The Austrian Studies Association
Sixty Years with Austria and Austrian Scholarship in North America
By Michael Burri
Dr. Heinrich Drimmel (1912-1991) served as Austrian Federal Minister of Education from 1954 until 1964. He was instrumental in the formation of Austrian cultural diplomacy, and, ultimately, in the formation of what today is called the Austrian Studies Association.
PHOTO: AUSTRIAN NATIONAL LIBRARY
In 2021, the Austrian Studies Association marks the 60th anniversary of its founding. Such anniversaries present an opportunity to acquaint new audiences with an organization and to reintroduce it to old ones. In this spirit, and to quote its mission statement, the Austrian Studies Association (ASA) is a nonprofit membership organization that “promotes the teaching and research of all disciplines in their study of Austria, and it acknowledges the diverse historical, multiethnic, and multilingual character of Austria, the former Habsburg territories, and their legacies.”
Unaffiliated with any single university, the ASA is primarily comprised of graduate students, researchers, university faculty, and others who are based in North America and Europe. Its flagship publication is the Journal of Austrian Studies, edited by Todd Herzog and Hilary Hope Herzog. The journal makes available new scholarship on Austria, awards an annual Max Kade Essay Prize, and is widely held by university libraries. A member of the American Council of Learned Societies, the ASA also holds a large conference each year. The July 2021 conference is devoted to the theme “National and Postnational Perspectives in / from / towards Austria,” and will be hosted by the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. In 2022, the ASA conference moves to New Orleans with the kind assistance of Center Austria at the University of New Orleans.
But anniversaries also present an opportunity for reflection on the past, stock taking of the present, and honest assessments of the future. From this standpoint, the ASA provides a fascinating case study. After all, as an organization that traces its origins to 1961, the ASA has existed just six fewer years than an independent Second Republic Austria. The history of the ASA is thus deeply intertwined with the history of the Second Republic. Indeed, from its beginnings, the ASA has often tracked closely with an Austrian state agenda in cultural diplomacy, as echoing Austrian priorities has brought organizational focus and support. And yet, it might be said that the ASA has delivered its greatest service to scholarship, when it has considered itself outside Austria, and that it has delivered its greatest contributions to Austrian scholarship when it has pursued subjects in ways that could not (yet) take place in Austria.
Founded as the International Arthur Schnitzler Research Association (IASRA), the ASA owes its beginnings to the foreign cultural diplomacy of the late 1950s. That cultural diplomacy, particularly in the figure of Education Minister Heinrich Drimmel, envisioned literature as a calling card for Austria abroad. Already in 1956, Drimmel recruited the Grillparzer Society to promote Austrian literature at home and, as the history of the Society puts it, “especially abroad.” Not surprisingly, the first IASRA bulletin in 1961 shows Victor Suchy of the Grillparzer Society among its inaugural members. But IASRA founders also mobilized an American-based constituency that had yet to be fully recognized by the national politics of the 1950s in Austria. That constituency was the sizable group of Austrian Jewish exiles, who together with political refugees had been driven from Austria during the Ständestaat and National Socialist period and were now living abroad.
Indeed, Austrian exiles and the always-individual circumstances of their exile shaped IASRA from the outset. In March 1938, Cambridge University Library had helped Olga Schnitzler, in dramatic fashion, to rescue the posthumous literary estate of Arthur Schnitzler from Vienna. After 1945, the Schnitzler family subsequently became entangled in a legal dispute over ownership of the literary estate, which was now permanently located in Cambridge. Heinrich Schnitzler, the son of Arthur Schnitzler, had been able to secure a microfilm copy from Cambridge, the 38 reels of which he had deposited at the University of Kentucky. Both he and his mother, Olga Schnitzler, were IASRA founding members, and they cautiously opened the Schnitzler archive to researchers. In this, local circumstances mattered. With IASRA, and not for the last time, scholars in the United States had access to critical sources and materials unavailable in Austria.
The monographic approach of IASRA would not survive the events of 1968, though the decisive events did not take place on the student-filled streets of Paris, but rather in Vienna. Here, in March 1967, Minister of Education Theodor Pfiffl- Perčević had called upon Austrian media, cultural, parliamentary, and other government elites “to help redefine Austrian foreign diplomacy.” During a live two-day meeting, his ministry formally recorded and responded to the advice of 30 speakers and 12 written submissions. Contributions to that meeting were subsequently issued in a book format as Culture Inquiry regarding the Goals and Means of the Foreign Cultural Diplomacy of Austria (1968).
An early consequence of the meeting was registered by the Journal of the Arthur Schnitzler Research Association. For as the final issue of 1967 informed its readers, IASRA would now broaden its focus to encompass Austrian literature more generally, with the journal taking the new name Modern Austrian Literature. But if IASRA had rejected the idea that important Austrian scholarship could only take place in Austria, Modern Austrian Literature ceded its autonomy to the agenda of Viennese cultural politics. Pfiffl- Perčević himself was even granted a full page to deliver ministerial blessings to the newly formed “American Committee for the Study of Austrian Literature.” Indeed, with “Cultural News from Vienna,” a section that described the new theater season, highlights from the Vienna Festival, and personnel changes at local cultural institutions, the first issues of Modern Austrian Literature aimed to reestablish the Austrian capital as the center of its readers’ universe.
Among the names published in the inaugural IASRA membership register is Donald Daviau, a faculty member in the Department of German at the University of California-Riverside. In 1971, Daviau replaced Vincent LoCicero as editor of Modern Austrian Literature, a change that signaled increased attention to scholarship and academic convention. In 1988, with Jorun Johns, Daviau also founded Ariadne Press, which published both academic research and translations. But it was perhaps the annual conferences Daviau organized in Riverside from 1971 to 1999 that represent his most significant legacy to Austrian scholarship from North America. And here, it was both Daviau and the location that played a crucial role.
First, the traditional local attractions – weather, landscape, and nearby Los Angeles – drew a continuous and changing stream of scholars to Riverside. Second, Southern California evoked local memories and traditions associated with the German and Austrian exile community that had relocated there during the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, the conference often gave a prominent place to still-living local eyewitnesses, together with others, such as the Viennese exile and New Yorker Helli Ultmann, who had been engaged to the Viennese cabaret and political figure Jura Soyer (1913-1939 Buchenwald). Daviau thus initiated a discussion of Austrian exile writers and literature when such topics were still seeking a receptive audience in Austria. Finally, Southern California attracted speakers who wanted to talk about Austria, Hollywood, and film. And it was not only past history. In the 1980s, iconic Austrian directors, such as Fred Zinnemann and Billy Wilder, were still active in Hollywood, Together with Modern Austrian Literature, Riverside thus helped bridge an older American-based generation of Austrian film masters with a new generation of cinema studies scholars working in Austria.
To be sure, the impact of the Riverside enterprise was always somewhat constrained by its mandate to focus on Austrian literature, a mandate sustained by the subsidies it received from the Austrian government. If that meant Carl Schorske and his thesis of finde- siècle Vienna never earned top billing in Riverside, so be it. Looking back, that seems like a missed opportunity. Though today, to borrow a phrase from Steven Beller, an “ex-topic,” Schorkse’s fin-desiècle Vienna remains both a distinctively North American contribution and the single most transformative rubric in scholarship on Austria. Meanwhile, Egon Schwarz, a leading figure in American Germanistik and one of the prime movers in turning the attention of German departments to the specifics of Austrian literature after 1970, was never a regular visitor to Riverside. What Schwarz, who had been driven from Vienna in 1938, brought in his approach to literature was a direct affirmation of the Jewish sources of much Austrian writing, a topic that was mostly avoided by other Austrian- Jewish émigrés. IASRA, it might be mentioned, never noted in its founding documents that Schnitzler was Jewish. At the celebrated 1980 Riverside conference on exile literature, Schwarz read from his autobiography. But more often it was his graduate students and former graduate students from Washington University who carried forward both his insistence that the particularity of the Jewish experience mattered for Austrian literature and his forthright confrontation with the historical facts of anti-Semitism.
The end of the Cold War, and after 1989, the reassertion of national histories among former East bloc countries brought new challenges to the group around Modern Austrian Literature. For Austria, the urgency to compete for American attention had diminished. At the same time, the individuals who had helped Riverside to flourish were disappearing, as were the Austrian subsidies. By 1999, Donald Daviau had relinquished his editing duties and organized his last Riverside conference. The Austrian Government subsidies that had been the catalyst for powerfully transforming scholarship on Austria proved equally difficult to replace, and provided new organizational leadership a sharp lesson in foreign cultural diplomacy. In 2000, that leadership sought to reconfigure the organization, which still officially operated under the name IASRA, as the Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association (MALCA). But the national literature agenda no longer energized the constituencies it once had. Institutionally, budgets for German and other foreign language departments were being slashed. Moreover, new professional models of interdisciplinarity in the 1990s, especially the German Studies Association, had shown a promising path forward.
In 2011, MALCA members voted to rename their organization the Austrian Studies Association, with Modern Austrian Literature now reconfigured as the Journal of Austrian Studies. Today, the ASA does not know its future – how could it? But the organization remains committed to writing its own history, while drawing upon its past to meet the challenges ahead. One such challenge will be to fulfill its mission of “acknowledging the diverse historical, multiethnic, and multilingual character of Austria, the former Habsburg territories, and their legacies.” That will not be an easy task in a contemporary Central Europe where strongly inflected nationalist narratives prevail, even as a growing body of scholarship devoted to shared multiethnic and multinational pasts suggests a change on the horizon.
Another challenge is to find compelling ways to speak about Austria to contemporary American undergraduates and graduate students. It is students together with the subjects that move them that are the future of Austrian Studies. Finally, the ASA must secure the financial support it needs to flourish intellectually, while remaining vigilant against being seen as a part of Viennese Kulturpolitik.
Bowling Green State University in Ohio hosted the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Austrian Studies Association.
PHOTO: BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY
The Austrian Studies Association shares a sixty-year history with the Second Republic of Austria. To the founders of our organization, the transformation in scholarship on Austria that these sixty-years have brought would have been impossible to imagine. Yet, as those founders realized, the most enduring North American contributions to scholarship on Austria proceed from an intellectual disposition that recognizes the value of critical distance. That is, their vision anticipated a future North American agenda for Austrian Studies, and in 2021, that vision continues to guide the Austrian Studies Association.
It might be said that today that North American agenda travels well — even back to Austria. In 2010, the University of Vienna launched its master’s degree program in “Austrian Studies.” With more than 150 graduate students enrolled, the Austrian Studies requirements read like an elaboration of the ASA mission statement. Students are to know “Austrian literature, language, and culture in a European context; a capacity to critically reflect upon imaginary myth constructs, historical identity constructs, political and journalistic discursivations of the ‘national’; and to convey a basic knowledge of at least one other central or eastern European language and culture.”
Michael Burri, Ph.D., is Lecturer in German at Bryn Mawr College and the President of the Austrian Studies Association.
More information:
Austrian Studies Association:
http://www.austrian-studies.org/