“1989 a turning point in the scholar relations between Austria and its neighbour countries”

1989 was undoubtedly a turning-point in European if not in World history on very different levels of political, social, cultural and also scholar activities in Europe. But it would give a wrong image to think that the Iron Curtain prevented every kind of relations between the countries in the Eastern and the Western part of Europe before 1989. Participation of scholars from Eastern bloc countries in international conferences and some kind of official cooperation between for example Austria and the Communist neighbour-countries on a formal level like the negotiations in the framework of the so called “Kulturabkommen” constituted forms of contact between historians in Central Europe. As I was never a member of one of the official delegations in Czechoslovakia I cannot report about the precise situation there, but my experience within the framework of such Kulturabkommen-negotiations in the Soviet Union was not very encouraging concerning an open exchange of information and a fruitful methodological discussion between the partners.
Far more important and as it would turn out later forward-looking were the informal connections which existed in this time. My personal experience is mostly concentrated on these informal relations to Czech historians and art historians. One could assume that my family background – my grandfather was born a couple of kilometres north of České Budějovice and moved as a teenager to Vienna – has something to do with my early relations to Czech history, but this was not the real reason. This fundamental factor consisted in the choice of the topic of my Habilitation, which was dealing with the political propaganda of Emperor Rudolf II. As we all know this Emperor resided in Prague and so in the course of my research I travelled in the late 1970ies to Prague. An old friend of mine, my mentor Walter Hummelberger, who came originally from Bohemia and had studied in Prague, provided me with some contact-adresses – as it turned out all these people were victims of the so called “normalisace” after 1968. Naïve as many of us had been I did dot even realize that my appearance in their houses would also create troubles for these people. But I was nevertheless warmly welcomed and handed over in their network to other colleagues who were specialized in the period of Rudolf II. So I met scholars like Eliška Fučiková, Beket Bukovinská, Jarmila Krcalová and Jaromir Neumann, but also historians like Josef Polišenský.
Remembering the situation in this time what is still very moving for me is the enormous helpfulness of my Czech colleagues who became in the following years also good friends. As Rudolf II seems far more important from the perspectives of art-history than of history, the network I built up in this time included mostly a lot of well known art-historians. Most of them were very dissatisfied with the situation, their strong interest in the court of Rudolf II was not opportune in the political situation which researched very intensively National Czech arts of the 19th century. This group of friends in Prague is still very active – I just remind you of the Research Center for Visual arts and Culture in the Age of Rudolf II, which publishes Studia Rudolfina – and even after I switched to other topics and left the field of Rudolfinian studies the human aspect of our old relation continued and continues till now.
One of my most remarkable experiences before 1989 was a field trip I organised with my students to Moravia and Bohemia together with two art historians who joined us in the excursion and provided us with very important information, this was Jiří Kroupa from the University in Brno and Ivan Prokop Muchka from Prague. This field trip took place in the spring term 1989 a couple of month before the political situation of the country changed so dramatically.
Another very positive early experience with Czech historians and especially archivists occurred to me in my research about some members of the Windisch-Graetz family in the early 1980ies. Here again so much helpfulness and friendliness and cooperation were offered to me that I can only think very gratefully about this experience. In the time before 1989 only few foreign scholars and especially Austrian scholars worked in Czech archives. Whenever I told colleagues of mine in Austria about my plans to work in Czech archives most of them reacted very sceptical. But my experience was excellent and once again I met a lot of very interesting scholars and widened my network. The research was extended later on in a research project about some carefully selected aristocratic families. Most of them had their archive in Bohemia and Moravia, so I travelled still before the velvet revolution with my students to different archives and worked there.
Then 1989 happened, the borders opened and there was an enormous growth of the scholar contacts in the field of history especially with Czechoslovakia and after 1993 with the Czech Republic. I fear that for some institutions like the Czech archives this did not mean pleasure and joy alone, but also an enormous stress with the mass of family historians the stormed the archives. Before 1989 in these archives only a couple of well trained specialists worked but after 1989 with the genealogical amateurs who very often are not able to read the documents the pressure and burden of work in archives was quickly growing.
In the very beginning of the time after 1989 these relations were also very much encouraged by the official Austria. The Austrian Ministers for Research was Erhard Busek who was very much interested in an intensification of the contacts between the Central European Countries. Even if the Concept of Central Europe that has also a political content may be discussed and is very disputable and dubious the effect for scholar activities was very important. Money was spent by the republic of Austria for a scholar cooperation with Austria´s neighbour countries connected with the idea of sustainability – though this word (in German “Nachhaltigkeit”) was in this time not a keyword, a buzz word or a manta of politics. The name of the program, that aimed to projects carried out by one or more Austrian scholars together with scholars of one or more “post-Communist Countries” (to use a term of the period) was East-West-Projects. These projects of the ministry of research initiated a lot of cooperation between historians of Austria and her neighbour countries. I had such a project cooperating with Jaroslav Panek and Zděnek Hojda in Prague and Aron Petneki in Budapest which was very successful on the level of content and also concerning the infrastructure of research, the program provided the acquisition of hardware and software that at this point of technical development made an exchange of data between the different countries easy. Unfortunately the Austrian government lost interest in the program in the middle of the route, the following-up projects were never financed.
But the process of cooperation once started was continuing and a lot of different projects in collaboration between Czech and Austrian historians in the last 20 years enriched our knowledge of the common history enormously. This would not have been possible without the opening of the political borders in 1989 but in the same way also the opening of the intellectual borders within different fields of research and generally in the field of history. In Austria as well as in first Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1993 and then the Czech Republic a younger generation started to be active that left the old type of positivistic history behind and started to ask new questions, used new methods and had an interdisciplinary and international approach to their field.
In this process of a new orientation of historians on both side of the border the emerging Institute of History of the University of South Bohemia played a decisive role. The series of conferences with Václav Bůžek and his young team organised in Český Krumlov for example were for sure an important forum of scholar exchange especially for the period of Early Modern History. Scholars from different countries met there including also Austrians and my participation – unfortunately not in all, but in many of these meeting belong to the most enjoyable conference-memories I have got in my long scholar live.
Many other conferences and activities between Austria and the Czech Republic developed in the last 20 years, some of them more on a global, some others more on a local level in the cooperation of regions like Southern Bohemia and the northern part of Lower- or Upper Austria the so called Wald- and Mühlviertel. I do not want and can not give a complete survey of these manifold activities, let me just mention the Austrian Czech meetings of historians organised by the Waldviertelakademie since 2004 and called “Österreichisch tschechischer Historikertag“. These conferences were organised by a private institution but included also the cooperation between Universities especially the South Bohemian University and the University of Vienna.
Different historical institutes at the University of Vienna are involved in these forms of cooperation in the last decades. The Viennese University has five different institutes for History and a Research institute associated with the University, the well known Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung. In all of these institutes (I cannot say much about the Institute for Ancient history where I do not know the situation so well) cooperation with Czech institutions and individuals exist. Very clearly the institute for East European History has a specific interest in Czech history and also the Institute for Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte) is cooperating in the research of some of the sensitive questions in the history of the 20th century. In the institute of Economic and Social history projects under the supervision of Markus Cerman dealt with the common history of our countries and my own institute, the institute for history (Institut für Geschichte) has a focus on this common area, I have of course to mention Thomas Winkelbauer with his intensive cooperation especially with Moravia and the fact that two of our young scholars Dana Cerman-Stefanová and Petr Mat´a are of Czech origin.
I think this fact is symptomatic for the extraordinary development since 1989 that is also visible in the exchange of students. In this context the year 2004 when the Czech Republic became a member of the European Union was another turning point in the field of scholar exchange. Even before this time Czech students came to study in Austria, I still remember quite well the changes in the student´s population of the International Summer School of the University of Vienna in Strobl where I teach since 1980 every summer. In the program that was originally very much oriented on American students shortly after 1989 the percentage of students from former Eastern European countries was permanently growing. In this summer courses with a familiar atmosphere of less than 100 students on a campus the phenomenon was of course better visible than at the University in Vienna itself where in a mass subject like history individual student are less noticeable.
That leads me to a side note about the current situation at the University in Vienna that also attracted the interest of the media. The protest movement of the students that occupied the main lecture hall the auditorium maximum at the University of Vienna and meanwhile spread to other Austrian, German, Italian and American Universities is a spontaneous reaction to an impossible situation at the University for the students and indirectly also for the teaching staff in many subjects. The department of history in Vienna has about 5.000 students and this is in spite of the fact that this department of history in Vienna is probably the largest in Europe an enormous challenge. The relation between the figures of students and teachers is dramatically bad. Too many students in courses, too many students in lectures where the place in the lecture hall is not sufficient for such large numbers are main problems. Also in our field many of us have too many Master or PhD students which means you can either be a bad supervisor or if you want to be a good one work far more than the usual working hours a week. There was a sort of discussion about that between the official representatives of the universities and the responsible minister for the last year which finally had not real result. The basic democratic protest of the students that most of the teachers at the university generally welcome – even if there are different demands from the side of the students that have to be discussed in details – brought some movement into this discussion. The politicians have to react to these activities of the students now and discuss how much money our society is willing to spend for education. The discussion involves also topics like a restriction of the admission of students and the tuition fee that existed a couple of years ago for some time and was abolished shortly before the last elections in Austria as a populist measure in the electorate campaign. The fact that similar protest emerged in different places and different countries shows that there is a great challenge to our educational system in particular for the field of humanities and social science.
All these existing problems of the university system should not hide the positive development in international relations in the last couple of years which have made European Universities more multifaceted and colourful. The European Union and the membership of the Czech Republic since 2004 brought a great change in this field. The Erasmus program is the flagship education and training programme of the European Union, enabling more than 180.000 students to study and work abroad each year, as well as supporting co-operation actions between higher education institutions across Europe.
About 100 different Erasmus agreements between the University of Vienna and Czech Universities exist, especially with Prague, Brno and Olomouc and in very different fields, from archaeology, biology, chemistry, art history, protestant and catholic theology, to law and political studies.
In the field of history there are exchange programs with Prague and the Institute of History of the University of South Bohemia established, there exist also – as far as I know – Erasmus agreements in the field of catholic theology and Slavonic studies between Vienna and České Budějovice . In the last couple of years a lot of excellent and very interesting students from the University of South Bohemia came as Erasmus students to Vienna where I am the person in charge for the program. Unfortunately as I have to say the Austrian side of the exchange does not work that well which undoubtedly has to do with the fact that the knowledge of the Czech language among Austrian students is very rare. Auxiliary to the Erasmus Project other programs like for example the 1992 founded Czech-Austrian Aktion with a program for the promotion of a bilateral cooperation in the field of education and science (Programm zur Förderung der bilateralen Zusammenarbeit in Bildung und Wissenschaft; AKTION Česká republika - Rakousko, spolupráce ve vědě a vzdělávání) support the possibility of students from the Czech Republic to work in Austrian libraries and archives.
Looking back to a long personal history of relations between the two countries and their historians we can observe an enormous change for the better in the last two decades. What was the hope of a few like me before 1989 of an intensification of the Czech Austrian cooperation in this field became reality. Meanwhile after 20 years a broad variety of co-operations has been established, reaching from guest lectures, Erasmus-programs to a fruitful scholar exchange. As an optimistic person I hope that this process of exchange of persons and publications, but first and foremost of ideas, friendship and good feelings is going to continue and to intensify in the future.