40 years of contemporary history in Innsbruck
We celebrate, research and ask questions
In April 1984, the Institute of Contemporary History was founded at the University of Innsbruck. The first director of the Institute, Rolf Steininger, had already been appointed Professor of Contemporary History at Innsbruck the previous year.
40 years later, on the occasion of the Institute's anniversary, we look back on the beginnings, developments and changes. And we look at the state of (institute) affairs in 2024.
In a course, students conducted interviews with active and former members of the Institute and looked at historical sources from the Institute of Contemporary History. The exciting, amusing and sometimes critical results can be read on the following pages.
Text: Ina Friedmann
The birth of the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck: A milestone for the critical examination of the recent past in Tyrol
Text: Olaf Stark
On 1 February 1984, a new chapter in historical research was opened at the University of Innsbruck with the founding of the Institute of Contemporary History. This event was an important milestone for students and researchers interested in the recent past.
The Institute of Contemporary History was assigned to the Faculty of Humanities.
Before this pioneering foundation, the range of courses on contemporary history at the University of Innsbruck was rather sparse. The Institute of History only offered a few courses on this topic; if you searched for the keyword ‘contemporary history’ in the course catalogue for the 1982 summer semester, for example, there were no hits among the courses. In the summer semester of 1983, around a year before the Institute was founded, there were already five courses dealing with contemporary history. These included the broad-based ‘Conversatorium on Contemporary History’, which was led by Rolf Steininger as the newly appointed first Professor of Contemporary History and was open to all history students.
In addition, specific seminars were offered that provided an in-depth insight into contemporary history. In the first part of the programme, Rolf Steininger led a proseminar on Anglo-American occupation policy in Germany. In the second study period, seminars such as ‘Austrian History: Contemporary History’ and ‘Contemporary History: The USA, Great Britain and the Genesis of the Cold War’ were offered. The fifth course was a seminar by Johann Rainer and Hermann Kuprian from Austrian History entitled ‘Contemporary History’.
However, this changed fundamentally with the founding of the Institute of Contemporary History in the summer semester of 1984 as the third of its kind in Austria - after the founding of the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna in 1966 and the Institute of Modern History and Contemporary History at the University of Social and Economic Sciences in Linz in 1968, which had already been followed by the establishment of the associate professorship for Austrian History with special consideration of contemporary history in Salzburg in 1967, the full professorship for Austrian History in 1969 and the establishment of the ‘Department of Contemporary History’ in Graz in 1984 at the same time as Innsbruck. The official confirmation of the establishment of the Institute by the Federal Ministry of Science and Research dates from 12 April 1984, when the document was sent to the Faculty Board of the Faculty of Humanities, confirming the establishment of the Institute of Contemporary History.
A broad spectrum of programmes was created that dealt intensively with the events and developments of the recent past. Rolf Steininger took over the management of the Institute after the foundation had already been negotiated as part of his appointment agreement. He was supported by assistants Klaus Eisterer and Dietmar Schuler as well as secretary Anita Göstl.
The Institute offered a wide range of courses. The first course after its official foundation was a lecture with an accompanying conversatorium on the ‘Dictatorship and Foreign Policy of the Third Reich’, supported by ‘sound, slide and film presentations’. In addition to seminars on the division of Germany and the history of Austria, topics such as ‘History and ideology: tendencies in bourgeois historiography since 1900’ and the end of the Weimar Republic were also covered.
The blog posts on the following pages, which provide a variety of insights into the Institute, illustrate the importance of this foundation and honour the work of those who have made a significant contribution to establishing and expanding the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck. The developments, challenges and successes can now be read about from different perspectives.