Preview: Unwritten Biographies- Fractures and Continuities. Artists of the Angewandte Vienna 1933–1955

The research project Sonderfall" Angewandte Die Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien im Austrofaschismus, Nationalsozialismus und in der Nachkriegszeit [The University of Applied Arts Vienna under Austrofascism, National Socialism, and during the Postwar Period] and the publication of the same name (Edition Angewandte, De Gruyter 2024) focused on the institutional history of the Angewandte between 1933 and 1955. In the German-English follow-up publication, the University of Applied Arts embarks on a special kind of search for traces. By the time of the “Anschluss” in 1938, nothing remained of the former Kunstgewerbeschule as it has been before. Jewish and politically undesirable teachers and students were expelled and driven out, and countless promising careers came to an abrupt end. Their escape routes across Europe, some of them across several continents, led to exile in the US, England, Israel, South America, or Australia.

This edited volume traces the artistic, political, and personal lives of artists who taught or studied here. They worked in all fields of art—art, architecture, working for theatres and the film industries, design, fashion, art education, and art therapy. They are largely forgotten or known only in specialist circles: Unwritten Biographies. The focus is primarily on exiled artists who studied during the interwar period, such as Rudi Bass, Margarete Berger-Hamerschlag, Fritz Czuczka, Karl/Karol Duldig, Slawa Duldig-Horowitz, Bettina Bauer-Ehrlich, Richard Erdoes, Leo Glückselig, Ita Goldberg, Kitty Goldman(n), Karl Hofmann, Fritz Janeba, Käthe/Kathe Janeba-Pollak, Georg Kalmar, Ruth Karplus/Rogers-Altmann, Hans Felix Kraus, Fini Vogelbaum/Rudiger-Littlejohn, Laci/Laszlo Matulay, Gertrude Morgenstern, Carlo Pietzner, Kurt Popper, Marcel Ronay, Friedrich (Fritz) Rosenbaum, Johann/Hans Rothe, Bil Spira, Richard Tandler, Georg Teltscher (George Adams), Lisl Weil, Edith Wellspacher-Emery, Judith Zweig/Katinka. Their destiny, their courage, their commitment, often their humor, but above all their work are impressive.

The publication also takes a closer look at professors such as the Wilhelm Müller-Hofmann, who was dismissed in 1938 and was one of the few to return after 1945; the ardent National Socialist and short-term director Philipp Häusler, Franz Schuster, who was known as a socialist, and the opportunistic Paul Kirnig, who both successfully promoted the school's elevation to the rank of a Reichshochschule, as well as the queer fashion professor Eduard Wimmer-Wisgrill.

The contributions by international researchers from various disciplines are pioneering work that aims to embed these previously “unwritten biographies” in cultural-political contexts: in Austrofascist, National Socialist, or post-Nazi Vienna, or in the respective countries of exile, where complex processes of cultural transfer took place. The publication is dedicated to a previously neglected, forgotten, and suppressed history of the Angewandte and thus also of Viennese Modernism.