What we are researching

The website "UniGraz_1585-tomorrow" is a digital platform that tells the story of the University of Graz from its foundation to the present day. The project is characterized by a "digital public history" and offers users the opportunity to navigate through more than 430 years of university and academic history via multimedia contributions, an interactive timeline and a digital map.

UniGraz_1585-tomorrow" focuses on institutional developments, academic milestones and political ruptures and conflicts. There are articles on student life and the regional and global positioning of the university. Key players in the university's history and people who have been honored by the university are portrayed on the website. Selected museum objects from the university collections illustrate the eventful history of Graz University and science.

The project focuses on the development of the University of Graz since its foundation with an emphasis on the upheavals of the 20th century and thus a critical examination of the topics of fascism, National Socialism and war. An important part of the site is the commemoration of the victims of National Socialism. As a digital space of remembrance, the website provides information on the university members expelled in 1938 and on university memorials.

UniGraz_1585-tomorrow is a project of the Rector of the University of Graz.

Project management: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Gerald Lamprecht (gerald.lamprecht(at)uni-graz.at)

Responsible for the concept: Marco Jandl, MA, Dr. Susanne Korbel, Univ.-Prof. Dr. Gerald Lamprecht

Project staff: Marco Jandl, MA

Internally funded project

Cooperation partners: Department of Communication and Public Relations, University Archives, University Museums

In this project, I examine personal encounters between Jews and non-Jews in Budapest and Vienna around 1900. The historiography of Jews at the beginning of modernity is still characterized by a narrative of private isolation. For this reason, Jewish history has often been understood as particular and not as part of a general history. The lack of studies of private everyday life in the historiography of Jews in the Habsburg Monarchy has led to a narrative of cultural participation, but not of private involvement. Without an adequate elaboration of non-exclusive narratives about the Jews of Budapest and Vienna, we underestimate the impact of Jewish-non-Jewish relations, especially in daily routines.

My project fills this gap by analyzing the diverse encounters between Jews and non-Jews in the "private" spaces of everyday life. The aim is to examine and compare living and working spaces in Budapest and Vienna as spaces that connected Jews and non-Jews in their historical past. Where and how did people come into contact with each other in "private" spaces in Budapest and Vienna around 1900? What effects did such daily encounters have on prejudices?

To realize the project, which is located at the intersection of Jewish studies, cultural studies and history - and is also relevant for gender studies and for perspectives on interethnic relations in societies shaped by migration - I use approaches from everyday history. By focusing on identifications based on both similarity and difference within living spaces, which I refer to as "private non-spaces", I aim to gain new insights into intimacy. As such "private non-spaces", I examine spaces that have rarely been the focus of research on Jewish-non-Jewish relationships: Living and sleeping spaces (including shared flats with bedmates and lodgers, domestic servants who also lived in the households they worked for), spaces of homework (production of factory goods in private homes in production communities) and forced accommodation (spaces of enforced housing to which the state had access, such as prisons and reformatories, as well as institutions for people with disabilities).

Project management: Dr.phil. BA MA Susanne Korbel (susanne.korbel@uni-graz.at)

Funded by: FWF

The tri-national D-A-Ch project aims to provide an exemplary and paradigmatic approach to German-language Jewish literature since the Enlightenment, based on a cultural studies understanding of texts, approaches from reception aesthetics, translation, transfer, spatial and media theory and the history of science. Conceptually, the six handbooks "Tradition und Glauben" (Basel), "Räume und Landschaften" (Klagenfurt), "Sprachkulturen" (Aachen), "Geschichtsdenken" (Basel), "Wissen und Lernen" (Basel/ Aachen) and "Wechselbeziehungen" (Graz) are not master narratives, but research-led paradigms, in order to show in an integral presentation that Jewish thought and German-language Jewish literature since the end of the 18th century have not been primarily assimilationist. Instead, it shows that Jewish thought and German-language Jewish literature since the end of the 18th century were not primarily assimilated to artistic, literary and scientific developments in the German-speaking world, but that they helped to constitute these developments in a dialogical way that was both sustainable and stimulating.

The handbook supervised by Graz is dedicated to comparative and literary-sociological "interrelationships" and focuses on the diverse connections, exchange processes and the interweaving of cultural practices. It understands German-Jewish literature as a discursive space for socio-cultural negotiation processes.

Project leader: Priv.-Doz. Dr.phil. M.A Olaf Terpitz

Funded by: FWF, DFG, SNF

The First World War with its social, political, economic and cultural upheavals had a fundamental impact on the social development of Europe. The phase of transition from dynastically constituted multi-ethnic empires to new 'nation' states in Central Europe was characterized by fundamental economic slumps, social tensions and shaken mentalities caused by the consequences of the war. Belonging and/or foreignness were the subject of fierce social and political controversies, with the Jewish population repeatedly at the center.
Above all, this led to a massive increase and radicalization of anti-Semitism in all its familiar but also new forms and manifestations. Based on and embedded in the pan-European development, the project presented here is dedicated to the developments of anti-Semitism in the predominantly German-speaking areas of the declining Habsburg Monarchy and the newly emerging Republic of German Austria/Austria in this area. On the one hand, the focus is on the analysis of anti-Semitism in its traditional as well as new manifestations due to political developments. The aim is to examine whether, in addition to the repeatedly noted increase and radicalization of anti-Semitism in the years from 1914 to 1923, there was also a transformation of anti-Semitic images and stereotypes.
Closely related to this is the question of the actors of anti-Semitism. Two correlated groups of actors will be examined in particular. Political parties and newly emerging anti-Semitic associations and organizations.

Funded by: Doctoral scholarship from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.

Scholarship program: History of anti-Semitism and the Shoah

The Digital Remembrance Landscape Austria (DERLA) is an interdisciplinary documentation and mediation project. It documents the places and symbols of remembrance for the victims as well as the places of terror of National Socialism in Austria and aims to critically examine National Socialism and the memory of it and its victims. In a first step, around 700 memorials in Styria and Vorarlberg were documented and historically described. In addition, around 30 educational programs were developed for working with schoolchildren. Next year, DERLA will be expanded to include the symbols of remembrance and educational offers from Tyrol and Carinthia. Ultimately, all Austrian signs of remembrance will be documented in DERLA.

DERLA distinguishes between manifest and non-manifest places of remembrance. Manifest places of remembrance are those that are made visible to the public as places of remembrance through commemorative signs (monuments, memorial plaques, etc.). Non-manifest places of remembrance are places of remembrance that do not yet have a publicly visible sign of remembrance, but have a historical connection to victims and/or the terror of National Socialism and fascism. DERLA provides them with a virtual symbol.

Each memorial site is provided with information about the historical event or the people commemorated at the site, as well as the history of the memorial marker/place itself. Furthermore, the memorial signs/places are assigned to different categories for better orientation of the users and in relation to the mediation offers. These categories are based on the intention of the founders and builders of the memorials and, in the case of non-manifest memorials, on the historical events/experiences associated with the respective site.

DERLA consists of four main elements:

• An interactive map of remembrance leads to the individual places and signs of remembrance and makes their history visible. You can carry out extensive research using filter and search functions.
• In the archive of names, all those people who are named and remembered on the memorial signs are presented biographically. DERLA provides them with a virtual memorial. More than 1300 biographies are currently recorded in DERLA.
• The education portal contains location-based and non-location-based offers for educational work in schools. Historical learning with DERLA can take place both on site and in the classroom.
• The Paths of Remembrance lead along curated routes into specific topics of the history of National Socialism and the culture of remembrance. They are virtual exhibitions on specific topics.

DERLA is an ongoing project that also relies on the cooperation and feedback of users of erinnerungslandschaft.at. Research DERLA and use it in your daily educational work. Let us know your impressions and feedback.

Please contact us:

E-mail: derla(at)uni-graz.at

Project management: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Gerald Lamprecht

Funding bodies: Zukunftsfonds Steiermark, National Fund of the Republic of Austria for the Victims of National Socialism, Future Fund of the Republic of Austria, City of Graz: Science

Cooperation partners: _erinnern.at_ National Socialism and the Holocaust: Memory and the Present, ZIM Center for Information Modelling at the University of Graz

2023 marks the 85th anniversary of the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany and thus also the racially and politically motivated expulsion of members of the University of Graz. Based on research into the Nazification and denazification of the university, this project is now for the first time dedicated to the individual fates of academics and students who were expelled from the university in 1938 and had to flee. Although previous research has already named the members of the University of Graz who were affected by Nazi persecution, further biographical research has not yet been carried out, with a few exceptions in the case of well-known personalities.

In this project, the biographies of all academics expelled from the University of Graz in 1938 due to racist and political persecution are to be researched on the basis of extensive source and literature work. The researched biographies will be published in a printed memorial book and will also be available as biographical entries on the web portal of the University of Graz "UniGraz_1585-tomorrow", thus also creating a digital space of remembrance.

Project staff: BA Mag.phil. MA Marco Jandl

Funding bodies: National Fund of the Republic of Austria, Future Fund of the Republic of Austria, City of Graz - Science, Province of Styria - Science, David Herzog Fund of the Styrian Universities