_{Excerpt from the cultural movie “Rund um Wien” (Around Vienna) D-1941} 

While the portrayal of Vienna in feature films has already been subject of extensive scholarly research, a comparable investigation has not yet been carried out for cultural movies. This gap is especially surprising given that cultural movies developed strategies for the audiovisual representation of the city that differed markedly from the paradigms of fictional movies. Essentially, cultural movies served as an attempt for communicating ideological worldviews. This project illustrates this through two distinct periods in the city’s history: the era of National Socialist rule and the post-war period.

The guiding criterion for examining Vienna’s image in cultural movies from both eras is the role of film music. Unlike “fiction” movies in German-language cinema of the 1940s and 1950s—where plot took precedence and music usually played only a sporadic, accentuating role—in cultural movies, music provided a continuous interpretive layer to the moving image. Within this framework, the audiovisual representation of Vienna as the “City of Music” in cultural movies emerges as a particularly compelling research area. This approach also enables us to trace the different ideological intentions that National Socialism and the early Second Republic projected into the genre.