DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROJECT

The Difference and the City project (DatC) was carried out by Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier (principal investigator) from 2009 to 2013. It was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under the title Difference and the City: Minoritäre MigrantInnen Wiens 1900 (P 21493). DatC started out from an observation about migrants from predominantly South Slav regions in Vienna around 1900, and that was the absence of an organized public sphere. It was one of the goals to verify this observation or to relativize it.

Was there a hidden public, were these migrants taking part in a translocal public, or both? This was the reason why the project should start its investigation with migrant networks and clusters »below« the level of classical ethnic organizations, and to show migrant strategies in dealing with their being different.

To that end, lives of single migrant personalities of several social positions should be reconstructed and made visible in their familial networks and their connections to other networks. This was to be juxtaposed to an analysis of the discursive activities of migrants on the level of migrant organizations. Thus, strategies of making a living were to be connected to strategies of self-representation. Was there a causal relation? Or were migrants living one way and represented themselves in a different way? As ethnicity is a major element of historiographical explanations of the dynamics in the late Habsburg Monarchy, DatC wanted to test the importance of the ethnic category in as many domains of life as possible.

The DatC concept was good but two factors lead to fundamental changes in research orientation: the principal investigator was offered to participate in a short term research project in the United States (Understanding the Migration Experience: The Austrian-American Connection, 1870-1914, funded by the Botstiber Foundation, conducted by Annemarie Steidl, University of Vienna, and in collaboration with James Oberly, UWEC) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The material available there was so rich and offered so many comparative perspectives, that Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier decided to include it in the research perspective of the Vienna project. This comparison alone however would have lead to an imbalanced research focus. It was therefore decided to extend the period of time covered from 1890–1914 to 1791–1929 and in return to narrow down the thematic scope.

The research design was split in two tiers: for the original period (1890–1914), research has concentrated on describing the numerical and social outlook of all migrants form South-Slav speaking regions in Vienna around 1800. In the extended period (1791–1929), Fischer-Nebmaier limited the scope on self-representations in newspapers of Habsburg Serbs only and on the networks and infrastructures that were behind those publications, using these significant events and places as a structure: 1781, first Serb newspaper in Vienna; 1848, Serb newspaper discourse begins in Southern Hungary. In the 1890s, no more Serbian newspapers in Vienna; 1906 first Serb newspaper in the US; appeared only in Serbian until 1929.

The plan seemed feasible because Fischer-Nebmaier had experience with and rich material from all these periods and topics. He had written his dissertation on a related topic in the context of the inception of late 18th century Habsburg Serb discourse. He had written an extensive study about the advent of Habsburg Serb newspaper discourse during the 1848 revolution in the framework of FWF research project P13346 in 1999 to 2001. He was investigating the unclear situation of South-Slavs in Vienna around 1900 and this in-depth approach was promising to yield new insights. And he was simultaneously also writing up chapters based on the material gathered in the US about Habsburg South Slavs there in the early 20th century.

Partly, results have already been published. A book is ready for submission on the US project and a book on the overall project results is in preparation. Results of the research on Vienna are in print as “Difference and the City. Migrants from the Predominantly South-Slav Regions of Austria-Hungary in Vienna Around 1900.” In Wien um 1900: Migration und Innovation in Wissenschaft und Kultur, edited by Oliver Rathkolb and Elisabeth Röhrlich. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.