In June 1966, the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Vienna officially announced the founding of a new department: "At the request of the full professorial council, the Federal Ministry of Education has established the Department of Contemporary History with the number 75.873-I/4/66 of 3 June 1966." This marked the beginning of a new era of institutionalised historical research in Vienna and in Austria as a whole. The historian Ludwig Jedlicka was appointed to the board of the new department.^[1]

The department began its work with the smallest possible staff: one professor, one assistant and one librarian. The department, initially located at Rotehausgasse 6 in Vienna's ninth district, owed its existence to the intensive efforts of Ludwig Jedlicka. Since 1961, he had headed an Austrian Department of Contemporary History, which had been founded by the Austrian Society for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, which still exists today. The Federal Ministry for Education under Heinrich Drimmel also played a decisive role in this. The board of the Austrian Department of Contemporary History included Alfons Lhotsky and Friedrich Walter; the scientific advisory board headed by Richard Meister included Hugo Hantsch, Leo Santifaller and Friedrich Engel-Janosi. Contacts had already been established with the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (later renamed the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance), founded by Herbert Steiner in 1963.

Topics

The basis for research and teaching was formed by extensive collections, archives and files, including image and sound documents, as well as a constantly growing library on Austrian contemporary history. Initially, the scientific approach to the field of research was geared towards the history of events and the political history of social elites, especially military history. A particular focus was on the study of resistance in the Nazi era during the years 1938 to 1945. In this context, the First Republic and the destruction of democracy in Austrofascism increasingly came to the fore. A separate publication series was created, funded by the grand coalition of the Theodor Körner Foundation and the Leopold Kunschak Prize for research into Austrian history from 1927 to 1938. Some publications of the first generation of students, which included, for example, Peter Huemer and Gisela Rabitsch as well as the assistants Karl Haas, Gerhard Jagschitz, Anton Staudinger and Karl Stuhlpfarrer, are still considered pioneering works of Austrian contemporary history.

People

Gustav Spann and the librarian Peter Malina were mainly responsible for public relations and teacher training. With Ludwig Jedlicka's successor, the full professor Erika Weinzierl, who held the chair from 1979 to 1995, further topics were covered, including the history of the Republic, National Socialism, anti-Semitism and the church, the history of science, and exile and emigration research. Gerhard Botz, who succeeded Erika Weinzierl, increasingly returned to research on violence, resistance and the Holocaust, particularly from a social science perspective.
In 1998, the Department of Contemporary History moved to the university campus on the site of the old General Hospital. The enactment of the University Act in 2002 brought with it both a generational change in the academic staff and a thematic differentiation of contemporary history and its methodological expansion beyond an Austro-centric, political and national history of events.

The professors and habilitated research associates at the department:

• Monika Bernold (Women's and Gender History)
• Johanna Gehmacher (Associate Professor, Women's and Gender History)
• Valeska Huber (Tenure Track Professor)
• Zsófia Lóránd (Tenure Track Professor)
• Claudia Kraft (Professor of Cultural History, History of Knowledge and Gender History)
• Kerstin von Lingen (Professor of Comparative Studies in Dictatorship, Violence and Genocide)
• Maria Mesner (Women's and Gender History, Austrian Contemporary History in an International Context)
• Oliver Rathkolb (Professor of Contemporary Austrian History in an International Context)

Since 2022, Claudia Kraft has been head of the Department, Maria Mesner is deputy head.
Marianne Ertl has been head of the Department's secretariat since 1992.

Cooperation

The Department's profile and thematic priorities are aligned with the principles of methodological pluralism and research-oriented teaching. There are close links to the Key Research Topics established at the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies, namely:

• Democracy and Human Rights
• Dictatorships, Violence and Genocide
• Women's and Gender History
• Global History
• Austria in its Environment
• History of Science - Cultures of Knowledge - Societies of Knowledge

and the research groups:

• Coping Strategies in the Face of Violence
• New Cold War Studies
• Sexual Violence in the First World War: Military Court Files of the Imperial and Royal Army and Self-Narratives as Sources

as well as at interfaculty level:

• Research Platform GAIN - Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities
• Research Platform for the Study of Transformations and Eastern Europe
• Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET)

The Department of Contemporary History cooperates with various institutions, including the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Historical Social Science, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute and the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance.

The Austrian Journal of History (ÖZG) and the journal zeitgeschichte are based at the department, as are the Heinz von Foerster Society and its archive. In cooperation with the Sir Peter Ustinov Institute, the renowned Ustinov Visiting Professorship is regularly filled at the Department of Contemporary History.

^[1] For Jedlicka's biography, cf. Oliver Rathkolb: Ludwig Jedlicka: Four Lives and a Typical Austrian. Biographical Sketch of one of the Co-founders of Contemporary History Research. In: zeitgeschichte. 32 (2005) 6, pp. 351-370.

As of: December 2023