Bureaugraphies. Administration After the Age of Bureaucracy
Protocol Culture. Transcripts of the Austrian Bureaucracy 1900–1950
Modern German Literature, University of Vienna
The subproject is dedicated to the Austrian state administration from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century, i.e. from the final phase of the imperial bureaucracy to the reconstruction of a republican administration in the Second Republic. (The overarching k.u.k. institutions within the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the administrations of its successor states are not considered specifically, only as a context.) The project takes the bureaucracy of the ‘cisleithanian’ Habsburg monarchy as its point of departure in order to investigate the extent to which administrative writing procedures and concomitant behavioral routines were continuously (in spite of the political caesura of 1918, 1938, and 1945) permeating and transforming the social sphere (or specific parts of it) in Austria and should thus be considered paradigmatic ‘bureaugraphies’. To this end, the subproject focuses on the official, but also on the extra-governmental function of the protocol; on its role within contemporary discourses critical of bureaucracy; and on the emergence of a protocol mode of writing in literature.
Contact
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Burkhardt Wolf
Publications
- Burkhardt Wolf: ‘Organisation und Kreativität. Zur Idee des schöpferischen Bürokraten’, in: Soziale Systeme 29/1-2 (2024), S. 43-62.
- Peter Plener/Niels Werber/Burkhardt Wolf (Hg.): Das Protokoll. Berlin: Metzler 2023 (AdminiStudies. Formen und Medien der Verwaltung, Bd. 2).
- Thomas Weitin/Burkhardt Wolf: Gewalt der Archive. Studien zur Kulturgeschichte der Wissensspeicherung. Konstanz 2012.