EHRI-1/EHRI-2

The VWI has been a member of an EU-sponsored research consortium since 2010. The main aim of EHRI – European Holocaust Research Infrastructure – is to develop lasting opportunities for networking. This is intended to foster innovative documentation methods and research guidelines for research infrastructures that have to date only been used on a national basis. The first phase of EHRI from 2010 to 2014 consisted of designing online tools by the consortium members, linking databases of scattered archives with Holocaust-relevant documents, and developing new research topics and questions.

This project, funded by twenty research institutions across twelve European states – Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and the United Kingdom – as well as Israel, was funded by a grant applied for in the framework of the seventh funding programme of the EU and granted a total of seven million Euros by the European Commission. Over its four-year duration, it created structures for an enduring network of European research and archive resources on the history of the Holocaust. The most important partners were Yad Vashem (Jerusalem), CEGES-SOMA (Brussels), King’s College London, the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Institute for Contemporary History in Berlin and Munich, as well as NIOD – Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Amsterdam), which coordinated the entire project.

Within the framework of Work Package 2 of the project, the VWI developed a research initiative for Holocaust-relevant archives of Jewish communities in Eastern and Central Europe in collaboration with the Jewish Museum in Prague, the research centre at Terezín, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest, as well as the archive of the IKG in Vienna, and established infrastructure and networking tools for archival resources. In 2015, he project was extended for four more years.

In the framework of EHRI-2, the VWI explored the possibilities of expanding the infrastructures developed in EHRI-1 and of making them more sustainable, but also of ways to make scattered, smaller, hardly known collections that are nevertheless relevant to Holocaust research (more) accessible and to expand existing research infrastructure through digital platforms, repositories, and databases, as well as through online curricula, exhibitions, and presentations on specific research projects and/or case studies in Holocaust research.

The focus here was on topical questions regarding digital archival collections in Central Europe with a view toward discussing and developing organisational and legal guidelines and procedures for the transnationalisation of Holocaust research networks and archives, with an emphasis on local approaches and regional concerns regarding current usage of Holocaust sources. Such local approaches were to be connected with other projects from Central Europe in order to create a network by and for these initiatives transcending ethnic, linguistic, and/or national boundaries, which could thereby overcome previous impediments to opening up space for innovative approaches.

The institute was moreover connected to the EHRI fellowship programme and was thereby able to provide scholarly supervision to eight fellows over the duration of the project and to integrate them into the research activities of the institute.

EHRI-2, in the framework of which the VWI organised the workshops Transnational meets Local: Making Holocaust Research Projects and Infrastructures Sustainable by Using Digital Archives, Electronic Repositories, and Internet Platforms on Local and Regional Levels (19/20 November 2018) and “It Happened Here!” 
Digital and Shared: Holocaust History in Public Space (1/2 April 2019), concluded in October 2019.

Displacement – Exile – Emigration

The Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW) ran a project opening up the estate of the law firm Ebner until 2014. Dr. Hugo Ebner represented numerous victims of Nazi persecution who had been displaced from Austria in or after 1938 due to their Jewish background (and sometimes also for political reasons) in reparation cases. The estate holds around 7,000 files revealing details of the victims’ circumstances, careers, and biographies before and after their displacement. These can help illuminate quantitatively and empirically such issues as social background, disruptions in the victims’ lives as a result of the enforced exile, as well as gender-specific aspects of survival in the country of exile and many other important aspects of their post-war history of exile, allowing for some degree of reconstruction.

In co-operation with DÖW, the VWI ran a complimentary project entitled Displacement – Exile – Emigration: The Jewish Austrians Displaced by National Socialism Reflected in the Emigration Index of the IKG Vienna. This project expanded on the findings of the DÖW project through an examination of test samples drawn from this index and the corresponding questionnaires held on microfiche in the IKG archive. This project thus placed the previous results onto a broader methodological level. This led especially to an innovative combination of the quantitative results with the database of DÖW’s Ebner project as well as with DÖW’s database of Austrian victims of the Holocaust, allowing for a first ever overview of the persecution, flight, and murder of Jewish Austrians.

The project was run by DÖW scholar Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider and was completed in 2014.

ns-quellen.at

This project, the very first project of the VWI, is dedicated to the topic of confiscation of property between 1938 and 1945 and restitution and compensation after 1945. The results of this work were compiled on an online platform by “forschungsbüro. Verein für wissenschaftliche und kulturelle Dienstleistungen”, who also maintain the platform and make it accessible.

The platform is conceived as a modular system, offering detailed information on the means which can be of great assistance in research. It contains information on Austrian archives containing documents on the confiscation of property, on the rescindment of citizenship, and on the process by which one can discover whether a particular property or apartment was “Aryanised”. ns-quellen.at offers an overview of the legal foundations both of Nazi confiscation of property as well as of restitution and compensation by the Republic of Austria after 1945. All legislation relevant in the context are collected here and made directly available in original form. It additionally includes bibliographical references and a glossary of relevant terminology.

The platform is understood as a portal: It does not save a trip to the archives, but is designed to facilitate research there.

The platform went online in 2011 and has been continually maintained and sometimes updated since.

The People Write! Polish Everyman Biography from the Great Depression to the Holocaust

This project conducted by VWI alumna Kate Lebow in the framework of an Elise Richter Programme of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) was based at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) and examined the autobiographies of farmers, workers, and other ‘ordinary people’ in Poland during the interwar period. Inspired by the Chicago School, Polish sociologists in the 1920s organised annual competitions for the creation of autobiographies as a means to collect personal narratives from workers, farmers, youths, ethnic minorities, the unemployed, and other individuals.

The best texts from among each social group received awards. This ‘Polish method of social research’, as it soon became internationally known, exceeded all expectations of the involved researches. Right into the 1930s, these competitions produced a living culture of the composition of personal testimony encompassing the most varied milieus, from agricultural youth groups through to Jewish cultural circles

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Through an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, this project examines these social biographies against the broad backdrop of the mid-twentieth-century fascination with documentary representations of the ‘little man’. This project was not so concerned with what social autobiographies communicated about Poland in the interwar period, but rather with how local narrative practices impact globally.

The project was completed in September 2016.

Lost in Administration

The research project Lost in Administration has been based at the University of Salzburg since 2013 and aims to reconstructs the life stories of the children of African-American GIs and Austrian women as well as the (welfare) political treatment of these children on the basis of biographic narrative interviews and research in Austrian and American archives.

In 2016, VWI team member Philipp Rohrbach curated the exhibition SchwarzÖsterreich. Die Kinder afroamerikanischer Besatzungssoldaten (Black Austria: The Children of African American Soldiers of the Occupation) together with the freelance historian Niko Wahl, which was on display at the Vienna Museum of Folk Life & Folk Art from April to August 2016. This exhibition, which received critical acclaim in the media and among a broad public, was supported by the VWI, as was a first-ever meeting of the interview partners which took place in the course of the exhibition.

The VWI is also involved in organising and conducting a scholarly symposium on this theme in the autumn of 2017.