This seminar is now available as MP3 (please listen to the file below in three parts).

The 1915 War Aid Exhibition in Vienna put the Austro-Hungarian empire’s wartime refugees on display in an exhibition that was as much about the empire’s own legitimacy as it was about aid to displaced victims of war. The paper situates the 1915 exhibition within a broader relationship between empire, ethnography and museums at the turn of the century. It addresses the ways in which the monarchy, museums and national elites all sought to foster the empire’s supranational identity of unity-indiversity and superimpose that identity on local populations in both metropolitan and local public spaces. Governing practices at both the imperial and local level relied on this visual representation of the empire’s constituent populations to legitimize relations between and across the empire’s nationalities and the monarchy itself. Museums and ethnographic work thus acted in their own as well as other (often mutually compatible) interests by creating an embodied landscape of governed diversity in the empire. The paper concludes on a contemporary lens – digital, coloured, archived, mobile – to speculate how the story of wartime refugees might be woven into other stories about trauma, materiality, humanitarianism, internationalism, memory and commemorative practices across boundaries of time and space.

Dr Julie Thorpe is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney. Her first book, Pan-Germanism and the Austrofascist State, 1933-38, was published by Manchester University Press in 2011.

To view the flyer for this event please see: Exhibiting Refugees in Austria-Hungary: The 1915 War Aid Exhibition in Vienna.