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CLIO-Association for Education and History Work

Mission statement

Our scientific interest is the question of room for maneuver in times of National Socialism. With all of its activities, CLIO contributes to making people visible who

  • opposed National Socialism 
  • went the “other way”
  • have stood up for their convictions
  • believed in Austria when it no longer existed 
  • People stayed in an inhuman time

CLIO also has a history and has been since 1995 …

CLIO or a muse wanders, does history and memory work

In Greek mythology, Clio is one of the nine muses . She and her sisters are daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, with Clio being entrusted with the art of writing history.

In Graz, CLIO is an association for history and educational work that has dedicated itself to the art of teaching history as well as history and memory work – and it does it, as Peter Lachnit did in September 2008 in the Ö 1 program “Dimensions – The World of Science ”meant in a portrait of CLIO – among other things by wandering about history and literally following it up.

The “wandering” of local contemporary and social history, following in the footsteps of the Styrian partisans, visiting places where Jewish life in Graz was established 100 years ago and other searches were the starting points for the CLIO carried out Events on forgotten and repressed Styrian contemporary history. In the meantime, numerous exhibitions, symposia and lecture series on contemporary historical topics as well as books have been added to the local search for clues in Styria .

CLIO was founded in 1995 by the writer Thomas Karny (Die Hatz. Pictures from the Mühlviertel “Hasenjagd”) and the historians Margit Franz and Manuela Fritz and the historian Heimo Halbrainer. The aim was to scientifically process the repressed recent history of Styria, which was only marginally treated by institutionalized historical research, and to discuss it publicly beyond the academic field.

One of the first activities of the association that was noticed nationwide was an exhibition in Graz in January 1998 in memory of the Graz architect Herbert Eichholzer, whose birth and death anniversaries were 95th and 55th anniversary respectively. The exhibition “Herbert Eichholzer 1903-1943. Architecture and Resistance ”made a decisive contribution to the fact that this“ forgotten ”architect found its way into the public memory of his hometown.

The scientific examination of various topics of Styrian contemporary history led to the fact that CLIO founded a publishing house in 1998. In the last twenty years, more than 80 books on resistance to National Socialism, flight and expulsion of the Jewish population, anti-Semitism, Nazi rule in Styria, Nazi and war crimes trials, women’s history and other topics have been published. The results of scientific conferences are discussed in the academic series “CLIO Historical and Sociopolitical Writings” and “Publications of the Post-War Justice Research Center” , and texts by forgotten authors are published in a series of publications that began in 2008.