Testimony of the End: analysis of Otto Maria Carpeaux's narrative about the collapse of Austria during the Ständestaat (1934-1938)

• Grant number: 24/21242-7
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: August 01, 2025
• End date: January 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Communications - Journalism and Publishing
• Principal Investigator: Mauro de Souza Ventura
• Grantee: Mauro de Souza Ventura
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura, Artes, Comunicação e Design (FAAC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Bauru. Bauru , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research aims to characterize and interpret the journalistic engagement of Otto Maria Carpeaux (1900-1978) in the Corporate State (Ständestaat) during the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg governments of Austria, from 1934 to 1938. To this end, it proposes to make an interpretative analysis of the work Van Habsburg tot Hitler (From the Habsburgs to Hitler), a testimonial account of the years of militancy and engagement in that period. This book, completely unknown both in Brazil and in Europe, was written and published in 1938, when Carpeaux was in Antwerp, Belgium, after his escape from Vienna, in March of that year. As an extension of previous research, funded by Fapesp (Processes 2015/015723 and 2020/13540-7), we also propose to characterize and interpret Otto Maria Carpeaux's participation in the cultural policy of the Corporate State (Ständestaat) based on the analysis of his articles on cinema, published in 1937 and 1938 in the weekly magazine Der Gute Film, a press organ linked to the Institute of Film Culture of the Austrian Ministry of Education.The characterization of Otto Maria Carpeaux's involvement and journalistic activism in the Corporate State (Ständestaat) during the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg governments will have as its fundamental methodological procedure the interpretative analysis of the work Van Habsburg tot Hitler (From the Habsburgs to Hitler), a testimonial account of his experience during that period and which will be studied based on the concepts of trauma and testimony. According to Seligmann-Silva (2005), testimony is characterized by being "an attempt to gather the fragments of the 'past' (which does not pass), giving them a connection and a context". However, the past witnessed in this book is the historical past, which includes the personal memory of the survivor Carpeaux, and is part of the set of testimonial works written by authors who survived and/or evoked the catastrophes of the 20th century. This work is configured as an autobiographical testimony and, as such, can be defined as a "retrospective narrative in prose that a real person makes of his own existence, when focusing on his individual history, in particular the history of his personality". (Lejeune, 2008).Finally, the analysis of his articles on cinema, published in 1937 and 1938 in the weekly magazine Der Gute Film, will serve as a period document to be compared with Carpeaux's testimonial account, which constitutes the main corpus of this research, in the broader context of a network of publications that functioned as an ideological apparatus of the Austrofascist State, and this is precisely the theme that this research deals with. (AU)