Being Nationalized "Inner Nature": Acceptance and Resistance by the Friends of Nature in "Red Vienna"

Takako FURUKAWA

This paper investigates how the climbing association for workers of the Social Democratic Party in "Red Vienna", the Friends of Nature, had maintained their original wandering activities through nature since fin-de-siècle, and reacted against the health managements by the party in the interwar period. And it would be clarified when the association showed their liberal thoughts that had been influenced through bourgeois alpine associations, and resisted the course of the health management policy by the party that managed to nationalize the population. The party regarded mountain climbing and wander just as the means to recover the population that had been reduced in the lost WWI and to build a socialist nation. The Friends of Nature almost agreed with the party’s policy and co-worked, but tried to enlighten the young radical-left by using the liberal methods of studying through nature, when they were confronted with the too much politicized youth. Moreover, they resisted such compulsory abstinence from drinking as the youth strongly insisted on, because they regarded it as interfering in individual private sphere, i.e. male mountain-climber’s body, and besides, drinking was the custom of mountain climbing associations. The Friends of Nature, however, agreed the nationalizing policy for women, because they had less interests in the female health management than in the young male's one. They only wanted to nationalize young tough men in order to get their successors of mountain climbers. This proves that the socialist mountaineers had even in the interwar era an exclusive thought of liberals, since they had accepted it at the end of the 19^th century.