In autumn of 1888, a clandestine operation took place in Vienna. The target was no military installation, research laboratory, or government office. It was a brickyard, and the man who penetrated its security perimeter in disguise was a physician and newspaper editor called Victor Adler. He had no rational reason to be here, risking prison for burglary and a beating by the guards. Adler was independently wealthy, with an established medical practice, and he owned his own newspaper. He went because he was angry – angry at the injustice, the exploitation and cruelty he saw every day. What he found inside the guarded compounds made him angrier still.
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On 1 December 1888, he published the first of two articles describing what he had seen. Inside the factories, entire families of workers, men, women, and children, worked brutally long hours to make bricks. They lived on site, sleeping in barracks or huts, some in abandoned kilns, crowded onto makeshift cots or bedding down on heaps or foal or sand, covered with ragged blankets. Their pay was given in stamped tin tokens they could redeem for overpriced food and alcohol at the company store, and it was so paltry many walked for miles to a nearby cannery to beg ‘gulash broth’ (Gulaschsaft) left over after processing meat. Others walked over an hour to a soup kitchen where they received free portions at the end of a long workday. Adler described their plight in horrific detail.
The people he had met were known as Ziegelböhmen, migrant workers from Bohemia who came to Vienna in the hope of earning a living, but found themselves effectively imprisoned. Adler described them as “…the poorest slaves the sun shines upon.” Yet their labour built the greatest city of the German-speaking world: Vienna.
It is too often forgotten that, for all of Berlin’s grandeur and Munich’s charm, there was no equal to the old imperial capital in culture, art, and architecture. People from all over Europe came to admire and study its buildings, visits its grand museums, its famous theatres, operas and concert halls, ride along its Ringstrasse boulevard, and walk its scenic parks. All this glory, still a tourist attraction of global reach, was built on the backs of thousands of starving, freezing labourers drawn from the Bohemian countryside.
Aside from culture, style, and savoir-vivre, Vienna differed from Berlin or Dresden in that it was a genuinely multicultural city. Its people spoke mostly German, but also Hungarian, Italian, Croat, Czech, Polish, Ruthenian, Serbian, Romanian, Yiddish and Russian. Situated at this crossroads of cultures, the wealth of the city’s affluent classes fostered a unique culinary culture. Viennese food, but especially Viennese confectionery, is still world famous. Particularly Bohemians were known as skilful cooks, leading bourgeois families to hire Czech-speaking kitchen staff by preference, but the glory of it was no one nation’s. Ottoman and Italian, German, Central European and Balkan traditions today meet in every Kaffeehaus spread of cakes.
A modest, and genuinely Bohemian, part of this is Kolatschen. The word is borrowed from Czech where it means a leavened cake with a sweet topping, though in Vienna it came to mean something you bought individually from a baker, a kind of hand pie. By the time Katharina Prato writes down this exhaustive recipe in her Süddeutsche Küche, the meaning is clearly still very much in flux:
Kolatschen with a poppyseed or plum filling. You prepare a dough of 7 decilitres of milk, a thin starter of 2 decagrammes of yeast that are mixed with 2 decilitres of milk, a spoonful of sugar, and a little flour, 5 decagrammes of butter or beef fat, 2 egg yolks, a little salt, and the necessary amount of additional flour. After beating it, add two beaten egg whites. Spread the dough on a greased baking sheet to the thickness of a little finger, let it rise, then spread poppyseed or plum filling (pages 85 and 86) on it almost to the edge. Let the cake bake rather hot and cut it into small, square pieces.
Or: Distribute the dough on the sheet by spoonfuls, press a hollow into each piece and fill it with plum or poppyseed filling. Let the Kolatschen rise well, then brush their edges with butter, bake them. As they come out of the oven, brush them with butter and sprinkle them with grated gingerbread (Lebkuchen).
Or: Cut out the dough to round shapes with a large cookie cutter (Krapfenstecher). Put on them boiled prunes, chopped finely and mixed with sugar and cinnamon. Fold the dough over the filling on three sides, brush it with egg, sprinkle it with sugar, and bake it.
The last is the way Kolatschen are usually made in Austria today. The form is best suited for individual sale as a snack. In the Czech Republic, kolacz are more likely to be round and cut into individual slices to share. The basic principle is unaffected. The recipes for the filling are also varied:
Poppyseed filling No. I: Mix 4 decilitres of poppyseeds pounded fine or ground in a coffee mill with enough boiling cream to make a thick mash, then add 2 decilitres of honey, cinnamon, and lemon aroma.
No. II: Boil 14 decagrammes of sugar with one decilitre of water and add enough pounded poppyseed to make a thick mass. Then add cinnamon, lemon aroma, cloves, and a little cream.
No. III: Boil 2 decilitres of honey and mix in the pounded poppyseed and spices. Add a little wine as the filling is about to be spread.
No. IV: Stir 3 egg yolks with 10 decagrammes of butter and add 14 decagrammes of ground poppyseed, 5 decagrammes of clarified butter, 3 tablespoons of very good cream, 7 decagrammes of currants, cinnamon, vanilla, and the three egg whites beaten to a snow.
Plum filling No. I: Dried prunes are boiled, chopped finely, and simmered with sugar, cinnamon, lemon peel, allspice (Neugewürz), and the prune cooking liquid.
No. II: Powidl (plum puree) is cooked with water and wine so it spreads easily.
In the end, this is not so much a distinct recipe as a local expression of the global realisation that Leavened Dough With Sweet Fillings Tastes Good. Plum filling most likely became dominant because it was relatively cheap and familiar. Similar things had been cooked for centuries. Still, we need to keep in mind that these were luxuries. Small indulgences certainly, but unlike today, when a doughnut or cookie is always at hand, even bourgeois families like that of Dr. Adler did not have treats like this daily. If you earned just enough to survive locked into one of those brickyards, you might see one for a high holiday.
Victor Adler’s daring infiltration had immediate legal consequences. He had made public that employers paid their workers in company scrip and confined them in their factories – both strictly illegal. The police thus arrested two workers who had assisted him, and Adler himself was sued and fined. Nothing was done to remedy the situation. Yet, though the factory owners might control the law courts, they had lost badly in the court of public opinion. Austria-Hungary was not a democracy, but it had a relatively free press. Public anger forced the authorities to stop the payment in scrip and tolerate the forming of a union that successfully went on strike in 1895. The employers could not defeat them by lockouts as outside supporters fed and sheltered the strikers, and after eight days, the brickworkers had won. Their immediate gains were small – a modest raise, guaranteed working hours – but their standing as parties in collective bargaining ensured the old abuses could not easily be reimposed.
Victor Adler continued to involve himself in labour organisations and Social Democratic politics, becoming a member of parliament and, at the end of his life, briefly a minister in the provisional government that ended the monarchy. He died in 1918, one day before the new Austrian Republic was proclaimed, but his work was continued.
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In Vienna, the solid working class vote not least of the brickmakers, construction workers, and domestic servants, ensured a Socialist city council until it was ended by a fascist coup in 1934. This ‘Red Vienna’, faced with a crisis of underemployment, overcrowding, and the aftermath of a World War, undertook a daring experiment. They used the old imperial capital’s vast construction industry to build modern, no-frills social housing on a grand scale. The Ziegelböhmen who for generations had toiled to raise operas and palaces now made the material for a revolution in urban housing that was soon copied in cities across the German-speaking world. The strategy was fiscally and socially risky, but it paid enormous dividends. To this day, the city’s strong stock of public housing ensures that rents in Vienna remain far more affordable than in any other large German-speaking city, and its 1920s housing developments are now considered pioneering efforts in modern architecture. In 1924, one of them was named in honour of Victor Adler.