Die Presse, December 18, 2019
German Original: https://www.diepresse.com/5738399/futter-fur-das-kulturelle-vakuum-im-australischen-exil
Austrians displaced by the war were responsible for an enormous transfer of knowledge from Europe’s cultural centers to Australia. The contemporary historian Philipp Strobl investigated why this transfer worked so well.
On December 14, 1938 Karl Anton Schwarz reached Australia. Before he fled Austria after the Anschluss, he was a full-time insurance broker and a passionate ski tour hiker his spare time. Henceforth, Schwarz imported the concept of the Austrian Alpine Association to Australia, where skiing was practiced only by exclusive circles until that time. Through memberships and mountain huts he built up an infrastructure that would have a lasting influence on Australian ski sports and ski tourism.
Schwarz was not an isolated case. Many expellees started their lives anew in Australia with valuable knowledge capital under their belts. Philipp Strobl (University of Hildesheim and University of Innsbruck) processed the biographies of those who made an impact on the Australian culture and economy through their knowledge and their pioneer spirit.
They mostly came from solid, middle-class homes, many of them – physicians, lawyers, architects, engineers and businessmen – were highly qualified. The contemporary historian pursued the issue from 2016 until 2019 through a project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) at the University of Innsbruck and at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne (Australia) in order to make the knowledge transfer, as well as the adaption of ideas more comprehensible.
2,600 Austrians Down Under
Between 1938 and 1945, some 9,000 expellees, most of them Jewish, arrived in Australian exile from German-speaking countries. Among them were ca. 2,600 Austrians, most of them from Vienna. A majority of them settled on the East Coast.
The choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser is one person, whose trace was followed and documented by Philipp Strobl. She was a pioneer of modern expressive dance and had great success as a dancer in Vienna. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II she first fled to Bogotá (Colombia) and later to Sydney. There, she finally developed the Australian variant of Modern Dance.
The art historian Gertrude Langer shared a similar fate. After landing in rural Brisbane, she was longing for European Modernism – and revolutionized the local art sector. Today, Langer is regarded as one of the pioneers of modern art in Queensland. The way Langer applied her cultural capital in her new home – by also utilizing local knowledge and knowledge of the Aborigines - is notable, Philipp Strobl points out.
Because Australia has an “excellent archival culture” and all immigration records are available in their entirety, the contemporary historian was able to establish precise profiles of the Austrian expellees in Australia. He also interviewed 26 of them and their descendants, respectively, as well as their friends or acquaintances from different social strata, age groups, and cultural areas.
Based on the representative case studies he is currently forming a “collective biography.” He is using it as a methodology to consistently analyze the collected biographical information of the expellees. “I am particularly interested in the question of what portion of the cultural capital they brought to Australia was acquired in Austria, how they adapted it, and, finally, what strategies they used to translate their ideas and their knowledge,” explains Strobl.
This offers interesting insights into the question of what cultural, social, professional, or economic footprint they left behind: “Many things that today are regarded as “Australian” have an international origin.” The success of transnational knowledge transfer is rooted, one hand, in the expellees themselves, as well as in their ability to market their knowledge, as Strobl recently explained in a conclusion published in the Journal of Migration History (05/2019). On the other hand, the receiving society has to recognize the cultural capital of immigrants as important and valuable.