Expelled education

At the turn of the century and from the 1920s to the beginning of the 1930s, the Viennese adult education centre movement was an integral part of the “Wiener Moderne” (Viennese Modernism) due to its research and mediation and communication activities in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Many heads of sections and instructors, teaching staff and lecturers at the Viennese adult education centres (“Wiener Volksbildungsverein”, “Volkshochschule Volksheim Ottakring” and “Urania Wien”) were distinguished academics in almost all disciplines working at the university and outside the university. Their enlightened, neopositivist, leftist liberal and social reformer stance gradually lost its foothold in the intellectual life of the 1930s. Many of them had already been forced into inner and outer emigration before 1938 in the wake of the establishment of Austrofascist dictatorship. The “Anschluss” in 1938 violently ended a significant chapter in the history of the popularisation of science in Austria.

As part of Austria’s “expelled reason”, “expelled education” has been given a permanent platform at the Viennese adult education centres that is devoted to preserving its memory by means of the computer-based recording of all events, courses and lectures as well as all lecturers, course instructors and functionaries.

Use Holdings Search to search for lecturers, course instructors and their lectures, courses and events.

Project director:
Christian H. Stifter

Indexing:
Edith Hahn