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“Maintaining a Common Culture” – The German Research Foundation and the Austrian-German Scientific Aid in the Interbellum. After the end of the Great War, private as well as public research funding in Austria was anaemic and slow to develop. Whereas the German state-funded Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) was established as early as 1920, first steps in that direction were only taken in Austria in the late 1920s. In 1929, the Osterreichisch-deutsche Wissenschaftshilfe (ODW) was founded under the auspices of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the DFG. Although prima facie on an equal footing, the new research funding organisation was in fact highly dependent on its German cooperation partner. The article explores for the first time ODW's position within the German and Austrian science and foreign policies, which aimed to promote the idea of unification of both states within the German Reich. A quantitative analysis of the subsidies policy in the first five years of existence shows that the ODW gave financial aid primarily to conservative research fields‘ affecting the intellectual balance of power in the First Austrian Republic. Policy continuities and discontinuities of the organisation in the course of the national-socialist rise to power in Germany after 1933 are examined in the second part of the article. The article thus both increases our knowledge about the most important German research funding organisation DFG‘ and identifies some of the fundamental structural features of Austrian science policy in the interwar years.

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, a new sub-field of physics and chemistry emerged centering on radioactivity. Its disciplinary structures were slow to crystallize. The early phase of this field was characterized by substantial international exchange between the European centers in Vienna, Paris, Berlin and Cambridge and a concomitant high degree of transdisciplinarity. Research on radioactivity was also marked by an unusual openness in respect to gender and gender politics. The volatile political and social context of nuclear research, which abruptly changed several times, acted to further, impede or block these initiatives to transcend diverse boundaries in science, politics, and society. The two central questions of the present project are: How did the agendas and foci of Austrian nuclear research, and the styles of work of the scientists, change within the framework of international cooperation and competition? How were these developments dynamically linked with the political, social and cultural shifts in European history in the 20th century? The historical analysis starts with the founding of the Vienna Institute for Radium Research (IRR), including the institutes for physics at the University of Vienna that worked in close cooperation with the IRR. The period under investigation extends from the late years of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire to World War I, the era of "Red Vienna," the "state of estates" (Ständestaat) and the Nazi dictatorship, down to the full restoration of Austrian sovereignty in 1955. The study will include systematic transnational comparisons with the other centers of European nuclear research, based in part on existing literature from the history of science, as well as exact reconstructions of the bilateral and multilateral cooperative links and relations with the international scientific community. In this way, the proposed project is expected to go beyond the historical reconstruction of nuclear research in Austria and shed light on the importance of nationality and internationality, both for framing politics and as mental and cultural points of reference for the behavior and actions of the scientific actors and the production of scientific knowledge under shifting constellations of war and peace, democracy and dictatorship., Wie veränderte sich die Radioaktivitäts- und Kernforschung in Österreich seit der Entdeckung des Kernzerfalls im späten 19. Jahrhundert bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges? Dieses Buch bietet eine profunde Analyse lokaler Forschungstraditionen im politisch-sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Kontext. Die Studie verortet das Institut für Radiumforschung in Wien und andere österreichische Standorte der Radioaktivitäts- bzw. Kernforschung in zwei sich überlagernden Netzwerken: Einerseits im regionalen Forschungsraum der Habsburger Monarchie, der Ersten Republik und des „Dritten Reiches“ und andererseits in der globalen Gemeinschaft der „Radioaktivisten“. Sie zeigt anhand neuer Archivquellen, welche Rolle die in Österreich vorhandenen Ressourcen im globalen Netzwerk der Kernforschung spielten.

Die Fruhgeschichte der fotografischen Methode, die als Nachweisinstrument kernphysikalischer und kosmischer Strahlung in den 1950er Jahren zur Blute kam, hat das Interesse vieler Wissenschaftshistoriker gefunden. Peter Galison hat gezeigt, wie fragil das Experimentalsystem lange Zeit war, das sich um die Methode bildete, und wie prekar die mit ihr aufgezeichneten Ergebnisse.

This paper is an enquiry into the medial construction and aestheticizing of the war in present day TV documentaries on the First World War. The analysis refers mainly to the exemplary 90-minute documentary "Der Moderne Krieg", which the German-French station, ARTE, broadcast last summer. Two temporal phases converge here: at the first phase it can be seen how film, as a new medium during the First World War, lent a hitherto unknown aesthetic dimension to the industrialized war events, which oriented itself at the same time toward traditional image forms and motifs. In the second, present-day phase, this film material is respliced and loaded with additional meaning. Both temporal phases are inseparably intertwined – both construe the modern myth of the clean war: each in its own manner, each according to its own era. In general, the official pictorial propaganda put forth an effort to blot out the horror of the industrialized waging of war. Instead, it perpetuated the scenario of a pre-modern, romantic war (e.g. Huppauf 1997: 887f.). One outstanding motif of German film reporting, as well as of war photography, was the front, i.e. pictures from life at the front line. On the other hand, a contemporary photographic iconography and aesthetic of destruction were also developed. Thus, the improved photographic technology and faster shutter speed made possible a new type of presentation of the dynamics of war, e.g. in the shots of soldiers using their equipment. Film technology was used for the first time for the construction of the reality of war as visual battleground. Thus, soldiers themselves participated in combat exhibitions that were staged especially for the camera (e.g. Paul 2004: 106).