Zeitgeschichte im Spannungsfeld zwischen Politik, Biografie und Methodik: autobiografische Anmerkungen

Abstract

Gerhard Botz outlines his scholarly autobiography in its interrelationship with and against main developments in Austrian politics and historiographic trends. However, he does not want to present a coherent narrative about his career from social and scholarly peripheries to close to the centres of historical and social scientific research. The unfolding of his scientific profile is compounded of different puzzle pieces like memory-based descriptions, historical analyses of contemporary political contexts, and his live story interviews. As an historian the author tries to integrate social science and cultural history methods and theories into his main professional grounding which is focused thematically on Austria's history since the end of the First World War, particularly on the disastrous effects of violence and the Nazi dictatorship. He presents his main findings and the methodical practices along three fields of long term interests and projects: political violence and social conflict during the interwar period in Austria, the functioning and social consequences of national socialist rule on the example of Vienna, and the social composition and motivations of the NSDAP membership. In doing so he allows also insights into every-day work, obstacles and gains of historical research applying a multitude of methods, including quantification and oral history. These insights were gained in close connection with several leading scholars of QUANTUM and the Centre of Historical Social Research in Cologne. These efforts motivated Gerhard Botz to organize the Salzburg Summer Schools on New Methods in History and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Social Science History (at the University of Vienna until its closure in 2017).