Research Project ACONTRA

In a collaborative project, researchers and curators from the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, the University of Vienna and the Haus der Geschichte Österreich examine the role of Austrian radio in the formation of a 'new' national consciousness after WWII. In particular, it examines how imaginations and projections of the country’s past and future are affectively mediated on an auditory level, and the extent to which the medium contributes to the shaping of a new national temporality, and thus also a new sense of national belonging. An important aspect to focus on, in this respect, is the difficult relation with a tabooed but ever present Nazi past. Results of the project and selected material will be presented in an exhibition (both materially and digitally) in Autumn 2024. 

Even though, from 1945 to 1955, most employees at Austrian radio stations were Austrians, all stations were officially under allied administration. The struggle for ideological influence on the radio programs is well researched, especially by scholars of contemporary history. The programs themselves, however, have hardly been comprehensively analyzed. This is largely due to the fact that the primary sources have either not been available at all, or extremely difficult to access. It was only in the 1990s that the Österreichische Mediathek was able to acquire an estate that held 215 original tapes of the “American” station, RWR, most of which have since been digitized. 600 tapes of the Russian-controlled RAVAG have also become available when the ORF Archives were digitized, and another 100 individual items may be found in the DokuFunk archive. In 2016, the holdings at the ORF Archives and the Österreichische Mediathek were included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. 

However, these collections are so fragmented and diverse, both structurally and in terms of content, that they have to be processed in a standardized way before they may be productively used for further research. We aim at doing so with the help of the annotation software LAMA (Linking Annotations for Media Analysis), which was developed for the Digital Musicology project Telling Sounds. Using Linked Open Data and Semantic Web methodologies, the documents will thus be indexed and related with each other on the level of production and content. Once the materials are structured in a standardized way, they may be analyzed with regard to the outlined research questions. At the same time, our materials, as well as the newly generated standardized metadata, are indexed and linked with Authority Files, which makes them accessible for future research.  

In close cooperation between researchers and curators, the results of our analysis, as well as select sources, will be presented to a broad public at the Haus der Geschichte Österreich. A physical exhibition will be installed at the Almá Rose-Plateau in the Neue Burg imperial palace at Vienna’s Heldenplatz square, and a digital exhibition will go online towards the end of 2024, in time for the anniversary celebrations of 100 Years of Radio in Austria. 

Julia Jaklin is our project technician and programmer, and she works at the Department of Musicology and Performance Studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts (mdw). In 2022, she completed her Master's degree in Musicology at the University of Vienna with the Master's thesis Frauen(stimmen) im Radio (Women's Voices on the Radio). She is also studying Computer Science (Bachelor Software & Information Engineering) at the Vienna University of Technology. From 2018 to 2021, Julia Jaklin was a staff member in the research project Telling Sounds. The research tool LAMA (Linked Annotations for Audiovisual Media), developed in this project by Peter Provaznik together with Julia Jaklin, is now being further developed in the ACONTRA project. 

Stefan Benedik is one of our project leads, and has been working at the House of Austrian History (hdgö) since 2017. He is curating material and digital exhibitions, and heads the museum's Public History section. He studied history and cultural anthropology in Graz and Prague, and has been involved in university research and teaching in Graz, Toronto and Budapest. He held scholarships from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (DOC team) and the Steiermark Savings Bank (Young Researcher Prize). In 2016, he headed the organisation team for Austrian Conference on Contemporary History. In 2010 he became Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Gender Studies doctoral programme at the University of Graz, and since June 2015 has been a member of the Austrian Journal of History's (OeZG) editorial board.

Elias Berner is one of our project leads, and he works at the Department of Musicology and Performance Studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts (mdw). For the year 2022, he was awarded a Post-Doc-Track Fellowship by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Elias Berner is a regular lecturer at the Department of Musicology at the University of Vienna. In 2021, he received his PhD with a thesis entitled Memory, Consolation, Provocation: Music in Films about the Shoah. With this project, he was a Junior Fellow of the International Research Center for Cultural Studies from 2015-2017. From 2017-2021, he was a staff member of the Digital Humanities project Telling Sounds at the MDW.

Birgit Haberpeuntner is one of our project leads, and she works at the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies (tfm) at the University of Vienna. She is also a freelance translator, and, before the current project, she was a teaching and research assistant at the tfm-department. She wrote her dissertation about the reception of Walter Benjamin in contemporary postcolonial cultural theory, which was partly funded by a Junior Fellowship at the International Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, Berlin and Montréal. Before that, she studied English and American Studies as well as Theater, Film and Media Studies in Vienna, Montréal and New York. 

Past:

Project presentation at the Media Historical Forum at the University of Potsdam, November 10, 2022, via Zoom; find documentation here (in German):  https://rundfunkundgeschichte.de/vielfalt-im-kleinen-bericht-vom-medienhistorischen-forum-2022/ and via https://twitter.com/naKOGE_ 

Project presentation at the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies (University of Vienna) “Day of Research”, January 13, 2023 

Open workshop organized by the study group for radio and history, as well as a a meeting with the German Radio Archive in Potsdam, February 17, 2023, University of Potsdam 

Presentation "Deine Vergangenheit war groß: Kriegsresonanzen im österreichischen Radio der Nachkriegsz" by Birgit Haberpeuntner and Elias Berner at the annual conference of the Arbeitskreis für Militärgeschichte l "Der Sound des Krieges," 27-29 Sept. 2023 at FU Berlin

Upcoming:  

tba

Julia Jaklin 
University of Music and Performing Arts (mdw) 
Department of Musicology and Performance Studies
Lothringerstraße 18
1030 Wien 
jaklin@mdw.ac.at 

Elias Berner 
University of Music and Performing Arts (mdw) 
Department of Musicology and Performance Studies
Lothringerstraße 18 
1030 Wien 
berner-e@mdw.ac.at 

Stefan Benedik 
House of Austrian History 
Public History 
Neue Burg, Heldenplatz, Wien 
+ 43 1534 10 - 803 
stefan.benedik@hdgoe.at 

Birgit Haberpeuntner 
University of Vienna 
Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies
Josef-Holaubek-Platz 2 (UZA II) 
1090 Wien, Raum 2H555 
birgit.haberpeuntner@univie.ac.at