Sociology in Austria since 1945

C. Fleck

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137435873
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Sociology in Austria has been frequently affected by political developments in the country. This first history of sociology in Austria examines the impact of the break-up of the Habsburg Empire and of two consecutive dictatorships, which destroyed academic freedom by means of forced migration and imprisonment. Even after 1945 the re-established Second Republic did not dismiss professors promoted during the Nazi period, and failed to invite exiled academics to return home. The author argues that the result has been a continuation of favouritism and conformism, with compliance to political regimes sanctioned at the expense of meritocracy and that in the light of this chequered past we should celebrate instances of de-institutionalization.

1

Sociology in Austria: Introduction

Abstract: The development of sociology in Austria has been influenced by political changes more than once during the 20th Century. After the breakup of the Habsburg Empire, a tiny successor state had to struggle to survive, and government did not spend much attention to academic affairs. Two consecutive dictatorships destroyed academic freedom and brought with them forced migration and imprisonment. Favoritism and conformism became characteristic patterns in the higher education system. After 1945 the reestablished Second Republic did not try to dismiss professors promoted during the dictatorship and did not invite exiled academics back home. The consequence was the continuation of behavioral patterns in academia established earlier: Austria’s postwar academic world was not governed by meritocratic criteria but the effect of a ‘dynamic adaptation’ to new political regimes. Following an institutionalist point of view one had to take into account such discontinuities and pay tribute to episodes of de-institutionalization.

Keywords: Austria; conformism; de-nazification; governance; institutionalization; Nazism; universities

Fleck, Christian. Sociology in Austria. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137435873.0004.

On a Sunday evening in January 1945, a twenty-nine year old American writes a letter to his parents back home in Texas about a dinner with his two new bosses the day before. They invited him to a fancy restaurant and over some drinks and an expensive meal (the writer reports the exact amount of dollars spent: $20, which is today about $260) the two seniors laid out the job offered to him. When it came to bargain the salary, the young man asked, in his eyes, for much more than he thought reasonable, but the two added 500 dollars above his grandiose $4,500. The letter continues congratulating the parents whose ‘good blood and bones and brash you all put into me began to come through a little’ (Mills 2000, p. 84).

The three men spending an evening together were C. Wright Mills; Robert K. Merton, then thirty-four years old; and as the senior at the table Paul F. Lazarsfeld, who turned 44 that year. Subsequently Mills was hired by the directors of the Bureau of Applied Social Research to work as the field director in Decatur, Illinois. There the Bureau had planned to collect data for their next big study on the role of media in forming public opinions. Several years later, after struggling with Mills about his unwillingness or inability to finish the manuscript, Lazarsfeld dismissed him and hired a substitute, Elihu Katz, who managed to finalize what became published as Personal Influence (Katz & Lazarsfeld 1955). Later, Mills took revenge by criticizing the style of work he should have done as ‘abstracted empiricism’ (Mills 1959).

Around the time when the three Americans talked business in Manhattan, a not-so-young man took part in what has been called an ‘evacuation action’. The location was at World War II’s eastern front where the Soviet Union’s Red Army executed heavy pressure on the Nazi Wehrmacht. Fifty-one year old Benedikt Kautsky was one of the thousands of prisoners of the concentration camp Auschwitz who had to walk to the Gleiwitz camp (now Gliwice, Poland) about 50 kilometers deep in the Third Reich’s shrinking domain. Kautsky, the son of the prominent theoretician of the Second Socialist International Karl Kautsky, survived the evacuation march and four camps altogether where he had been imprisoned for seven years. After his liberation by Allied troops in Buchenwald, he moved to Switzerland to recover. While there for six months he wrote a book about the camps, Teufel und Verdammte (Devils and Damned), which came out in Zurich in 1946. It is more than an eyewitness account but also a sound sociological analysis. Kautsky presented his view of the camp’s social organization at least once in front of sociologists when he participated in a panel on terror at the German Sociological Society’s second postwar Congress in 1948 in Worms (Lepsius 1979, p. 69). Kautsky’s study, however, did not get the credit it would have deserved, for several reasons. One might have been his not belonging to German academic circles since he remained in Switzerland up to 1950. His attempt to get a university position in the United States was not successful, so he returned to Vienna where he had worked in the interwar years. There he made a mostly non-academic career on the sideline of the labor movement, first as a trade union’s educator, then as vice-director in one of the nationalized Austrian banks. He also became Privatdozent for social policy at two universities, Graz and Vienna, editor of Karl Marx’s writings, and author of the revisionist programs of both the Austrian and the German Social Democrats, a party in which the still remaining Marxist traits were extinguished in 1958 and 1959, respectively. Kautsky died in 1960 at the age of 66.

Why start a short history of sociology in Austria with anecdotes that happened far away from the country’s soil and also seem to be unrelated to one another?

Before discussing the similarities, a note on the skewed representation between the sexes here and in subsequent parts of this book should be made to avoid unnecessary allegations. It is a fact that back then the male-dominated world of academia was seen by all members as natural and the fact that women did not occupy in it any space did not get challenged at all. The few women who could find a place there are the proverbial exception.

Let us move now to the links between the two stories.

Three of the men mentioned left their marks upon postwar sociology worldwide, and it is no speculation to relate their impact to their actual places of living. Only in the second half of the 20th Century worldwide academia became more strongly divided into one capital and several provinces. Obviously the center had moved across the Atlantic, and Lazarsfeld, Merton and Mills were at the very core of the center. Several parts of Europe, the German-speaking segment in particular, had been put aside, and the residents of the new capital could ignore whatever was produced there. This move had its causes both in politics and in sheer numbers. Nazism de-legitimized all things German whereas the effects of the dramatic growth of the republic of science’s population did not become recognized immediately. It should be uncontroversial that the more a population increases the less observable it remains for its members. Dissimilar to Latin, which was a foreign language for all its practitioners, the new lingua franca privileged those who spoke it as their mother tongue.

It might not be widely known that all four men possessed at least weak ties to Austria: Lazarsfeld was born in Vienna; he grew up there and received his primary and secondary socialization in Austria. The German-born Kautsky lived most of his adult life there. Merton spent only a summer at a famous villa in Grundlsee to improve his German in the middle of the 1930s. Twenty years later Mills lived for half a year in Austria, lecturing in the summer of 1957 for two weeks at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies (Mills 2000, pp. 199–238, cf. Schmidt 2003) and continued to live in Innsbruck afterwards for the rest of the year. He enjoyed riding his BMW motorcycle up and down the Alps more than improving his German (Mills 2000, pp. 242, 246, 303). The two Americans did not meet any fellow sociologists during their visits, but Merton visited bookstores and Mills loved coffeehouses where he wrote what later came out as The Sociological Imagination (Mills 1959).

Furthermore all four men located themselves politically as left of center, even if some were more outspoken than others with regard to their political leanings. Earlier generations of sociologists have not been as clearly belonging politically to the left as the members of the generation that shaped postwar sociology (the German-speaking sociologists entered the ‘liberal’ bandwagon much later than their Anglophone or French colleagues). Kautsky’s biography was aberrant, not only for the seven years he spent in a concentration camp. Neither his career nor his writings meet today’s expectations for an academic man. He changed topics and professional affiliations and his résumé resembled a Privatgelehrter (an independent scholar). The occupational trajectories of the three professional sociologists were much more uniform: Mills got his first tenure-track academic job at the age of 25, Merton at 28. Only Lazarsfeld was different. He was not appointed to a regular position before the age of 40 because of his complicated move from Europe to America. All three stayed professors for the rest of their lives. Nevertheless, one finds some similarities across the Atlantic divide. Kautsky seldom addressed purely an academic readership; his prose is plain and the analytic devices understandable for any lay person. Mills also wanted to be heard by the largest possible audience and wrote appropriately. The tendency of sociology and other social sciences to favorably address peers and sidestep lay readers started only then. A methodologist like Lazarsfeld or a theoretician like Merton would not be held responsible for readability today although this ‘odd couple’ (Merton 1998, pp. 169–71) tried hard to be understood by not only expert readers. The subjects of the two books – mass media’s consequences and state terror against political opponents and ethnic minorities – echo the very different political and cultural experiences of those who were by training and inclination interested to understand recent developments of their social environments. Likewise the very different reception of the products, which were the outcomes of the two episodes, illustrates what happened not only to sociology but to all of the sciences during the second third of the 20th Century. Between the early 1930s and the middle of the 1950s American institutions of higher education and research surpassed their European counterparts in a way which could not be more dramatic. The United States and their institutions of higher education and research became the unchallenged leader, and the Europeans lagged behind for decades – and Austria’s performance was even worse. To sum it up: the two episodes illustrate the cultural lag between academic environments that were just a generation earlier in the reverse order of prestige.

Austria as it was

Another general remark is needed before starting with the portrait of sociology in Austria. In sociology, as in most other disciplines, the majority of those who spend time reading about its history are primarily interested in products of lasting fame. They are therefore more interested in finding out the circumstances that enabled particular authors to proceed successfully and produce disciplinary benchmarks. Prominent authors and celebrated books, seldom shorter pieces like articles, and even less frequent other accomplishments, are at the core of the curiosity of these readers. They will be disappointed with what I have to offer. What follows is a story of dead ends, failures, frauds, undeserved appropriation and incompetence, with no happy ending but one which could be labeled ‘the conquest of banality’. Why then should someone continue reading? One of the less dull truisms of sociology highlights that by examining deviant cases we can improve our understanding of the ordinary. Austria’s intellectual history deviates from familiar patterns.

Speaking about Austria means, at least with regard to intellectual affairs, focusing on Vienna, a city which was the metropolis of the Habsburg Empire and continued to produce, and even over-produce, talents after the end of the monarchy until the early 1930s when a reactionary regime of Roman-Catholics banned all leftist institutions and forced liberal minded people into public silence. Within four years this authoritarian regime had been removed by the Nazi movement from inside Austria and the expansionist aspirations of the Hitler government in neighboring Germany. After the Anschluss (as the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich in 1938 has been called), persecution and expulsion ruined the leftovers of a flourishing cultural era.

Vienna’s population had grown during the 19th Century at a pace comparable to cities like Chicago. Located in the center of the continent, Vienna received many immigrants from eastern parts of Europe, a region from which even more people went overseas. Among them were the parents of the above-mentioned Merton. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania into an immigrant family, but easily could have ended up in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district with its huge number of Jewish immigrants from Galicia and the Bukovina. In Austria the social and cultural conditions for the quick advancement of second-generation immigrants were less auspicious than in the New World. A huge number of prominent Austrian scholars came from Jewish families, but most of them were third or fourth generation Viennese, like the Lazarsfeld family. Compared with the rapid upward mobility of the East European immigrants in New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, the Viennese Jews started producing remarkable intellectuals and scholars only after their parents had succeeded economically. Labeling these people Jews or of Jewish origin is somewhat misleading because the overwhelming majority of them followed the path of assimilation by leaving their religious community or practicing their faith quietly. The infamous Viennese mayor Karl Lueger (1844–1910) expressed the attitude towards this minority tellingly when he declared that he decides who is a Jew, which means that any attempt to assimilate needed the approval of the Christian majority. Nazism brought with it the emergence of a ‘race’-based anti-Semitism where even men who fought for the Kaiser in World War I, side by side with an Adolf Hitler, another product of Vienna’s fin-de-siècle culture, could be persecuted. Several of the subjectively completely assimilated individuals learned only when they were forced to prove their ‘Aryan ancestry’ that their parents or grandparents were of ‘Mosaic’ religious affiliation and they themselves therefore were counted as ‘half’ or ‘quarter Jews’ by the Nazi authorities. Of the nearly 200,000 Austrians persecuted as Jews according to the Nuremberg Laws by their Nazi compatriots, around 60,000 perished in the killing fields and extermination camps. The vast majority of the rest escaped, and an unknown tiny minority survived the seven years of Nazi reign as so-called ‘submarines’. The escapees were not a representative sample of the whole Jewish population but younger, better educated, wealthier, politically adept. Remarkably many from this wave became well-known scholars, including first-class sociologists.

In April 1945, two weeks before the unconditional surrender of the Nazi regime that ended WWII in Europe, Austria re-established itself as an independent republic. The Austrians got a more favorable treatment by the Allied Forces because of the equation of the state of Austria with its people when they had declared Austria the ‘first victim’ of German expansionism. Austria’s postwar elites were not slow to use this ambiguous formula. Politicians and the cultural elite tried to separate Austria from any German traits. A telling example of this attempt to form an independent nation has been the change of the name of the home language taught in school. Up to this point the vast majority of Austrian citizens spoke German and would have had no objection to naming the classes at school German language instruction. The ‘separatistic’ Austrian government decided to label it ‘instruction’s language’. Nevertheless, in hindsight, one is forced to credit Austria’s postwar governments a success because they achieved a different treatment by the Allies than the two other successor states of the Nazi Reich. Legitimized by undisputed results of an early national election, held only half a year after re-establishing an independent Austria, a two-party coalition government ruled Austria for the next twenty years and beyond. For the first ten years Austria remained an occupied territory, partitioned between the four Allied Forces, with only restricted sovereignty. Whereas the overall future was undecided and insecure, several parts of the country could be governed without much interference of the Allied overseers. The whole education sector, from kindergarten to the universities, was one of the domains where the Austrian government could do as they pleased. The Allies stopped pressing for de-nazification or re-education long before any signs of success could be seen. Since the two political parties agreed on dividing the state between them into spheres of influence, the education sector was handed over to the conservative People’s Party, the successor of the Christian Social Party. Both ministry and university personnel were selected for their deference to the rule of Catholicism and political Conservativism. Civil servants and professors disbanded by the Nazis in 1938 returned to their desks and professorial chairs if they lived nearby. Those who had gone into exile experienced much more trouble with being reinstalled. Travel permits were seldom granted by the victorious nations, and invitations to return were not issued.

Exiled professors worrying about the future of their former universities did not get the needed support by the American and British occupation forces and were outright rejected by the Austrian government. An initiative called the Austrian University League of America published a memorandum about the reconstruction of the universities in which its authors pled for a complete revocation of all promotions under Nazi rule, but instead the opposite happened. The League offered both the ministry and the universities lists of scholars willing to return, but none of them received an invitation.¹ On these lists one does not find the names of Paul Lazarsfeld or anyone of a similar academic caliber because they were not interested in exchanging their, in more than one respect, favorable positions for an insecure position in Austria with its still widespread destruction, lack of food and uncertain political future. But the list contains the names of several scholars who became prominent later on and would have made a difference in Austria (it is an open question whether they would have become similarly prominent if they had returned to Austria in the 1940s).

Austria’s postwar academic world was populated by people who, during their lifetime, had experienced more than once the reality that success and survival in academia were not rooted in meritocratic accomplishments and open competition, but instead required the ‘dynamic adaptation’ (Müller 1997) to new political regimes. After 1945 it was relatively easy for professors to overcome their Nazi affiliations, either by joining a political party or by finding someone who was willing to provide a so called ‘clean bill paper’. Consequently, the professoriate of the postwar years assembled countless conformists and shameless panderers. Not the best role models for the next generation.

To gauge the long-term consequences of such a climate one need also to be aware of a particularity of the recruitment procedure in ‘teutonic’ (Galtung 1981) universities, in which the Ordinarius, a full professor occupying a chair, was the one who in practice selected his successor by granting him habilitation, the second doctorate. Up until the late 1960s professors with above-average...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Sociology in Austria: Introduction
• 2  A Remarkable Past
• 3  A Decade of Backwardness
• 4  A Missed Opportunity
• 5  Years of Reforms
• 6   The Eye of the Needle in Recruiting
• 7  Extramural Social Research
• 8  Concluding Remarks on Social Impact and Scholarly Success
• References
• Index