Biography in Austria, a Selection: The Year in Austria

Recent research and publications in life writing in Austria have taken many forms.

1. RESEARCH PROJECTS

BiographiA

BiographiA is a four-volume lexicon of Austrian women that Böhlau Verlag published in May 2015. The lexicon commemorates 6,500 women in Austrian history from the Roman period to the present day. In addition to the print edition, there is also a much larger online database containing around 20,000 biographies. The project of the Dokumentationsstelle Frauenforschung des Instituts für Wissenschaft und Kunst (IWK), which has been running since 1998 and is led by Ilse Korotin, is making a substantial contribution to feminist biographical research.

This lexicon addresses the problem of the structural marginalization of women’s lives in Austria, following Thomas Carlyle’s famous dictum, history is nothing but the history of “great men.” Austrian women have not only been excluded from areas of achievement that are considered “worthy” of biography, but their biographical traces are also often more difficult to uncover because their letters and diaries—so rarely seen as worthy of being archived and preserved—have often not survived.

The concern of the editors of this lexicon has not only been to make women’s lives more visible and to show them belated recognition. The team has also been concerned with producing a gendered critique of the ways women’s lives are considered within a memory culture dominated by men. Nazification of Austrian Justice: Biographies of Judges and State Prosecutors The topic of legal proceedings during the National Socialist dictatorship is a long-standing research focus of the Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstands (DÖW), which was founded in 1963. The sources are primarily legal papers held in the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv. The personal side of this history was previously only known in fragments.

Building on two research projects resulting from a partnership with the Philipps-Universität Marburg/Lahn, in which the careers of 1,632 Austrian judges and state prosecutors have been digitally documented (including 900 short biographies), the Austrian Ministry of Justice has now granted financial support for a full examination of personal papers, many of which are held in courts outside of Vienna. A second goal of this project, alongside the completion of the short biographies, is the creation of a collective biography.

Biographical Handbook of the Austrian Victims of Stalinism

Another DÖW project, which builds on the previously published book … Ein Paragraf wird sich finden: Gedenkbuch der österreichischen Stalin-Opfer (bis 1945), based on extensive research led by Barry McLoughlin and Josef Vogl, is the publication Österreichische Stalin-Opfer bis 1945 on the DÖW website, containing 780 short biographies of Austrian citizens who were imprisoned in Soviet institutions between 7 November 1917 and 8 May 1945. This group does not include Austrian-Jewish refugees of the years 1938–40, the subject of a separate project, nor Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers who became prisoners of war in the Soviet Union.

Ernst Jandl Online

Drawing on ten years’ research on the extensive papers of the Austrian poet and performance artist Ernst Jandl (1925–2000) at the Austrian National Library, Ernst Jandl Online—a project of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography (LBI)—is a bio-bibliographical database. This project documents Jandl’s complete works, including the relevant reviews, commentaries, and secondary literature, and is complemented with archival materials.

Karl Kraus Online

One of the LBI’s other research programs is dedicated to the author Karl Kraus (1874–1936), editor of the journal Die Fackel and a prominent pacifist. His papers are held at the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, one of the LBI’s partners. The first part of this interactive biographical database comprises texts, objects, and data on the topic of Karl Kraus, the reader. Kraus held hundreds of readings of both his own works and those of others. Further parts of the online platform will be dedicated to Kraus’s legal activities, and his work as the editor of Die Fackel.

2. BIOPICS

Egon Schiele

In 2016, a biopic was produced on the life of the Austrian painter...