportages of 1920-22 Vienna

Mariaenrica Giannuzzi

doi:10.13125/2039-6597/6267

Mariaenrica Giannuzzi Cornell University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/6267

Keywords: Viennese coffeehouse, New Woman, Red Vienna, Milena Jesenská, Domesticity, Privat/public divide, Flaneuse

Abstract

Drawing on feminist urban studies (Stratigakos 2015, 2008; Blau 2015, 1999; Fitz-Krasny 2019), I revisit the early journalistic work of Milena Jesenská: the fourteen pieces that report from Vienna under siege in the aftermath of WWI for the Czech-language Prague-based periodical Tribuna, and yet, in a fashion column. As I argue, these texts illustrate new spaces of dwelling, namely how it is possible to dwell “in public”. Jesenská’s narratives capture eating habits according to wealth, occupation, class, personal expectations, ideology, and gender. Her literary ethnography of 1920s Vienna blurs the public/private divide. Specifically, her texts render the coffeehouse as a site of “fashionable poverty” that allows for the emergence of a new flaneuse, bohemian (and Bohemian), lifestyle. In Jesenská’s literary practices, the café becomes an icon of a libertine and decadent life for all, with a radical aesthetic: the obsession with a single idea (self-branding), expensive meals on credit (financial credibility and gift economy), and allegedly promiscuous sexual bonds connotes the coffeehouse as the most liminal of the spatial negotiations.

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