Academies of Sciences in Central Europe in Cold War

Die Akademien der Wissenschaften in Zentraleuropa im Kalten Krieg. Transformationsprozesse im Spannungsfeld von Abgrenzung und Annäherung [The Academies of Sciences in Central Europe during the Cold War: Transformative Processes in the Tension between Dissociation and Rapprochement], ed. by Johannes Feichtinger and Heidemarie Uhl, Vienna: ÖAW Verlag During the Cold War, the systemic rivalry between East and West was also carried out in the field of scholarship. This volume examines the Academies of Sciences in Central Europe on either side of the Iron Curtain in the early stages of the Cold War (and in some cases beyond). These include academies in the Socialist states (the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Romanian Peoples Republic Academy, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences, and the Slovakian Academy of Sciences), academies in divided Germany (the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin, the Saxon Academy of Sciences, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and finally the Leopoldina in Halle/Saale as the all-German Academy of Sciences), and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This volume offers for the first time a comparative perspective on the Central European Academies of Science during the Cold War. The overarching focus lies on the one hand on continuities and ruptures within the academies and on the other hand on commonalities and differences between the Western and Socialist models of the academy, as well as within each respective political system. The comparison begins with the degree of autonomy and independence granted to the academies of sciences by the state and by politics in each respective case. An introductory chapter reveals and analyzes the fundamental differences between the Western and Socialist academies. A marked difference quickly becomes apparent in two central aspects: While the Western academies despite their involvement in National Socialism largely continued to function uninterrupted after 1945, the academies of sciences in the Socialist states were established anew. The academies of the Socialist type were soon expanded into comprehensive carriers of scholarship, while the Western academies remained purely societies of scholars. The Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) occupies a middle position between these two models. The introduction by the editors and Mitchell Ashs contribution constitute a well-founded frame for the altogether fifteen contributions by renowned historians of the sciences. The concluding remarks by Herbert Matis and Arnold Suppan locate the individual chapters within the context of political transformations in Central Europe during the Cold War. The volume presents novel findings of the Research Network for the History of the Academies of Sciences in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries initiated by the ÖAW. Many of the findings on the academies of East Central Europe during the Cold War presented in this volume are here made accessible in the German language in a Western European language for the first time. The innovative conception of a transnational comparison opens up new scholarly terrain and is intended to offer impulses for further research in the future.