As a historian of communication, I am interested in audiovisual media and their use in our discipline. Since the beginning of my academic career at the University of Vienna in 1983, I have been able to set up an audiovisual department with extensive technical equipment.

As part of a university course, I carried out a project between 1988 and 1996 that was intended to give young people “up close and personal” encounters with their own history. In the tradition of oral history, the students conducted in-depth interviews with Austrians who were not the well-known heroes of Austrian history, but people who, in their respective places and with their respective opportunities, made a contribution to the resistance against the Third Reich. In conversation with their grandchildren, they reveal personal and political information and convey tangible examples of the possibilities of walking the straight and narrow in a totalitarian system.

Aligned with the FAIR principles, the project “Oral History: Austrian Publicists in Exile in Resistance to National Socialism – An Oral Video History Project 1988-1996” was archived in Phaidra, the institutional repository of the University of Vienna, and made permanently accessible to the public.