When researchers become censors. An approach to the Vienna Censorship Office during the First World War
This project is dedicated to the complex censorship techniques in the Habsburg Monarchy during the First World War. The focus of the investigation is on Censorship Department »D« of the »Gemeinsames Zentralnachweisbüro«, which recruited its staff among conscripted academics, artists, and protagonists of Viennese Modernism. Responsible for the monitoring of prisoner-of-war mail, the censorship office proved to be a bottleneck not only for the masses of correspondence, but also for the scholarly biographies of its censors, whose task it was to translate coded messages contained in the private correspondence from all languages of the Habsburg Monarchy and its wartime enemies into general mood reports and metadata. With the toleration of the army command, the collected material also flowed into the censors’ personal research projects.
Evelyn Knappitsch studied history in Graz and Vienna and received her Ph.D. in Graz in 2020. Her research interests lie in the field of media and cultural history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A central aspect of her approach is the exploration of narrative techniques of historiography. She is currently an independent researcher and lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Graz.
