Nachrufe/Obituaries

Nachruf auf Herta Blaukopf

Am 19. Januar 2005, kurz nach ihrem 81. Geburtstag, ist Dr. Herta Blaukopf, geb. Singer, ihrem schweren Leiden erlegen.

Die Krankheit, die sie unvermittelt aus einer schöpferischen wissenschaftliche Periode riss, ertrug sie bis zuletzt mit Mut, Geduld und großer Würde.

Mit den Hinterbliebenen trauert auch das Institut Wiener Kreis und die Forschungs- und Projektgruppe "Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung und Kunst", zu deren ständigen MitarbeiterInnen sie gehörte und deren nimmermüdes moralisches und intellektuelles Gewissen sie war, um Herta Blaukopf.

Als Ehefrau von Kurt Blaukopf, des Begründers und spiritus rector unseres Forschungsschwerpunkts, dessen intellektuelle Weggefährtin, Mitarbeiterin und Mitautorin die promovierte Germanistin war, trat sie bereits in der konstitutiven Phase der Projektgruppe seit 1992 mitgestaltend hervor, und bereicherte die Projektarbeit um wichtige Beiträge zur Geschichte der Germanistik, zur Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte.

Gerade in Zeiten der moralischen und geistigen Orientierungs- und Kritiklosigkeit vermissen wir ihre Stimme sehr!

Martin Seiler

Kurt Blaukopf (1914-1999)

On June 14, 1999 Kurt Blaukopf, the doyen of music sociology and music studies, passed away at the age of 85. He had been a member of the academic board of the IVC since its inception. Since 1992 he headed the IVC-research project for "Scientific World Conception and Art".

Born in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy town of Czernowitz (Bukovina) Blaukopf grew up in Vienna where he received a musical training and began to study law and political science. In 1938 he was forced to emigrate on "racial" grounds along with thousands of other Austrians of Jewish background. He first moved to Paris, then to Jerusalem in 1940 where he continued his musical and academic training. In exile he also actively supported all initiatives to reestablish a democratic Austria.

In 1947 Blaukopf returned to Austria where he first worked as a journalist and as an editor for the music journal phono. With his book Musiksoziologie (1st edition 1950) Blaukopf was appointed professor at the Vienna Academy of Art where he had founded the Institute for Music Sociology shortly before. From 1977 until he became professor emeritus in 1984, Blaukopf did pathbreaking work, as holder of the newly created chair for music sociology and head of the Institute for Music Sociology. Parallel to this, he was also honorary professor at the University of Vienna. Since he was not allowed to complete his studies, the university awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1994. As member of the executive council of the UNESCO (Paris, 1972-1976) and founder and director of the Institute MEDIACULT (1969-1989), an international research institute for media, communication and cultural development he was able to launch and publish a number of studies on the influence of new technologies on the communication of music and art ("mediamorphosis"). His publications on the work and time of Gustav Mahler are milestones in the fields of music history and music studies.

Blaukopf's contributions to disseminating ideas related to music and culture were honored in 1988 when he received the Austrian national prize for cultural journalism.

In the last decade of his intellectually very prolific life, his interests focused mainly on the empirist traditions of art and music sociology in connection with the research group at the IVC which he headed. He continued to work unfalteringly up until the end in spite of a serious illness. His last article in English on Otto Neurath's picture paedagogic work, "The Shortcomings of the TV-Screen in Cultural Communication", can be found in this Yearbook. Kurt Blaukopf's thought was informed by the Vienna Circle and its early history. His intellectual legacy is documented in the volume Pioniere empiristischer Musikforschung. Österreich und Böhmen als Wiege der modernen Kunstsoziologie (Pioneers of empiristic music studies. Austria and Bohemia as the cradle of modern art sociology) (1995). The other five volumes in the series that has been published by the research group largely reflect the intentions of this empiricist, inter-disciplinary and cooperative research.

With Kurt Blaukopf we have all lost a truly exceptional person and scholar. A sensitive and highly educated contemporary with a refreshing sense of humor and a healthy dose of irony and self-irony. His knowledge was strikingly encyclopedic and topical: he embodied the almost vanished type of polymath who was still rooted in the flourishing cultural life of the First Republic.

His so inspiring thought never served him as a means to an end but was always linked up with the conditio humana in an Enlightenment sense.

Thanks to his unyielding empiricism, together with a typically Austrian critique of language, Kurt Blaukopf never succumbed to a self-complacent academicism.

His international reputation as a music scholar is well-known. Fortunately, he himself was still able to take stock of his impressive life's work in a lovely autobiography titled Unterwegs zur Musiksoziologie, 1998 (Toward a Sociology of Music).

Not so well-known was Kurt Blaukopf's outstanding service as a mediator between the spheres of science and art. As an active project director at our institute he was able to play this role as an untiring editor, author and spiritus rector of an interdisciplinary research group. Backed his conviction that creativity and scientific methods are comparable in both research and the arts and influence each reciprocally, he decisively shaped and enriched the project at our Institute. Up until the very last weeks of his life, he served as intellectual mentor, providing rich inspiration and contributing valuable manuscripts.

His professional spirit and his love for research remained unbroken to the end. We are thus in the very fortunate position to have two unpublished manuscripts that reflect the orientation and broad spectrum of his intellectual work. The issues he dealt with range from modern screen perception to "Art studies as exact science from Diderot to the encyclopedia of the Vienna Circle" (to be published in the next volume of our IVC-publication series with Springer).

In spring of this year he developed, together with the members of the research group, the next phase of our project which we will try to carry out as his intellectual legacy.

We will not be able to replace Kurt Blaukopf. Together we will try to further develop some of his revolutionary ideas in his sense. His spirit and academic ethos will help us to get over this painful loss and channel our sadness in productive energy. We will try to not just preserve but also continue his intellectual aims (in particular his passion for Austrian philosophy from Bolzano to the Vienna Circle). We may also be able to conclude his last uncompleted work on the forgotten philosopher Robert Zimmermann on which he reported with almost childish enthusiasm.

Kurt Blaukopf was an exceptional and congenial person: an Austrian intellectual with an unbroken joy of discovery, a fascinating researcher with a human face. What a fortune for Austria that he, "the democrat, patriot and scholar", returned (without an invitation) to a country from which he had once been driven away. If there had been more such contemporaries we would not have been an "intellectual province" for so long. His unbroken optimism and his epicurean joie de vivre will be long remembered.

Friedrich Stadler