Austria´s Forced World War II Migration to Australia

This project seeks to research and write a prosopography (= collective biography) of a cohort of migrants forced to flee from Austria to Australia, after the March 1938 Anschluss of the country to Nazi Germany. It provides a comprehensive comparison between the impact of Austrian émigrés to Australia and the role played by returnees for postwar Austria. The cohort of about 4,000 people would be a great object for a research study due to their common background. Almost all migrants came from Vienna and most of them belonged to the educated middle class (in spite of their diverse religious and political views and their highly diverse careers). Furthermore, the overwhelming part of the cohort moved to the urban centers of Melbourne and Sydney. Austrian migration to Australia caused by World War II. has not found much attention from scholars so far and thus constitutes a lacunae in research. It promises fresh research results that would allow adding valuable information to the wider field of Austrian migration research. The study will provide a unique comprehensive collective biography of a relatively coherent cohort of migrants. It will merge biographies, autobiographies, oral history data, official records as well as contemporary newspaper articles into a comprehensive historical data base. The basis of the study constitutes a selection of 40 single biographies. For the first time, a comprehensive long-term study will evaluate both the process and the consequences of the migration of a cohort of migrants from Austria as well as the effects of their remigration. By doing so, the study will contribute to a research field that is very much underdeveloped compared to Germany. It will provide an analysis of the overall cultural transfer that took place between both states, including retroactive effects as a dynamic process and thus will not only show us what migrants had achieved in Australia, during the postwar years but also how those who decided to remigrate were able to enrich the Austrian postwar culture with their Australian experiences.

The project analysed the consequences of the migration of a cohort of Austrian World War II refugees in Australia. It researched and wrote a collective biography of 26 refugees who came to Australia before and during the war focusing on their memories and depictions of their contribution to the social, economic, and cultural transformation in wartime and post-war Australia. The project used the latest insights of the fields of biography and cultural transfer studies to write a collective biography of 26 people who stand representative for the overall cohort of Austrian refugees in Australia. In order to achieve that goal, the principle investigator (PI) combined quantitative methods and statistical analyses of the overall group with qualitative biographical approaches. As a result, he was able to present a series of smaller, published case studies, as well as a larger monographic manuscript that for the first time - give insights into the refugees social, economic, and cultural contribution to the development of the Australian postwar society from their own perspective. The refugees memories have further been complemented by other contextual sources (interviews with contemporary experts, media reports, company sources, literature on the respective fields of society/economy) to allow a depiction of the importance of the refugees contribution in the respective field. By realising the project, the PI, not only unearthed the impact of a group of refugees who came to Australia during a crucial phase of the post-war development, he also methodologically and contentually contributed to the fields of the history of knowledge, cultural transfer studies, as well as biography.