Abstract (eng)
The doctoral thesis is focused on the comparison of gender images as well as notions of history transported in literature to the Austrian resistance against the National-Socialist regime. With the catholic “Österreichische Freiheitsbewegung” and the so called leftish “Tschechische Sektion der KPÖ” – situated in the Czech-speaking Viennese minority – the comparison groups came from different social environments of the Austrian society. In the first part of the study, both groups are introduced in regard of their resistance activities and their organization structure, using the contextualization of social backgrounds to show existing connections. Through this, influences of the milieus on work structure and gender roles could be shown, especially transfers from political parties and different associations were visible.
For the subsequent second part, selected parts of the literature on both resistance groups were analyzed against the background of the political situation in Austria after 1945 and the development of contemporary history research. To enable a comparison, it was necessary to limit the selected literature to early reports by resistance fighters and to academic literature. As in academic texts of to other historical periods, images of men and women were used for the presentation of historical events. For example National-Socialist female offenders were shown as the counterpart to seemingly “ordinary” women to pronounce the moral abnormity of National Sozialism, other female or male connoted presentations of everyday life and war scenes. Because of this, the gender images were compared with the development of the Austrian society in the second Republic. As a result, the amount of influence taken by contemporary gender concepts on academic literature could be shown, as well as the partial use of gender images to distance the Austrian society from male – or sometimes female – offenders.