Associated Media of Austro-Hungarian Zoological Education

Before the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was one of the largest and most powerful states in Europe. The Empire was a major global player in science, education and heavy industry. Its multi-ethnic and multi-lingual makeup also presented a counter-model of success in comparison to the nation states of the German Reich and France. Yet tensions were rife within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, leading to intense competition in a wide variety of fields. Science and education, in particular, became focal points of the relationship between the imperial capital of Vienna and other cities of the Empire such as Budapest, Prague, Belgrade, Cluj or Lviv. Natural history education played a special role here. Internationally, scientific and educational institutions came to represent Austro-Hungarian eminence in scientific exploration as well as in the hard and life-sciences. Within the Empire, natural history equally played a pivotal role in the competition between Vienna and other urban centres. On the one hand, from the point of view of the capital city Vienna, the representation of flora and fauna from throughout the empire cemented a claim of governance over these territories, their wildlife and, by extension, their peoples. On the other hand, for the burgeoning national movements of the non-German-speaking peoples of the Empire, natural history became a focal point of establishing their own national scientific traditions. At the University of Vienna, a unique cache of material has survived that attests to the leading role that Austria-Hungary played in natural history research before First World War. The teaching collection of the former Department of Zoology, now held at the Department of Evolutionary Biology, shows how Vienna became one of the leading centers for Darwinist evolutionary theory, at a time when Darwin was facing fierce opposition in Britain. The first collection is made up of approx. 1000 original, hand- painted wallcharts, making the collection one of the largest of this kind world-wide, and the second encompasses approximately 8000 glas lantern slides. These images primarily served to teach students of zoology in the enormous lecture halls of the new University of Vienna, but they are also masterfully executed works of art that have, so far, been hidden away in the stacks. The FWF-funded project AMAZE will make these unique images accessible to the public for the first time, works of art that show how closely entwined science and the arts were in the nineteenth century. But, as Alan Ross and his team point out, images have never been innocent. Rather, visual media were crucial in configuring the balance of symbolic power in education and the sciences towards the capital city Vienna. The FWF-funded project AMAZE brings together an interdisciplinary team of historians of art, education and the sciences, and argues that images were crucial in the nationalization of science and internal colonialism in the Habsburg Empire.