Thank you very much for this kind introduction, Karin. Thank you also for your invitation, Anne, Elif and Lena. I'm delighted to be here in Linz. Colonialism is part of many family histories. To this day, families all over Europe keep objects such as diaries, photographs, militaria, or loot that their ancestors brought home as colonial agents. Such objects continue to convey colonial success stories beyond the death of their original owners, making families a refugee of colonial historical myths that hide the mass violence behind exotic imaginaries. Does this also apply to Austrian families? Until a few years ago, the answer would probably have been no, supported by the argument that the Habsburg monarchy had no colonies and therefore could not be considered a colonial power. This argument, however, ignores the fact that colonialism was by no means limited to the seizure of land and its exploitation. There is no doubt that Habsburgs considered themselves as a globally active player. a globally active player. Nevertheless, the myth of Austria's colonial innocence persists in its historical culture until this very day. As part of my habilitation project, I am investigating how this myth was condensed into a homogenic narrative over the course of the 20th century, while competing interpretations of the Habsburg Empire as a global player were marginalized and pushed out of the collective memory. Today, I will address a first case study of my second book project, which deals with Habsburg's colonialism in Austrian family memory. I will look at the private archive of the Boineburg-Lengsfeld family in Carinthia, whose great-uncle Richard was an officer in the Austrian-Hungarian Navy and who had participated in the so-called Boxer War in China in 1900. Richard returned to Europe in 1901, severely wounded. Four years later, he died as a result of this wound. However, even though he died almost 120 years ago, his memory is kept very much alive by his family until today. In the next 20 minutes, I will use the family, this family, to examine transgenerational processes of memory work. I will ask how family members position themselves in relation to colonial family history, how they make sense of it, and in doing so, analyze the social construction of silence surrounding colonial mass violence. surrounding colonial mass violence. Consequently, this is not a paper about Richard, about the Boxer War, but about the archive's guardians, about Götz and Claudia, and how they made sense of the family's colonial past. My presentation is divided into three parts. Firstly, I will provide some theoretical and methodological reflections on family memory, then put Richard's war deployment in China into its historical context, and finally, in the third part, examine how the family remembers the Boxer War to this day. remembers the Boxer War to this day. Let's start with the question of what family memory actually is and how can we investigate it. The analysis of family memories has so far concentrated. I'm a historian, so I'm mostly addressing the historical state of the art, of course, has so far concentrated on so-called table conversations, Tischgespräche, that represent oral representations and negotiations of the past, about the past. This approach is a result of the theoretical conception of family memories, of Familiengedächtnisse. Memory scholars argue that family memory is constituted through social interaction and reaches back about 3-4 generations or 80-100 years, just as far back as the oldest family member can remember. This theorization of family memory as a central mode of communicative memory, led to research often being conducted as oral history. This approach, however, ignores the material nature of family memories. Photographs and other objects of the past are not simply opportunities to tell a story, but they carry meanings themselves. That is the reason why I am using the concept of social memory for this talk. This concept argues that memory does not only appear in interactions, but also in objects whose social use creates history, meanings of the past. In order to investigate the histories of the Beunerburg-Lengsfeld family, I will make use of a mix of methods. I work ethnographically to find out how the family integrates the memory of the colonial war in China into its everyday life today, and I work techno-anthropologically to find out how previous generations positioned themselves in relation to families' colonial history through the use of various objects. Before I look at the history of the objects used, however, I need to provide you some historical context about Richard and the Boxer War. To the Beuneburg-Lengsfeld family, its history is very important to them, not least because they belonged to the titled nobility of the Habsburg Empire until 1918. Richard was born in October 1878, the second son of Freiherr Moritz von Beuneburg-Lengsfeld and his wife Marie. Richard had four younger siblings, Egon, Erich, Erwin and Marie. Like his father and brothers, Richard pursued a career in the Habsburg army, which was considered a suitable choice for his social standing. After attending the military secondary school in Vienna, he joined the Imperial Navy in 1897. Just one year later, he sailed to East Asia on the ship SMS Center. After a longer stay in India and Japan, the ship was transferred to the Bohai Sea on the Chinese coastline to support the Europeans in Beijing, together with soldiers of other colonial powers in the summer of 1900. What has happened in Beijing? At the end of the 19th century, China was one of the last uncolonized territories of the world. However, the influence of colonial powers grew. The anti-colonial secret society known as the Boxers formed to counter European influence. The movement quickly became bigger and soon pursued the goal of liberating China from foreign influence. In the spring of 1900, there was a poor harvest in China, which particularly affected the north of China and for which according to the boxes foreigners were to blame. As a consequence around 25 000 boxes marched from the north of Beijing to drive the foreigners out of the legation quarter in Beijing. In order to support the Europeans there, the colonial powers quickly sent an international intervention force to Beijing. Richard, sorry, and few dozens of other Austrians were part of this, as much as soldiers from the US, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia. This multinational army was able to reach Beijing in time and to defend the legation quarter against the Boxers. As a result, the Boxers laid siege on the legation quarter for around two months. 55 days later, a 20,000- strong contingent of the eight power alliance reached Beijing to liberate the besieged the unauthorized advance on Chinese soil prompted the Empress of China to clear to declare war on the colonial powers and fight with her army on the side of the boxes. Nevertheless, the international alliance succeeded in liberating the besieged in August 1900 and blundering Beijing. However, the conflict did not end there. The deployment of even larger contingents of European, US, and Japanese troops continued. They pursued the Boxers into the Chinese hinterland and carried out so-called punitive expeditions, executing Boxers and looting and burning villages. The international soldiers proceeded rigorously. Around 100,000 Chinese were dead against around 1,000 dead Europeans. The war ended with the so-called Boxer Protocols, in which China was forced to pay high compensation as a result. And as a result, Austria-Hungary, like other European powers, established a concession in Tianjin, which Austria-Hungary controlled until the First World War. And Richard, as an officer in the besieged city of Beijing, he was involved in the fighting during which he was seriously wounded. He was shot in the head. Despite several operations, it was not possible to remove the bullet. It was not possible to remove the bullet. Nevertheless, Richard's condition improved so that he was able to travel home to Vienna in 1901. There he was celebrated as a colonial hero and showered with honors. In addition to war decorations from several colonial powers such as Belgium and Japan, Emperor Franz Josef I awarded him the Golden Medal for Valia. Back in Vienna, Richard tried to pursue a career in the Imperial Navy, but was only partially successful due to his war injury, from which he died only a short time later in July 1905. And even though that was almost 120 years ago and no family member alive today met Richard personally, his memory is kept alive. How and above all, why? And what role does the immense violence of the Boxer War play in this? This brings me to the third part of my talk. I visit the Beuneburg-Lengsfeld family at their home near Villach in Carinthia at the end of March this year. Claudia welcomes me. Her husband, Götz, was Richard's great-nephew, or to put it in another way, Götz' grandfather, Erich, was Richard's great-nephew, or to put it in another way, Götz' grandfather Erich was Richard's brother. Claudia takes me to her home, the Brandenburg, a house in the woods that they made their home after getting married in 2007. Claudia invites me into her conversatory, serves me a coffee, and disappears into the attic for a few moments. She returns with a cardboard box containing almost all of the objects that are left of Richard, she tells me. She spreads the material out on the table in front of her. My conversation partner, Claudia, assumes that it was collected by Egon, Richard's younger brother, who apparently had a particularly close relationship with Richard. Egon's son, however, no longer cared about this material. In 2017, he sold it to his cousin Götz, Claudia's husband, along with furniture and pictures from the family estate. along with furniture and pictures from the family estate. So Claudia and I spent the next few hours working our way through the box and eating some Easter chocolate, as you can see. As the material has only been in the family for such a short time, she hardly knows it herself, as she explains it to me. Nevertheless, she's able to reliably tell me who can be seen on which photograph and to whom which handwriting can be attributed. We leave through the correspondences, discuss objects such as the cutlery, the curated purses, and the hat with the inscription Beuneburg, Beijing, 1900, as well as the headband that identified Richard as a crew member of the ship Center. In addition, we discover vast amounts of newspaper articles reporting on Richard's wounding, the associated military action, and his death four years later, which were probably collected by himself and later by his brother Egon. In the collection there are also three photographs showing him as a convalescent on the ship center and a whole series of photographs showing him with Sarah Fröschl, a family friend, in Vienna in December 1900. The texts on the back of the photograph, in which he presents himself in full uniform with saber and the distinctions he has received, give us an idea of how Richard interpreted this Beijing experience. In curved letters he wrote in ink on the back of the picture, the hero returns, the Held kehrt zurück. On another he refers to him as that sad and much mourned, als totgesagt und vielbeklagt. And that he wears his house cape, das Hauskäppchen, a visual sign of his wounding with glory and honor. His brother Egon kept the pictures and decades later added contextual information in blue pen, as you can see on the slide. The picture shows Richard Beunerburg Lengsfeld as a sea cadet, he wrote, who had returned severely wounded from the Boxer Rebellion in Beijing, and lists the military decorations his brother had received for this. Beijing in 1900. Egan corrected this. Now readers learn that the picture was taken, quote, after Beijing 1900 in the Fröschl Villa in December 1900, quote end. The fact that Richard is not forgotten today is due to the fact that the men in the Beunerburg-Lengsfeld family are very much into keeping family chronicles. Erich, another brother of Richard, included Richard's story in his own family chronicles when he wrote one in 1930, so 25 years after his brother's death. Götz, born in 1943, worked on one in the 1970s for his daughter Desiree, in which he reproduced Richard's self-imagination by referring to his great-uncle as, quote, the young hero of Beijing, the junge Held von Peking. As Claudia shows me around the house towards the end of my visit, we climb up the stairs to see some more of Richard's objects in the living room, his bag of cards, his saber, his smoking accessoires. When the family gathers here, Claudia tells me, the grandchildren sometimes come to her and ask her to tell them stories about the family. In doing so, she also tells them about Richard's adventure in China. From my point of view, the real attraction in the house, however, is the staircase itself. I immediately noticed that the walls are hung with pictures from the bottom to the ceiling. Götz, her husband, has hung them showing either ancestors or former family possessions. In the staircase, Claudia takes me on a journey through the family history that takes us back to the Middle Ages. It almost seems as if she could tell me a story about each picture. When I expressed my astonishment about this, she replied to me that her husband had assigned her two tasks after their marriage. First, as a studied economist, she was to take care of the management of the family forestry business. Secondly, she was expected to devote herself to the family history and ensure that nothing was forgotten. So Götz expected his wife to actually learn all the names, the family tree and the histories about them. In the stairwell, we also meet Richard three times. Götz didn't leave it to any chance what his family would think of the young hero from Beijing. On the picture's backs, he edited newspaper cuttings as historical evidence and short texts that stated that Richard had been in Beijing to, quote, put down the Boxer Rebellion, during which he had been, quote, wounded and decorated many times. And how does Claudia position herself in relation to Richard almost 120 years later and now that she has taken over the gatekeeper function from her dead husband, who died in 2020. Claudia explains to me that she perceives Richard as a bizarre and sad figure. She believes that he, who according to family legends, was a rather ordinary person, who saw the Boxer War as an opportunity to stand out, the Boxer War as an opportunity to stand out, to earn social prestige. That he paid for this with his young life, of course, is said to her. Despite the fact that so much material has been handed down within the family, there is hardly any information about Richard's time in China apart from the buzzwords Beijing, the Boxer War and the story of his wounding and the distinctions he earned. It seems as if his history, his story, has lost all historical context over the course of time. What matters to the family is his tragic fate, not the colonial war. What counts for them is to remember Richard as a victim of his own ambition and not the 100,000 dead Chinese. In this respect, it is not surprising that the colonial mass violence of the Boxer War remains unmentioned in the family chronicles once in Richard's photo production. On the back of this photograph, he wrote mysteriously, now we can laugh again. Jetzt können wir leicht lachen. But he was probably referring more to his serious injury than to the immense mass violence he witnessed in China. In my theoretical reflections, I have already mentioned that family memories are black boxes. They are fragmentary, ephemeral, shaped by silence. This also applies to that of the Beunerburg-Lengsfeld family, of course. The memoirs of Paula von Rosthorn, however, allow us to illuminate some parts of this black box and get an idea of what Richard actually did in Beijing. Paula was the wife of the Austrian-Hungarian envoy in Beijing during the siege. A few years later, she published her memoirs, in which Richard appears several times. Even though she describes him as her favorite, meinen Liebling, Paula paints, at least for us, a readership in the 21st century, a rather unflattering picture of him. She portrays him as a violent racist man who, unlike other besieged people, could not wait for the fighting to start, took particular pleasure and proved creativity in building human traps during the siege, and dreamed of holding and presenting the empress of China like a caged animal after the victory on his ship Zenta. This brings me to my conclusion. Austria's colonial past is also part of Austrian family histories. In the case of Beuneburg-Lengsfeld, however, the colonial war in China is merely an empty backdrop, a seemingly exotic ornament whose function is merely to decorate the highly normed narrative and emphasis its perceived exceptionality. European mass violence in China remains invisible in the family archive, and yet it is the silent elephant in the room thank you for your attention crazy material yes you encountered we'll start our conversation right away. Is there anybody who's eagerly waiting for the first question? Otherwise I can also start with the ending of your talk. What would you say, what can one then make of these family archives with respect to a more serious encounter with the colonial history of Austria, for example? Because you presented it now as something that rather cloaks the events in China into darkness, and it doesn't give us any more information on what happened there and also not about the involvement of Austrian soldiers but I guess you have an idea why it is still very important to dive into the family history so what can do you think what can we get out of it in order to have a more? have a better understanding of Austrian involvement in colonial endeavors Thank you, thank you for this interesting question. I Think one very important point is that we raise the awareness because this myth of Austria's innocence when it comes to colonialism is still very strong nowadays. And putting these family histories into the front helps us to prove, to highlight, to demonstrate that there are many, many more similar histories, even though that the Bornenburg-Lengsfeld family, for instance, thinks that Richard's story is an exceptional, unique, once in a lifetime experience. There were many men, not only soldiers, but also men who traveled the world as, I don't know, as sailors, as researchers, and so on and so forth, others built places around the world. So Austria-Hungary was deeply involved into this though connected world of the 19th and early 20th century world and family histories can help us to raise awareness is it me or is it the microphone? Something. Okay, I hope you can understand me. I think it's a very simple, but very basic and important step just to raise awareness about these questions. About the question how we position ourselves to the colonial past. So we have to train young scholars to sneak into the houses of the upper class, because that's obviously one of the problems. It's the upper class. Usually they don't talk to people like us, and they are also not subject to an interest in history, usually. I mean, there is a link to class, obviously. I mean, in the special context of the Boxer War, there is certainly this link, because when we think of the men who were at this ship center, the officers were Austrians, German-speaking officers, and the common sailors were men from Dalmatia, from Slovenia, Croatia. So this history has, of course, also a transnational dimension. So we are willing to address the Habsburg legacies of its colonial ambitions. We have to do this in a transnational way. Sure. Thank you. Alison and then Marielle. Alison is here first. Thanks, Marcus. That's really amazing talk. Thank you. And they work well together, because one of them, both Lino and yours. Oh, no, sorry. Is it yours is it on yeah oh I just need to use it one of them is about the kind of forbidden history of Austria one as an outsider seems to be a kind of obsession within Austrian history about kind of recreating social class in an aristocratic form and I just wanted to ask a question about social class and archive keeping. Your story is a fantastic piece of ethnography and the kind of gendered nature of the men want to protect their masculinity throughout this family history and the women do the work. But both, Lena, and and your talk is definitely these are very privileged archives memoirs photographs objects they're very much elite uh objects and so um i just wondered if you could kind of reflect on that karen said that more about how you get access to that and then the non, you talked about transnationality and the kind of non-elite archives and where those voices come from. Of course that's always the question in history making. Thank you for this interesting question. To find these archives, you have to be very lucky. And in my case, I had the pleasure to, that Claudia, as a senior student at the University of Klagenfurt, gave a presentation, or as we call it in Austria, a referat, about her family history, about the everyday life during the First World War. And in half a sentence, he told me about Richard, who was in China in 1900. And I was like, that's something. And I have to see the material. And I'm really thankful to Claudia that she was open and interested in my research and that she shared the material with me and allowed me that I can use it and can work with it. Because as you can imagine, this kind of material is not to be found in public archives, usually, normally. And the other thing is, Richard would definitely be forgotten if there wouldn't be such a, if there wouldn't be this tradition of having these family chronicles, and this tradition of being so proud of one's own family. In my PG thesis, I worked on the family memories of South Tyrolean families referring to Italy's colonial war in Ethiopia in the 1930s. And these families were lower class families, to put it that way. And there is a difference, definitely. It starts with the quality of the material that is left over. And it continues with this desire to keep it together, I think. Yeah. Just a small reminder for those uh who are with us online you can always put a question in the chat and there is one question but we'll have mariel first and then the chat so thank you marcus for your talk i wanted to come again also what alex Alexa said on the gender aspects of history writing because I found it super interesting and I kind of lost the thread a little bit in the end who was this woman who was actually saying sorry like if you could say a little bit more about that and also how you in the material you encounter, how can you assess these gender aspects? When is it like in which type of writing, for example, it is allowed to like say some things or like in which other ones it's more like, you know, like it's, there is like a need to stick to the narrative or where, yeah, just like about this, how you seen it, found it in your research. Thank you for providing me the opportunity to talk about this gender aspect, which is obviously very central in this trans generational memory practices and it says a lot that you can't remember who Claudia actually was I think because the archives guardians like I called them the other invisible figures. And men within families imagine themselves as those who make history, and women often, that is at least what I found in my research, consider themselves as those who keep history. I mean, Lena's example is contradictory, which is what I find really interesting, but I think this is, this reveals how much family members shatter space. And Claudia is a very interesting figure, I think, because she does not come out of this elite, upper-class milieu, not at all. She was born into a social democratic family. She studied. She was a businesswoman who owns her own hotel. But she really is a working lady, I would say. but she really is a working lady I would say and when she met and married guts in 2007 she got into this ex-noble family which was not noble at all because nobility was forbidden in Austria in 1918, but the way how this family performs itself is still very noble, I would say. So being elite, being noble is very important for the self-imagination. And so this is also the backdrop why Goethe saw it as his right to assign his wife duties, what she has to do within the family or for the family. And I think to come to the second part of your question, who can speak how in the family, I think that changed when Götz died in 2020. Because I have the feeling, or got the feeling when I was talking to Claudia, that she reproduces the narrative that comes out of the family chronicle, but she has her own interpretation too. And she was happy to share it with me. So there's one in chat, and then Birgit. Okay, so chat, the chat question. Yes, I'm reading the question and the comment. Thank you very much for your very interesting talk. The guest is saying and asking, did or will you get back with your research results to the family of Richard? If you already did so, how did they react? Thank you for this question. I will definitely get back to them. I think my plan is to write an article about this paper today. So any comments and critique is very much welcomed. And before I send it into the peer review or publish or whatever, I will consult the family in order to have them on the same page. This is also the difficulty to work with families that you have someone on board who has very different expectations of what to do with the material and as you can imagine my expectations or my my yeah my expectations as historians a historian are very different from hers. So it is an important but also a very difficult task to try to be on the same page and to have a relationship with each other where both sides, the historian and the family member, each other where both sides, the historian and the family member is feeling, being seen or heard, I think. Anna is next. Yes, thank you. I have so many questions, but I will try to stick maybe to a thought that has to do, I don't know how deep you go into that as an historian, but it has to do with questions of motivation. So, taking Lena's work with Rothberg's concept of implicated subjects, questions like, why do you choose to become an implicated subject beyond living memory or beyond this? living memory or beyond this. It's like you choose to imply yourself very actively by perpetuating, perpetuating, I'm sorry, perpetuating this, these narratives and this family memory. And I think there were already different motivations in the room, like this assertion of masculinity, and there were some other ideas. And I always think of that there must be some strong motivation that it's connected to the fact that there's a personal story, a personal history that has a very, very clear connection to some macro-political event. So this clear connection of someone, be it yourself, be it someone in your family, with something that everyone knows or everyone should know or something that's bigger than life, so to say, it seems to be doing something it seems to be like a very I don't know where which kind of affirmations come from that like having your own personal story or your family members personal story connected to the history with the big H and so maybe that's my main question like how deep do you go into questions of motivation in the article I hope that I can go very deep into the question of motivation because that's what this my research interest is about to learn why is Claudia still taking care of the family memory even though her husband is gone? Why does she think that this is still relevant and important to her, to the family? And she told me that at first she was completely uninterested in the names, the events, but with time she got very into it. But as I said in the talk, this ex-Noble family is very obsessed with its own history, and I think you got a really good point with this with this assumption that that there is something behind this link of the individual that I'm like family is related to and bigger history because when I went with Claudia through the staircases and she was telling me all these histories. It was absurd, like it was crazy at which points in world history her husband's relatives have been. She tells me the other story of Richard's great-grandfather, who was a general at the Battle of Königsgrätz in 1866. Then his brother was the commander of the Wehrmacht during the occupation of Paris during the Second World War and who was also linked to the Stauffenberg complot and so on and so forth. And you get the idea that they always have this link, that they were always at the right time, at the right place to be part of what was going on on the world stage. I think you've got a really important point here because as far as I can see, Richard today is nothing more than a memory figure who means social capital, cultural capital for the family. Something they can prove or show to someone who comes and visit them in their homes, a story they can tell, look how important we were or we are because this relative were there and this relative were there and Robert Musil wrote this and that about that family and so on. Lena, did you have a question? But the question is kind of coming from Anna's question because I understood her question differently in the beginning. I understood that she was asking for your motivation and I actually find that in this context quite interesting so yeah maybe you can speak about that thank you my motivation huh as a historian you I mean it you have to have this feeling of excitement when you hear this kind of rare stories. And it's an intrinsic motivation that you would like to learn more about it. Because before I've heard this referat from Claudia at the University of Klagenfurt, I never thought of Austrian-Hungarian soldiers taking part in the plundering of Beijing, for instance. And as far as I know, as a historian, there is zero literature about the personal involvement or the commemoration of the Austrians deployment in China. So I'm driven on the one hand by my personal motivation that I want to learn more about something no one has written anything and on the other hand the state of the art gives me the excuse to do so. It's the dream of every historian to find something on the back of the image, right? So this is probably one of the driving forces is to be able to uncover something in the back of history. And I think in your research, I mean, the material you just showed as this metaphor of trying to find something in the back of official history is really very nicely illustrated with the newspaper excerpts glued to the back of the images so do you plan to do anything with this also to find out about your own motivation as an historian because it's always in the back and it's always hidden and that makes, that's the fame of the historian, right? Thank you, Karin. Yes, definitely. During my postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, I learned that it is really important to put yourself as a researcher into the foreground and to talk about yourself, your expectations, who you are and your expectations basically. And this is even truer if you're working in the field with families. You cannot just act as you would be some neutral, I don't know, container who is collecting information and then tells how it was. That's not how historical work should be understood and should work. Yes, probably you can sneak in an article about yourself on the back of one of the images sooner or later. You see, I'm still for breaking into those houses somehow, to sneak something behind. Thanks a lot for this insight and for your talk. It's possible to give an applause if you like.