Author: Nora Schütz
General information
Address: “Vorwärts-Haus”, Rechte Wienzeile 97, 1050 Vienna
Website: www.vga.at
Contact: office@vga.at
Brief history
Founded in 1959, the Verein für die Geschichte der ArbeiterInnenbewegung (VGA) aimed to establish a space outside of university institutions that would bring back together pieces of Austrian history scattered throughout Europe. With the rise of the NSDAP in Germany in 1933, and their later takeover of Austria, documents from the Social Democratic Labour Party SDAP and the Austrian labour movement were brought out of the country and therefore saved from destruction. These measures began a few months before the events of February 12, 1934, when a civil war eliminated the organisation of social democratic resistance against fascism in Austria.
The VGA has changed locations several times, primarily due to financial constraints. However, in 1989, it relocated to the Vorwärts-Haus, its current location, where it shares the space with the Bruno Kreisky and Johanna Dohnal archives. From then on, the VGA was able to establish itself according to Fritz Adler’s vision. The son of Victor Adler, the founder of the SDAP, had envisioned it as a socialist and Austrian institution and a solution to the party’s dire lack of archive space and recurring resettlement of important documents.
In 2014, the VGA changed its name to “Verein für die Geschichte der ArbeiterInnenbewegung” to demonstrate its commitment to gender consciousness.
Holdings
The VGA is a multi-layered organisation, as it unites an archive, a library, and a research institute under one roof. Not only does it host the heritage of the Austrian labour movement, but it also understands itself as a place of academic research that preserves the social democratic intellectual heritage as well.
The first documents added into the VGA archive after its establishment in 1959 were the previously exiled Altes Parteiarchiv (Old Party Archive) and the Adler Archiv (the archival estate of Victor Adler and his family). Over the years, the VGA’s holdings were expanded to include documents from the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) that was established after 1945, as well as other smaller collections.
Structure and access
The structure of the Verein für Geschichte der ArbeiterInnenbewegung (VGA) is based on a number of core archives, complemented by additional collections that have been integrated over time. Among the principal holdings are the Adler-Archiv, which preserves the inheritance of the family of Victor and Emma Adler, and the Altes Parteiarchiv, the historical archive of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP). Closely related is the Parteistellenarchiv, which remained part of the Austrian State Archives until 1989, and the Parteiarchiv nach 1945, documenting the activities of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) in the post-war period. The VGA also holds numerous personal estates, including those of prominent socialist figures such as Adolf Schärf, Otto Bauer, Oskar and Marianne Pollak, Otto Leichter, Adelheid Popp, and Rosa Jochmann.
In addition to these core archives, the VGA maintains several specialised collections. The AZ-Bildarchiv contains roughly 600,000 photographs from the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the SPÖ party newspaper. offering a visual record of Austrian social and political life. The Sach- und Themenarchive are collections organised by subject and thematic focus, while the Organisationsarchive preserve records of affiliated unions and associations. The Fachbibliothek, comprising around 65,000 volumes, supports research on the history of the labour movement and related fields. The VGA also houses the Archiv der Revolutionären Linken, a collection of materials from Austrian Trotskyist groups, along with various smaller and miscellaneous collections. Together, these holdings illustrate the institutional and ideological breadth of the labour movement.
The VGA is generally accessible to everyone, but visitors must schedule an appointment by email with the VGA staff. A visit to the VGA is particularly helpful for students and academics, as the staff offers support and guidance with research. Each visit to the VGA begins with the submission of a user form which lists the documents, files and books to be handed out. Two factors that could be considered limiting are the restricted access to the Neues Parteiarchiv of the SPÖ, and a reproduction fee for sources. If researchers intend to print a source (or a scan of a source) in their work, a fee must be paid. The amount of fee varies depending on the type of reproduction and how and where it is used.
A selection of the AZ-Bildarchiv is digitised and openly accessible via the Austrian National Library. So far, about 60,000 of 600,000 pictures have been digitised. In addition to the digitisation and recording into databases, a special focus is put into deciphering information as much as possible, finding out details about the depicted persons, events and places.
Around 500 political posters (1945-1955) of the VGA’s holdings are part of an online accessible project of the Plattform zeithistorischer politischer Archive (PzpA; “Platform of contemporary political archives”).
Connected collections
Because the history of Socialism and social activism is so closely intertwined with that of the city of Vienna, a number of Viennese institutions preserve materials related to the holdings of the VGA and are valuable for comparative or complementary research. The Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (Austrian State Archives) contains extensive governmental and administrative records that contextualise the political activities documented in the VGA’s party archives. The same is true for the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv (WStLA). The Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National Library), in turn, preserves a vast body of printed and visual sources, including socialist periodicals and political pamphlets, that illuminate the broader media landscape of the labor movement.
The Library of the Arbeiterkammer Wien offers access to specialised literature on labor law, economics, and social policy, complementing the VGA’s focus on historical documentation. The Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (DÖW) holds collections on antifascism, exile, and resistance, including materials on socialist and trade union activists persecuted under National Socialism. Because of their subjects’ standing within the SPÖ, the Bruno-Kreisky-Archiv and Johanna-Dohnal-Archiv are directly complementary to the holdings of the VGA. And lastly, though the Archive of the Forschungszentrum für historische Minderheiten has lost its permanent location, it can still be a valuable resource on the Czech and Slovak labour movement in Vienna.
What makes this collection global?
While the VGA naturally focuses on the Austrian labour movement, the international character of that movement cannot be neglected, and that is why this perspective deserves significant attention. International networks and conferences, as well as the work of international bureaus and organisations, can be traced in the VGA’s archives. But still, and this is especially the case for the Altes Parteiarchiv, fundamental dynamics of centre and periphery as well as Eurocentrism regarding language and overall focus shape the VGA archives as well. So, structurally, the VGA is not a global history archive but can be utilised as such. Global history can be found in many places, for example in pictorial presentations and illustrations of a global and international movement – the image of the globe, for example, can be found on prints, posters and pamphlets. Several other topics represented in the VGA archives could be suitable points of departure for global history, such as migration, exile, international and global networks, and solidarity.
So, while the VGA’s focus is limited to the Austrian labour movement and the structure of national parties, the very character of the labour movement has always been international, connected to international networks and shaped by world-wide aspirations. With newer archives and documents that enriched the VGA’s contents (and continue to do so), the scope of perspectives represented in the VGA has grown considerably. Global history is very much possible and fruitful with what the VGA has to offer.
Featured primary source
This source can be found in the collection “Archiv der Revolutionären Linken – Sammlung TrotzkistInnen” (“Archive of the Revolutionary Left – Trotzkist Collection”). This archive has a long history of itself and includes contributions by several persons and organisations; the most recent one was added in 2022. In total, it has 46 boxes, as well as 86 files or boxes of the Raimund Löw contribution. The selected source is located in box 45 of the Raimund Löw section (RL45), titled “Lateinamerika”. It is a collection of various pamphlets, posters, magazines and other publications regarding Latin America, especially regarding solidarity with Chile and the Austrian brigades that went to Nicaragua to help with coffee farming. From 2021 to 2022, Löw contributed an extensive collection of documents of the revolutionary Marxist group (GRM), the socialist alternative (SOAL) and international partner organisations, as well as journalistic correspondence by Löw himself.
On September 11, 1973, after prolonged power struggles between two opposing groups in Chile (the socialist party of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president at that time, and the right-wing conservative military leadership of Augusto Pinochet), a coup marked the beginning of a 17-year-long dictatorship under a military junta. After Allende’s death, the Chilean Left was brutally persecuted and murdered by Pinochet’s regime. For the SPÖ, emphasising a solidarity that was founded on similar ideologies and parallels between the events of 1934 in Austria and 1973 in Chile was important. This solidarity campaign included aid for Chilean refugees (i.e. housing and finding work), the Chilean diaspora in Vienna (Viena Chilena) and the general symbolic mobilisation of solidarity against fascism.
This linoleum print (artist unknown), with the title “Chile sei uns eine Mahnung wie das Kapital regiert” (“Let Chile be a warning to us of how capital governs”) is not only brutal in its aesthetics and therefore quite eye-catching, but the presented symbolisms open up several topics at the same time. Machine guns, tanks and rockets represent warfare and Pinochet’s militarism, while the skull could symbolise death or fascism; its facial parts include symbols such as the dollar sign in the monocle, a swastika in the other eye, a SS rune forming the nose slits, teeth which seem to be framed by the white supremacist symbol of the Othala/Odal rune, and the abbreviation ITT on the helmet. The International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) owned about 70% of the Chilean telephone corporation Chiltelco. During Allende’s regime, he attempted to place Chiltelco under state control and offered the ITT compensation, which was declined. ITT then actively followed a lobbyist strategy against Allende’s government, putting pressure on the Nixon administration to cause intervention (which had already been the plan). The ITT on this print presents a good example of US influence and intervention in the Chilean Crisis, especially on a global Cold War scale. What this source therefore represents is not only the coup itself and what kind of events transpired in Chile, September 1973, but also the events’ international, global and historical background. Not only are the Cold War and US-American interests strongly accentuated, the danger of fascism vehemently emphasised, and the general topic of war represented, but the Chilean case is also portrayed as a global warning. This source is therefore a great example of the global potential the VGA possesses.
Further reading
Eckel, Jan. “‘Unter der Lupe’: Die internationale Menschenrechtskampagne gegen Chile in den siebziger Jahren.” In Moralpolitik: Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, 368–396. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010.
Qureshi, Lubna Z. Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile. Lanham: Lexington, 2009. Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.