Mittwoch, 25. Mai 2016, 13:15 - 14:45

Department of Communication at the University of Vienna, Room SR4 (basement), Währinger Straße 29, 1090 Wien

VWI goes to the Department of Communication

Until its downfall, the Third Reich wooed, persuaded, deceived and threatened its foreign correspondents. If all means of “direction”, “prescribed terminology” and “press control” failed, the regime did not hesitate to isolate, imprison and expel foreign journalists. Nonetheless, they constituted a force, which the National Socialist regime regarded in a modern way, from the perspective of media history, until the very end. In contrast to the public spheres of the Allies, the Third Reich never formally introduced pre-censorship, except for radio broadcasts. Hence, this research project concentrates on foreign correspondents in the Third Reich as independent creators of, and actors in, media events. In doing so we should also be able to provide an answer to what has been a crucial question of the Third Reich since at the latest 1941/42: What did foreign correspondents know about the murder of European Jews, and what did they report?

The findings of this project go beyond the timeframe of the years 1932–1949. The aim is to establish basic principles for contemporary history on how to deal with the relationship between dictatorships and a potentially democratic public audience – which is a pressing issue still today.

Comments by Fritz Hausjell

Norman Domeier is Research Fellow at the VWI. He is an assistant professor of modern European history at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. His PhD thesis on the Eulenburg Scandal in the German Empire – defended at the European University Institute in 2009 – was awarded the Geisteswissenschaften International Prize of the German Booksellers’ Association. He is currently working on a study of foreign journalists in Germany during the Third Reich.

Fritz Hausjell is Vice Director of the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna and is working here as distinguished professor. He published several papers on media, propaganda and journalism during the Third Reich and analysed the system Reichspressekammer in occupied Austria (Journalisten für das Reich, 1993, 2010). His habilitation was on Austrian exile journalism (2003). He is co-founder and co-editor of Medien & Zeit and since 2008 president of Österreichische Gesellschaft für Exilforschung (öge).

Click here to download the invitation as a PDF file.

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