tfm Archive and Collections

• Location: UZA II, Rotunda (Staircase H, Level 2), Althanstraße 14, 1090 Vienna
• Head: Mag. Dr. Birgit Peter, Privatdoz.
• E-Mail: birgit.peter@univie.ac.at
• Phone: +43-1-4277-443 44

The archive and the collections of the tfm | Department for Theater, Film and Media Studies go back to the founding year of the "Central Institute for Theater Studies" in 1943, when the department's founder Heinz Kindermann began to create a teaching and research collection relevant to Nazi ideology. During research for the exhibition project "Wissenschaft nach der Mode? Die Gründung des Zentralinstituts für Theaterwissenschaft an der Universität Wien" (opening May 2008 - exploring the roots of the tfm), fragments of these early collections were rediscovered. They are mainly newspaper clippings, playbills, theater programs, which can be traced in Kindermann's correspondence with theater directors of "Greater Germany" and were filed under "European Theater of the Present" and "War Theater", as well as a picture archive containing portraits of actors in the form of engravings and photographs.

After 1945, the collection grew through donations, including the extensive partial estate of the theater director and writer Alfred Freiherr von Berger (1853-1912), which also includes the partial estate of his wife, the castle actress Stella von Hohenfels-Berger (1857-1920), and his niece, the poet Gisela Berger, and the partial estate of the cabaret director Stella Kadmon (1902-1989). Furthermore, the archive includes holdings on actors, writers, playwrights and critics such as Josef Kainz, Alfred Neugebauer, Max Mell, Berthold Viertel, Leon Epp, Richard Flatter, Oskar Werner, Max Reinhardt (= part of the former Max Reinhardt Archive in Salzburg), Hans Weigel, Alfred Zohner, Eleonora Duse, Gemma Boic, Armin Friedmann, Heinrich Glücksmann, Max Paulsen and others.

A variety of theater notes and programs (especially from Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s and from  Berlin) as well as theater and music theater reviews complete the collection. In addition to retrieving, securing and determining provenance, work is being done on cataloguing the inventory.