About us

Contact persons and co-initiators

Susanne Hochreiter is a literary scholar at the Department of German Studies and currently chairs the Working Group for Equal Opportunities at the University of Vienna. Her work focuses on German-language literature of the 20th/21st century. She has published on gender-appropriate language. In addition to this exploratory examination, it is the literary texts themselves and their authors that warn against fascism and sensitize us to authoritarian developments. Ilse Aichinger wrote in 1946 in her “Call to Distrust”: “No sooner have we learned to raise our eyes than we have already learned to despise and deny again. No sooner have we stammered and tried to say “I” again than we have tried to emphasize it again. No sooner have we dared to say “you” again than we have already abused it!” The critical and cautionary examination of the legacy of the Nazi dictatorship has shaped Austrian literature since 1945 and continues to do so today. “Never again” – that’s now.

Birgit Sauer was Professor of Political Science at the University of Vienna until her retirement. She deals with the topics of feminist state theory and, in recent years, increasingly with the role of gender relations and masculinity in the success of the authoritarian right in Austria and Germany. The authoritarian right-wing obsession with gender has been leading to attacks against the deconstructivist concept of gender and against gender studies in Austria for some time – with the aim of authoritarianizing and de-democratizing. It was therefore important to her to prevent the FPÖ from forming a government and to work towards ensuring that the other parties form a government with their 70% of the vote.