Austrian Museum Research Articles

“Wartime” Ephemera from the Family Home in German and Austrian History Museums: A Counterexample to the British Case

When discussing “wartime ephemera”, of the kind that has been passed down through families since the Second World War, Germany and Austria could be considered as a counterexample to Britain. In German and Austrian historical memory, “wartime” cannot be separated from pre-war Nazi society (beginning in 1933 and 1938, respectively). Moreover, what we might loosely call the “Antiques Roadshow experience”—discussing family objects from the Second World War in a sympathetic public forum—has never been open to the majority of Germans and Austrians, who were rather inclined to hide and forget such objects in the family home. Even so, mundane Nazi-era objects survived in their millions and this essay discusses their display in German and Austrian history museums. There, they serve to illustrate a history of mentalities during and after the Nazi regime. Austrian museums are currently playing a proactive role in the transfer of objects from the private, family archive to public, cultural memory. This article considers how notions of “family” are constructed in museum discourse and asks how the millions of German and Austrian citizens and residents with no family connection to the Second World War can be included in a form of national family storytelling that arguably “re-ethnicizes” memory.

Catch of Reesa vespulae in Heritage Environments.

The skin beetle Reesa vespulae is regularly found beyond North America where it originated. The larvae cause considerable concern in museums, as they damage hides or furs in addition to being a special source of damage to collections of dried plants in herbaria or collections of insects and other zoological specimens. Reesa vespulae arrived in Europe in the mid-20th century and was associated mostly with stored food products, but over time, it has become recognised as a museum pest. Although it is still uncommon and may only be observed in a small fraction of museums, when the insect is found in large numbers, it can cause problems. Catches from blunder traps in Austrian museums and from an online database in the UK were used to track changing concern over the insect. As a single female beetle can continue to reproduce because the species is parthenogenetic, its presence can persist over long periods of time. Although small populations in museums are typically found in the adult form, the larval forms are more common where a site is infested by high numbers, perhaps because the larvae and adults must range more widely for food. Although R. vespulae can be controlled using pesticides, it is also possible to kill the larvae within infested materials through freezing or anoxia.

Investigating insect catch metrics from a large Austrian museum

Insects can damage museum collections. Heritage organisations are increasingly alert to such risk, so have moved towards integrated pest management which sees monitoring as important to conservation strategies. Museum insects are usually monitored using sticky traps, although the records these provide are not always easy to interpret or analyse, so scoring methods, pest occurrence indices and zone systems have been used to use the observations to manage pests. A six-year trapping programme at almost 700 sites (i.e. traps) across six floors of a large museum in Austria provided a total catch of ∼30 000 arthropods. Catch rate (catch per trap) was higher on lower floors although there was a substantial year-to-year variation. In addition to blunder traps, a proportion using pheromones as an attractant were effective at catching T. bisselliella. The pheromone is not attractive to silverfish (Zygentoma) yet the shy insects appear to take cover in the pheromone traps. In contrast Attagenus spp. were caught at equal rates on both pheromone and blunder traps. The study examined what factors influence the catch of insects in traps. The overall catch in a room is proportional to the number of traps set out. Catch increases with the size of the room, but this may arise because the number of traps is also related to room size. More specifically catch seems proportional to square root of room area, suggesting it relates to its perimeter. Infestations are revealed by high catch rate, maximum catches on a set of traps and the proportion of traps that are active in catching insects. The study aims to assess which parameters that might assist in identifying infested locations in museums.

Inventions, Speculations, Associations. Two Projects from Volkskundemuseum in Vienna

ABSTRACT The Volkskundemuseum (Austrian Museum of Folklife and Folk Art) in Vienna considers itself to be a thoroughly democratic, polyphonic museum in which not only cooperation partners but also the interested public have their say. But what role does academically researched information play? In the project “Speaking of Objects” participants took a close look at selected objects themselves and produced new narratives to share with the public through self-made podcasts. The project was led by Austrian artist group “gecko art.” In another project queer stories were invented for the performative tour entitled “Queer local history” by members of QWIEN – Center for Queer History. The stories drew attention to the heteronormative interpretation of the museum curators of the 1990s, or as Andreas Brunner and Hannes Sulzenbacher said: “One invents the homosexualization of the object, just as the museum or the curator invents the heterosexualization of the object.” In this contribution we not only present but also question the mediation methods that are full of fiction. The question raised here is if and when it is valid to invent stories about objects that could be mistaken for truth by the public.

Muzejní časopis Mittheilugen des Mährischen Gewerbe-Museums in Brünn (1883–1918) v kontextu časopisů uměleckoprůmyslových muzeí v českých zemích

The article focuses on the museum journal Mittheilungen des Mährischen Gewerbe-Museums in Brünn, one of the important source materials for research on the arts and crafts of the last third of the 19th century and the early 20th century not only in Moravia but also in the cultural areas of the Austrian monarchy. The journal was published in the Moravian Industrial Museum in Brno in 1883–1918, when the museum was headed by two important directors – August Prokop (1883–1893) and Julius Leisching (1893–1922). Under the influence of the latter, the museum became the press authority of the Association of Austrian Museums of Applied Arts, the Association of Austro-Moravian Local Museums and the German-Moravian Association of Heritage Preservation. The journal contained articles on art history and information on current exhibitions, museum collections and activities as well as on the museum library.

Austria Approaches Its Colonial Past: Prospects of a New Restitution Law for Cultural Objects

In January 2022 theAustrian government established an expert committee to study the colonial heritage in its federal museums. Although Austria is a country not considered to have an extensive colonial past, Austrian museums hold large collections of ethnographic objects and human remains that they acquired during the heydays of colonialism. This country report introduces the current restitution debate in Austria through a legal lens. It discusses the legal situation of cultural objects from colonial contexts and the instruments available to museums and the federal government to organize restitutions and formulate rules. From a comparative law perspective, the specific history of Austria might turn the currently-evolving Austrian approach into an interesting example for other countries with public holdings of cultural objects from colonial contexts but without a history of direct colonialism.

Evidence of Fungal Spreading by the Grey Silverfish (Ctenolepisma longicaudatum) in Austrian Museums

Abstract The grey silverfish Ctenolepisma longicaudatum is a new and serious pest spreading rapidly across Europe. Compared to the silverfish Lepisma saccharinum, it does not depend on relative humidity above 70% and thrives also in new museum buildings, modern storage depositories, apartments, and office buildings. Especially collections of graphic art, modern art on paper, photographs, but also archives and libraries are increasingly affected by this pest. Damage of paper objects has been reported by different authors and institutions across Europe. As these animals live in inaccessible cracks and crevices inside the buildings, we investigated the spread of microorganisms on living grey silverfish, to show a potential additional threat posed by this pest. In 8 locations in Austria living animals were collected with traps and placed for 10 min on agar plates which were incubated for 2 weeks. After incubation of 50 agar plates, between 2 and 20 colonies of fungi were growing on each plate. The most dominant fungal genera were Cladosporium (Cladosporium cladosporioides clade) and Penicillium (Penicillium glabrum, Penicillium decumbens); also, species of the genera Aspergillus, Alternaria, Botrytis, Bartalinia, Byssochlamis, Chaetomium and Mycothypha were found. The diversity of fungi reflects the common fungal community of museums and archives. The spores and mycelial fragments of the fungi are obviously travelling on the legs and bodies of the silverfish.

Public value of cultural heritages – towards a better understanding of citizen’s valuation of Austrian museums

ABSTRACT In times of scarce public funding, organisations that receive public funds face increasing pressure to legitimise themselves. Thus, museums must also legitimise themselves to receive public funds. They have to demonstrate that they provide a valuable contribution to society. Is the preservation of cultural goods a sufficient benefit for society or are museums valuable to citizens in any other way? To evaluate whether citizens see a benefit in museums and value museums, the concept of stakeholder-oriented public value is applied to museums. In contrast to former public sector reform models (like New Public Management), which have focused less on society and viewed citizens more as consumers and passive recipients of services, the public value concept adopts a citizen perspective in the sense of community governance. In order to analyse the interests of the citizens as main stakeholders of the services of the public sector, we conducted an explorative study in Austria. We developed a questionnaire to retrieve the interests of the citizens, obtaining 281 data sets for analysis. The study assessed the value that museums have for citizens as part of society. The findings show that, for the most part, citizens confirm that museums are valuable to them for several perspectives, namely the individual, societal and economic perspective. Previous research has mainly regarded the different types of values – individual, societal and economic – as separate categories. Our findings highlight that these specific values are interrelated. Our findings can inform policy recommendations.

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Neutron analyses of eight Bronze Age swords from Austria: The question of ‘stabbing’ or ‘cut-and-thrust’ weapons

European Bronze Age swords are rare finds; they cannot normally be sampled in the destructive manner that would be necessary to assess their manufacturing technique, or to obtain evidence regarding their use primarily as ‘stabbing’ or ‘slashing’ weapons. Therefore, non-invasive neutron-based methods are potentially ideal. In this paper, neutron diffraction (ND) and Neutron Resonance Capture Analyses (NRCA) are presented. The analyses were undertaken on eight Bronze Age metal-hilted swords of various types, from three Austrian museums. Neutron diffraction measurements were carried out on all eight swords at the ISIS Neutron Facility, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK), giving information about crystallographic microstructure, and major metal alloy and mineral compound proportions. NRCA was carried out on four of the swords at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Geel (BE), to determine the elemental compositions at various regions of these swords, because no invasive sampling was permitted. X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) was used to measure the elemental compositions of four swords from which one sample each was permitted to be cut for metallographic examination. The tin contents of the swords determined by NRCA, XRF and neutron diffraction data are in good agreement; some small differences could be well understood. Questions about the use of these swords as primarily either ‘stabbing’, or ‘cut-and-thrust’ weapons were addressed based on the neutron diffraction results and provide information which will be especially relevant for experimental archaeology and use-wear analysis.

Engaging migrant and refugee communities in non-formal science learning spaces

In this era of pandemics, economic crises and civil unrest, science centres and museums have an opportunity to become truly relevant resources to society. This paper summarises a number of critical lessons from the PISEA International Symposium, a conference held the at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in Vienna from the 17th–18th of October 2019. The purpose of this event was to share, learn, and discuss ways in which engagement with migrants and refugee populations might be improved within informal science learning spaces. Issues around integration, inclusive art-science practice, and shifting institutional policy and language were all explored. This paper also calls for the committed reform of informal science spaces, and a renewed commitment to responsive, equitable, and inclusive practice.

Through an Anticolonial Looking Glass: On Restitution, Indigenismo, and Zapatista Solidarity in Raiders of the Lost Crown

This essay examines Raiders of the Lost Crown (2013), by Fran Ilich (b. 1975, Tijuana), as an example of current experimental artistic-literary production that uses transmedial narrative forms to articulate a capacious anticolonial critique and trace historical connections between (neo)colonial and (neo)imperial formations. Raiders took the form of an alternate reality game whose players were charged with recapturing a legendary pre-Columbian Mexica (Aztec) headdress from an Austrian museum. The gameplay unfolded across myriad platforms, including an intervention at the museum, epistolary exchanges, a petition campaign, and participation in a solidarity economy. With mordant wit and calculated deception, Raiders puts on display the colonial character of museums, neoliberal economic regimes, and the geopolitical determinations that define debt and property while ironizing and provincializing Eurocentric humanism's universalizing claims and the moral feelings founded on these. Raiders critiques the neocolonial character of the Mexican state and its indigenismo in a manner that attests to the influence that Zapatista discourse and the history of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation have had on the politics and aesthetics of Ilich's work. Finally, in a speculative and utopic register, Raiders invokes the possibility of a future beyond European colonial modernity.

“German Industriousness, German Spirit, German Energy, and German Persistence”: Habsburg Cultural Politics and the Moravian Design Museum

Galleries and museums were key to the development of the public sphere in nineteenth-century Europe and America; museums of design and applied arts had an additional mission, namely, to promote economic competitiveness by improving the quality of design. This story is well known in relation to museums in London, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. But what role did museums outside of the capital cities play? This article analyzes the growth of museums of design in Bohemia and Moravia in the late nineteenth century, focusing on the Moravian Design Museum in Brno. It considers what happened when ideas about museums and their public purposes encountered the forces of municipal politics. Rudolf Eitelberger (1817–85) founded the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry in Vienna as a means of disseminating a shared idea of aesthetic and cultural value, but how successful was this idea in gaining acceptance outside of Vienna?

Review: Friedrich Kiesler: Lebenswelten/Life Visions

Friedrich Kiesler: Lebenswelten/Life Visions Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art (MAK), Vienna 15 June–2 October 2016 This exhibition focusing on the Austrian American Friedrich (Frederick) Kiesler (1890–1965) was the latest in a series at the MAK devoted to protagonists of the Wiener Moderne ; it followed exhibitions on Josef Frank and on the relationship between Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos.1 Kiesler has become a familiar figure in the Viennese museum scene. In 1997 his estate was purchased by the Austrian state and the city of Vienna. The same year saw the establishment of the Austrian Friedrich and Lilian Kiesler Foundation, which has since undertaken exemplary research, resulting in exhibitions and a growing awareness of Kiesler's relevance to contemporary discourse. The last significant exhibition, The Scenery Explodes—Frederick Kiesler, Architect and Visionary Theater Designer , was mounted by the Austrian Theater Museum in 2012–13.2 In 2015, Birkhauser published Endless Kiesler , a comprehensive account of Kiesler's spatial innovations.3 Thanks to the foundation's efforts, Kiesler is now one of the best-known figures of Viennese modernism. The curators of the exhibition at the MAK, Dieter Bogner, Maria Lind, and Barbel Vischer, set themselves the challenge of developing a new approach to Kiesler's career. Using a transdisciplinary methodology, they made Kiesler's transgression of boundaries their focus. Specifically, they stressed the interaction Kiesler achieved between aesthetic and empirical-scientific practices and their reflection of the environment and lifeworld ( Lebenswelt ). The Lebenswelten of the exhibition title …

The exhibition for sale. The Austrian Museum for Art and Industry between nationalistic exploitation and self-perception as an educational institution during the Austrofascist era

The presented case study offers an outline of Vienna’s museum of applied arts’ history during the transitional phase from Austria’s First Republic to the authoritarian regime of Austrofascism. It covers if and to which degree external factors like political ideologies were infl uencing the institution’s exhibition policies. Especially under the intense scrutiny of the ruling regime any proactive undertaking on the part of any museum’s director holdsspecial importance. Even more so as in this case Richard Ernst, the acting director, held this post from 1932 to 1950, thereby allowing the assessment of his policies throughout several changes of government. The study suggests that the modernisation of the exhibition space that took place under his leadership is connected to an overall repositioning as a scientific institution in opposition (or at least complementation) to the museum’s previous function as a promotional platform for Austrian businesses at home and abroad. Il caso di studio presenta uno spaccato della storia del Museo di Storia delle Arti Applicate di Vienna durante la transizione dall’Austria della Prima Repubblica all’affermazione del regime autoritario dell’Austrofascismo. Intende dimostrare se e in quale misura fattori esterni come le ideologie abbiano infl uenzato le politiche espositive dell’istituzione. Specialmente sotto l’intenso controllo del regime ogni attivita proattiva dei direttori museali assume particolare importanza, come si evince dal caso di Richard Ernst, direttore in carica dal 1932 al 1950, che permette di effettuare una valutazione delle scelte da lui effettuate nel corso di dei diversi cambi di governo. Lo studio dimostra che la modernizzazione dello spazio espositivo, che ebbe luogo sotto la sua direzione, e connessa a una risistemazione globale del museo come istituzione scientifi ca, in opposizione (o almeno come completamento) alla precedente funzione intesa come strumento di promozione per le imprese austriache in patria e all’estero.

The art of the old masters — Tableware of the Anabaptists and Haban faience from Western Slovakia in the collections of the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in Vienna

The Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in Vienna was founded in 1895. From the beginning, ceramics were collected. Today, the ceramic collections include about 15,000 objects, of which more than 300 are faiences most probably originating from the west of Slovakia. About 70 of these are from the 17th century and about 80 from the 18th century. Many of the objects entered the collections in the early years of the museum through donations and purchases. An important patron was the art historian Alfred Ritter Walcher von Molthein (1867–1928). He was one of the 19th century researchers and collectors who started the Haban myth about the Hutterites. Between 1974 and 2008, the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art had a branch museum in Burgenland, the Ethnographic Museum in Kittsee Castle. During restoration work on the castle, shards were found that are known as the Kittseer Kellerfund (Kittsee cellar find)

Exhibiting the Austro-Hungarian Empire: The Austrian Museum for Folk Culture in Vienna, 1895-1925

The Austrian Museum for Folk Culture (Österreichisches Museum für Volkskunde) was established in 1895 in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Initially founded as ‘monument of a state of nations [Völkerstaat]’ it acted on and facilitated larger imperial projects of statecraft, war and international diplomacy that spanned the Empire and its displacement in the interwar period (Schmidt 1960: 29). While much of the Museum’s collection was acquired in the years before the Empire’s collapse in 1918, I argue that it was only in the Empire’s afterlife that the Museum was able to perform its memory work for an entombed ‘state of nations’. The Museum projected this site of imperial memory initially onto a post-imperial pan-European map and then, following the rise of German nationalism in Germany and Austria, onto a pan-German vision of empire and nationhood.

Dating furniture and coopered vessels without waney edge – Reconstructing historical wood-working in Austria with the help of dendrochronology

In the present study, 208 furniture and 168 coopered vessels from three Austrian museums were examined. Dendrochronology was used to date objects and to extract further information such as the necessary time for seasoning, wood loss through wood-working and methods of construction. In most cases sampling was done by sanding the cross section and making digital photographs using a picture frame and measuring digitally.The dendrochronological dates of the sampled furniture range between 1524 and 1937. The group of furniture includes cupboards, chests, tables, benches, commodes and beds. In many cases furniture was artfully painted and sometimes even shows a painted year. With the help of dendrochronology it was proved that some objects had been painted for some time after construction, or had been over-painted. Most furniture, however, was painted immediately after completion. In this case, the seasoning and storage time of the boards and the wood loss due to shaping can be verified. As an average value, 14 years have passed between the dendrochronological date of the outermost ring and the painting. The time span includes time of seasoning and storage and the rings lost by wood-working. This leads, on the one hand to a short storage time of less than 10 years and on the other hand to very little wood loss due to manufacturing. Those boards being less shaped turned out to be back panels of cupboards, therefore they are recommended to be sampled for dating.Coopered vessels were dated between 1612 and 1940. There was evidence that staves were split and not sawn in many cases. The staves were often split out of the outermost part of the tree and hardly any wood was worked away which was proved by the close dendrochronological dates of the single staves of a vessel.Since there is a short time of storage and only little wood loss through wood-working, dating of objects without a waney edge becomes reasonable.

From Domestic Designs to Global Living: Imperial Innovations at the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, 1864–1914

The Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, the first of its kind on the European continent, gave equal status to domestic crafts from the provinces and the cosmopolitan luxuries of the Habsburg dynasty. The museum was thus assigned the task of forging a cohesive imperial identity, becoming the tool with which Austria-Hungary could assert itself as an effective imperial power, both locally and globally. By considering three significant exhibitions in the first 50 years of the museum’s history — the Vienna World’s Fair in 1873, the exhibition of Austrian Cottage Industry and Folk Art in 1905, and the exhibition that accompanied the 9th International Housing Conference in 1910 — this article investigates Austria’s transition from the classic model of mid-nineteenth-century imperialism to a uniquely pan-regional empire focused on notions of domesticity and cultural preservation, turning ultimately to the Socialist concerns that would form the basis of the post-imperial Austrian state.

Museum Culture of Remembrance: The Depiction of World War II in Japanese, German and Austrian Museums

Abstract As one component of cultural memory, museums have the potential to co-form the remembrance of an entire society. They try to minimise the experience deficiency of their visitors and help them further to know and understand history in an interesting and vivid way. The present paper will show how and to what extent important museums in Japan, Germany and Austria try to shape the historical consciousness of their visitors. With the Yūshūkan in Tōkyō, the Heiwa Kinen Shiryōkan in Hiroshima, the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna, four representative institutions will be taken as indicators of the national efforts to re-appraise the history of World War II. Analyses of the different exhibitions, together with an international comparison, will document the individual position of each museum as well as its political intention. In addition, legal and cultural backgrounds that can lead to a country-specific, ideologically biased museum-based depiction of World War II will also be taken into consideration.