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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.

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).