Blog
By Larry Wolff With the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy at the conclusion of World War I, American President Woodrow Wilson contributed to the creation of a new geopolitical order in Eastern Europe when he participated in refashioning the region as an interlocking set of supposedly national states at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.…
with Thomas Antonic Historian Thomas Antonic, who is also a filmmaker, writer, poet, musician, multimedia artist, and a two-time BIAAS grantee, has completed the film One More Step West Is the Sea and a co-edited collection titled ruth weiss: Beat Poetry, Jazz, Art. In this podcast, he discusses the fascinating life of ruth weiss, the Austrian-American…
By Carol Seigel In February 2020 I was fortunate enough to travel from England to the United States, funded by a generous grant from the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, to research a forthcoming exhibit for the Freud Museum London on the extraordinary life of Muriel Gardiner. As I visited the Library of Congress in…
https://botstiberbiaas.org/wp-content/uploads/unterweger_000.jpg Unterweger’s Signature Knot: The “Austrian Jack the Ripper’s” Murder Spree in the Vienna Woods and the Hollywood Hills By Kristina E. Poznan Austrian serial killer Johann “Jack” Unterweger was back in entertainment news after a brief discussion of him in an episode of Netflix’s Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. Unterweger committed…
https://botstiberbiaas.org/wp-content/uploads/Paris-Kindertransport-1.jpg Say Hello to “Auf Wiedersehen, Kinder!” and Ernst Papanek with Lilly Maier Lilly Maier has written a recent biography of Ernst Papanek, Auf Wiedersehen, Kinder!: Ernst Papanek. Revolutionär, Reformpädagoge und Retter jüdischer Kinder. In this podcast (below), she discusses the remarkable life of the Viennese-born socialist and educator. Already in exile from Austria, Papanek…
By Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley In our book, Remaking Central Europe. The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands, we look at the ways in which the new political order in Central Europe after the end of the Great War was fashioned by national and international entities in close concurrence. The rationale for…
By Adi Gordon “I was always Austrian. Austria I loved.” (Hans Kohn’s diary, Jerusalem, 31 May 1929) Understanding Nationalism These are interesting times to reflect on nationalism. After more than half a century in which nationalism was considerably tamed by the memory of World War Two, by intergovernmental organizations, and through various aspects of globalization,…
By Janine Yorimoto Boldt and Kristina E. Poznan When Franz Hölzlhuber arrived in the United States from Austria in 1856, the United States was in deep debate over the future of slavery in its western territories and actively engaged in Native removal. During Hölzlhuber’s four years in America, war was raging in “Bleeding” Kansas, John…
By Julia-Katharina Neier “No more is that Vienna Which once I called my own. I wander, far, alone, I have to forget.” These lyrics are from the chorus of “No More Is That Vienna,” which was written in New York in 1938 and set to music by the artist and journalist Jimmy Berg. With these…
By Casey J. Hayes So…What comes to mind when you hear the word “Cabaret”? Perhaps…Liza Minelli? Yet, however historically accurate this depiction of the 1920s Weimar Berlin cabaret scene may be (I doubt they had Liza or Bob Fosse,) it was a more reserved cabaret culture that developed within the Austrian capital; more quick conversation,…