The intention of this personal research wegsite is to provide students and a general public interested in current developments in Central Europe and their historical roots with a concise historical overview and a critical analysis.
My work mainly concerns :
The Danube Region: Economic and Social Developments
Multi-Ethnicity and Transnational Peoples in the Danube Basin
History is passed on by telling stories and describing images. My aim is to tell the “little history” of the “little people” instead of the history of the famous and powerful. By that I hope to raise awareness among the young and awaken in them an interest in their families’ and communities’ history. Amusing and light-hearted episodes and an abundance of images and documents should make the serious research effort more digestible. If history is told in an appealing way it might enthuse young people who so far have not been interested in this subject matter. In this way I would like to pass on my enthusiasm for social and economic historical developments in Central Europe, which has accompanied me all my life since childhood, when I asked my grandmother to tell me about her childhood and youth in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century. In the 1960s she was taking walks with me in the Viennese suburb of Ottakring and jokingly complained, why we always had to walk along the run-down small alleys of this district and dodge the many dog turds in the narrow lightless lanes while telling and retelling the same stories of her childhood and youth. I loved her funny, ironic and amusing accounts of a long gone way of life. Although the first half of the 20th century was certainly one of the most tragic historical periods in Central Europe, my grandmother Lola’s accounts were never sad or wailing, but humorous and ironic stories of human weaknesses, failures, but also exuberant amusements and a resilience in the face of disaster and an admirable “savoir vivre” – sometimes with a pinch of salt.