Österreichische Historiker: Lebensläufe und Karrieren, 1900–1945 ed. by Karel Hruza

Abstract

Reviewed by: Österreichische Historiker: Lebensläufe und Karrieren, 1900–1945 ed. by Karel Hruza Günter Bischof Karel Hruza, ed., Österreichische Historiker: Lebensläufe und Karrieren, 1900–1945. Vol. 3. Vienna: Böhlau, 2019. 627 pp. This is the third volume in a series of books on well-known Austrian historians that were active between 1900 and 1945 (and some beyond the war). The three volumes portraying altogether forty-seven historians constitute something of an encyclopedia of Austrian historians in the first half of the twentieth century; the editor needs to be congratulated for finding competent authors to complete this series. In fact, not all of the thirteen historians portrayed in Volume 3 were historians—there are archeologists (C. Praschniker), ethnologists (H. Wopfner, A. Helbock), and geographers (H. Hassinger) among them. The scholarly biographies presented here are all characterized by careers that had to negotiate the vast political and regime changes that jolted Central Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. The careers of these men (and two women) had to adjust from the late Habsburg monarchy and the First World War to the penniless years of the First Republic, the brutal Nazi years after the Anschluss (welcomed by most of them), to the beginnings of the Second Republic. Most of the historians portrayed in this volume grew up in grossdeutsche bourgeois families, and their German nationalist upbringing defined their career trajectories. Small wonder then that eight of the thirteen portrayed in this volume were supporters of the National Socialist cause, some were party members; the rank careerist Uebersberger prided himself on being an "SS-Standartenführer" (169). Only Wopfner and Redlich were not swept up in the wave of Austrian enthusiasm for National Socialism—Wopfner was critical of the Italian "rape" of the German South Tyrol (117), but Redlich served as a functionary in the Ständestaat (55). Only Ludo Moritz Hartmann and Lucie Varga hailed from Jewish families—Hartmann was a committed Social Democrat, and Varga was married to a communist. Most of the academic career trajectories outlined here led through the historical seminar of the University of Vienna—a couple trained and worked at my alma mater, the University of Innsbruck (Wopfner, Helbock). Some of the leading historians portrayed here (Redlich, Uebersberger, Brunner, Borodajkewycz), received the elite, hidebound postdoc training of the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung (IÖG) at the University of Vienna, which also opened up to them careers as archivists. Of the fortyseven historians portrayed in the three volumes, thirteen went through the [End Page 84] IÖG training (18). The IÖG trained people in the best empirical document-based tradition. It seemingly did not open young historians' eyes to new methodologies practiced in the wider world. Since many of the IÖG-trained historians ended up with chairs at the University of Vienna, this sort of "historicist and source positivist" (14) training was passed on to subsequent generations of students. This might explain a lot about the study of history in Austria in the present day. If these historians cast their gaze onto historical discourses practiced outside of Austria, they networked mostly with German historians or Germans teaching and researching in East Central Europe (Prague, Breslau) or southeastern Europe. Balduin Saria is an interesting case. Hailing from a German community in Lower Styria (today's Slovenia), he trained in Vienna but worked in post–World War I Yugoslavia (Belgrade and Ljubljana). He too was a German nationalist and became an NSDAP party member and taught at the University of Graz during World War II. Oddly enough, the only historians portrayed in this volume who also took note of new Western European or American historical discourses were the two women portrayed together in one chapter. Erna Pazelt engaged the scholarship of the important Belgian medieval economic historian Henri Pirenne, and Lucie Varga as a refugee in Paris worked with Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, leading lights in the famous Annales school based in France (430). Pazelt even ventured twice to visit the United States for lecture tours, during the Anschluss in 1938 and after the war in 1947 (421, 422); astoundingly, during World War II she even taught courses on American...