Helmut Gruber

History of the Austrian Working Class: Unity of Scholarship and Practice

On February 12, 1981, the Austrian Prime Minister Bruno Kreisky opened an international conference devoted to Working-Class Culture in Austria, 1918-1934.1 The largest delegation among the more than 100 participating scholars came from Austria, but there were also representatives from most European countries and the U.S. The festive inauguration of the conference was set in the former tramway sheds of the old Viennese working-class quarter of Meidling. This location was by no means fortuitous. Three weeks earlier a vast and impressive exhibit had opened in these abandoned structures to tell the history?in pictures and text?of the struggles and cultural accomplishments of the Austrian working class during the First Repub lic to the widest possible audience.2 ?or was February 12 an arbitrary choice in convening the conference, as Kreisky made quite clear in his remarks. In commemo rating that day in 1934 when the Austrian working class had risen and been crushed, Kreisky concluded, they were keeping alive a historical reminder to socialists and non-socialists alike that the defeat of the working-class movement then also meant the destruction of democracy and the loss of national independence.3 This planful constellation of a scholarly conference, public exposition, and allusions to past and present politics by Austrias leading socialist forms one of the important elements of the framework in which the history of Austrias working class has attained a unique unity of scholarship and practice. That singularity is made clear by the principal contributors to both the conference and the exhibition: both were drawn from the same reservoir of younger historians and social scientists, which has undertaken to create scholarly and public interest in working-class history. A complicated network of institutions and personalities has contributed to the creation and furthering of this new generation of scholars studying the history of the working class. A primary focus of these various components, which have made the publication of some 200 volumes in the past fifteen years possible, is the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut f?r Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, associated with the Insti