Österreichische Zeitgeschichte—Zeitgeschichte in Österreich: Eine Standortbestimmung in Zeiten des Umbruchs ed. by Marcus Gräser and Dirk Rupnow

Abstract

Reviewed by: Österreichische Zeitgeschichte—Zeitgeschichte in Österreich: Eine Standortbestimmung in Zeiten des Umbruchs ed. by Marcus Gräser and Dirk Rupnow Tim Corbett Marcus Gräser and Dirk Rupnow, eds., Österreichische Zeitgeschichte—Zeitgeschichte in Österreich: Eine Standortbestimmung in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Vienna: Böhlau, 2021. 872 pp. It is difficult in such a brief review to do justice to an almost nine-hundred-page volume showcasing the work of forty-six individual scholars. Yet the very size of the volume and the breadth of topics addressed therein already speaks to the vibrancy of the field of Austrian contemporary history, which here seems to be consensually defined as reaching from 1918 and the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy into the present day. As illustrated in an amusing quote by the pioneering historian Erika Weinzierl, this means that the field in its most contemporary forms comes up "hart an der Grenze zum Journalismus" (cited in Marcus Gräser's contribution, 53). The volume is divided into three thematic categories. "Epochen und Zäsuren" covers historical eras from the First Republic through to Austria in its European Union years. "Felder und Themen" addresses issues within contemporary history as varied as gender, postcolonialism, and sports. And lastly, "Verhältnisse" explores the entanglement of the field with other areas of inquiry such as the economy, environment, politics, culture, and law, as well as with non-university institutions like archives and museums. Readers in search of a comprehensive history of Austria from World War I to the present will be disappointed, for this is not a work of history per se but rather an overview of actors, approaches, and points of discussion underlying the development of the field since its inception in the 1950s and 1960s and the appertaining bodies of historiography. As such, this volume will be most [End Page 95] useful as a reference work for scholars and students working in contemporary Austrian history and related fields and could be viewed as something of a primer on related discourses. Indeed, the self-reflexivity of the volume is one of its most laudable features—given that history as a discipline in this respect can be notoriously stuffy in comparison to other fields in the humanities, as evinced for example in the almost neurotic avoidance of the first-person pronoun in historiographic writing (as though this obviated the subjectivity of the historian as an individual researcher and author). The contributors to this volume are for the most part refreshingly self-aware of their place within a sociopolitical continuum conditioned not only by their own ideological leanings but also personal networks, funding landscapes, and institutional entanglements. Perhaps the most interesting finding in this respect is the relative absence of controversy in this field over the decades, a curiosity explained by various authors through the close personal relationships underlying this comparatively small discipline on the one hand and the postwar schism between left-and right-wing narratives (commonly called Koalitionsgeschichtsschreibung) on the other (see especially the introduction, 15–16, and the somewhat anecdotal reflections of the historian emeritus Helmut Konrad, 30–31, to whose life work this volume is essentially dedicated). Another conspicuous facet of this monumental work is its near-exclusive focus on the inner-Austrian, German-language dimension of the field. The authors appear to have been selected exclusively from inner-Austrian contexts and the historiographies addressed focus predominantly on inner-Austrian research—a reference in the introduction (12) to the large number of German nationals in the field (including the two editors) notwithstanding. This appears strange considering the significant number of individuals and institutions outside Austria, especially in the English-speaking world, specializing in modern Austrian history, culture, and society, including a number of leading publications such as this very journal (despite its traditional focus on literary scholarship, JAS does regularly touch on key issues in contemporary Austrian history, too). This struck me especially with regard to my own area of specialization, namely modern Jewish history in Austria. Following decades of silence and erasure in the aftermath of the Holocaust, scholarly interest in Jewish Austrian history was reignited in the 1980s by a range of English-language scholars such as Marsha Rozenblit, George Berkley, Robert...