“Aufrechterhaltung der gemeinsamen Kultur”. Die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft und die Österreichisch‐Deutsche Wissenschaftshilfe in der Zwischenkriegszeit

Abstract

After the end of the Great War, private as well as public research funding in Austria was anaemic and slow to develop. Whereas the German state-funded Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) was established as early as 1920, first steps in that direction were only taken in Austria in the late 1920s. In 1929, the Osterreichisch-deutsche Wissenschaftshilfe (ODW) was founded under the auspices of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the DFG. Although prima facie on an equal footing, the new research funding organisation was in fact highly dependent on its German cooperation partner. The article explores for the first time ODW's position within the German and Austrian science and foreign policies, which aimed to promote the idea of unification of both states within the German Reich. A quantitative analysis of the subsidies policy in the first five years of existence shows that the ODW gave financial aid primarily to conservative research fields, affecting the intellectual balance of power in the First Austrian Republic. Policy continuities and discontinuities of the organisation in the course of the national-socialist rise to power in Germany after 1933 are examined in the second part of the article. The article thus both increases our knowledge about the most important German research funding organisation DFG, and identifies some of the fundamental structural features of Austrian science policy in the interwar years.