BLOG
The BIAAS blog series features posts by junior and senior scholars in the field of Austrian-American studies. The views and opinions expressed in these blogs are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BIAAS.
BIAAS Austrian-American Blog
In the Footsteps of Richard Neutra: An Expedition in California
By Peter Stuiber
Beginning in 2020, the Wien Museum MUSA presented the exhibition "Richard Neutra. Homes for California". This expedition highlighted the US-based work of one of the Austrian history's foremost modernist architects. To accompany it, a publication was made that also focuses on Neutra's contemporaries. The basis for this was an intensive research trip undertaken by Wien Museum curator Andreas Nierhaus and architectural photographer David Schreyer. A conversation.
Austrian Children and Youth Fleeing Nazi Austria Podcast Series
with Guest Host Jacqueline Vansant
Only a limited number of Jewish children, accompanied or alone, immigrated to the United States during WWII. As a result perhaps, research examining this subject has been largely overlooked. Austrian children and youth who fled Nazi-occupied Austria to land safely, against all the odds, in the United States has been even more neglected in terms of academic research. Here, however, in this extraordinary podcast series to support the related Journal of Austrian-American History Special Issue, guest host Jacqueline Vansant, professor emerita of German at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, discusses three different research perspectives examining Austrian-Jewish Child Migration during WWII with expert and engaging guests.
Woodrow Wilson’s Emancipatory Perspective: The Ottoman and Habsburg Empires
By Larry Wolff
Historian Larry Wolff chronicles the evolution of US President Woodrow Wilson's anti-imperial ideology towards the Habsburg Empire in this article. Though Wilson called for the autonomy of the Habsburg peoples in Point Ten of his Fourteen Points speech in January of 1918, he did not arrive at a fully frank opposition to the empire's existence until that October--a year and a half after America entered World War I. Wilson's thinking about the Habsburg monarchy was shaped by his perspective on the Ottoman empire, his youthful admiration for British Liberal leader William Gladstone, and his sense of Abraham Lincoln's legacy of emancipation.
ruth weiss: Poet, Performer, Grand Dame of the Beat Generation
with Thomas Antonic
BIAAS's latest podcast presents BIAAS grantee Thomas Antonic, whose film about Austrian-American Beat poet ruth weiss, One More Step West Is the Sea, recently won the New York Independent Cinema Awards 2021 in the category "Best International Documentary Feature."
Code Name Mary: The Extraordinary Life of Muriel Gardiner
By Carol Seigel
Muriel Gardiner had an extraordinary, multi-faceted life--a young American woman who courageously fought fascism in 1930s Austria; a member of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic circle in 1930s Vienna, who became a psychoanalyst herself, practising and writing in the US in the post war decades, and closely connected to Freud’s most famous patient, the Wolf Man, about whom she wrote a seminal book; and the founder of the Freud Museum London with her friend Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter. Muriel is also believed to be the model for Lillian Hellman’s character 'Julia' in the 1977 Oscar winning film.
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 three murders in Los Angeles in 1991 while on a freelance assignment for an Austrian newspaper to write an article comparing red light districts in Austria and the United States. He was apprehended in Florida in February of the following year, having gone back to Austria in between and then fled from Salzburg police back to the United States. Unterweger may have the distinction of being the only known Austrian-American serial killer.