Vienna Zoo in the first half of the 20th century

Projectnumber: Research project P 13339 Vienna Zoo in the first half of the 20th century Mitchell ASH 28.06.1999 This project focuses on the career of Otto Antonius, who acted (with a short interruption) as the director of Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna from 1924 to 1945. Antonius developed the zoo in Vienna from an imperial menagerie into a modem zoological garden. In addition to historically reconstructing his administrative, scientific, and aesthetic achievements in Schönbrunn, the project will investigate in detail his contributions to paleontology, zoology, ethology, zoobiology and animal-breeding. One particular aim of the study is to evaluate Antonius` new and fruitful way of combining paleontological evolutionary biology and behavioral science. This will also open a hitherto unknown chapter in the early history of ethology. In this perspective, Antonius` work appears as a continuation of a Viennese tradition of behavioral science that treats behavior as an important evolutionary mechanism and supposes particular behaviors to be important factors in the degeneration and extinction of species. This research tradition originates in the paleobiology of Othenio Abel, who was the academic teacher of both Antonius and Konrad Lorenz. Antonius` personal accomplishment consisted in developing on this basis a scientific formulation of zoobiology, the thoroughly evolutionistic conception `of which contrasted with Heini Hediger`s holistic approach. Comprehending history of science as part and parcel of cultural history, the project investigates the images and metaphors that motivated Antonius` conceptual framework. Such an approach shows how his understanding of nature was represented by the display of wild animals at Schönbrunn Zoo. Antonius` concept of animal exhibition will be contextualized within broader discourses of the interwar period that employed the concept of nature to criticize modem civilization. Particular attention will be given to the way in which Antonius` intellectual attitude and his administrative policies relate to the specific politicization of nature under National Socialism. The history of German zoos during National Socialism has been neglected to date. In the proposed project this surprising lacuna will be filled for the Schönbrunn Zoo, but in the wider context necessary for an appropriate judgment.