Today Gunther Burstyn (1879-1945) is considered as reformer of the Austrian tank force. But during the first half of the 20th century the young soldier sustained the typical well-known Austrian fate of innovators with his inventions and concepts. The implementation of his inventions, which were far beyond the military technical standard at that time, were doomed to failure because of disability of the Habsburg's and the Austrian army as well as on missing financial capacity of the Austrian...

Das Buch skizziert die militärisch ebenso erfolgreiche wie tragisch endende Karriere Wilhelm Zehners vom einfachen Soldaten über eine militärische Beamtenlaufbahn zum Bataillons-, Regiments- und Brigadekommandanten und letztlich zum Staatssekretär für Heerwesen und Mitglied der Regierung Dr. Kurt Schuschniggs. Überschattet ist diese Karriere vom mysteriösen Tod Zehners am Tag der Volksabstimmung des Jahres 1938. Die Frage, ob es Mord oder Selbstmord war, ist bis heute nicht ganz geklärt....

No school of thought has ever before influenced and indeed transformed 19th century biology so radically as Darwin’s Theory of Evolution or Common Descent. There have been some natural scientists who drew particular inspiration and direction from the natural environment into which they were born and where they had grown up, and equally from the places in which they were active later on in their life, who identified with Darwin’s new doctrine. Among the first of these scientists in search of...

The present publication summarises the biographies of the Austrian winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Robert Bárány; Julius Wagner von Jauregg, Karl Landsteiner, Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, the focus being primarily not on an assessment of their medical achievements but rather on a presentation of their lives. While these five personalities today are regarded as figureheads in the history of Austrian science, their biographies clearly show that they were by no means endowed with...

The present volume documents the results of an eponymous conference held in November 2000 initiated by biografiA, the Biographic Database and Lexicon of Austrian Women (http://www.biografiA.at) and held by the Institute of Science and Art (http://honehobel.phl.univie.ac.at/~iwk). Against the background of the Biographical Database of Austrian Women in preparation and the proposed Lexicon of Austrian Women, speakers from Germany and Austria presented both theoretical considerations and existing...

Aus dem Inhalt: Elisabeth Lebensaft: Das biographische Lexikon – ein Medium mit Vergangenheit und Zukunft; Franz Menges, Bernhard Ebneth: Die Neue Deutsche Biographie als Projekt und Aufgabe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayrischen Akademie der Wissenschaften; Igor Gostl: A Short Survey on the Croatian Historical Biographic Dictionaries; Irena Homola-Skapska: The Polish Biographical Dictionary: Polski Slownik Biograficzny (PSB); Alfred Zangger: Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz; Augustin...