In 2015, an exhibition at the Austrian Academy of Sciences recalled the history and “the continued relevance of research” (9) of “one of the most important research institutes in Austrians scientific history” (10) and led to the publication of Experimental Biology in the Vienna Prater: On the History of the Institute for Experimental Biology 1902 to 1945 in 2016. Edited by the Austrian historians Johannes Feichtinger, Stefan Sienell, and Heidemarie Uhl along with the science journalist Klaus Taschwer, who wrote most of the text, the volume can be considered the most comprehensive overview of the Biologische Versuchsanstalt (Institute for Experimental Biology, BVA) or “Vivarium,” named after its former use as an aquarium and later as “a sort of indoor zoo” (12) in the Vienna Prater. Founded and financed by the zoologist Hans Przibram and the two botanists Wilhelm Figdor and Leopold von Portheim in 1902, the BVA served for decades as a model for many biological research institutions in Europe and the United States until the Austrian Anschluss in 1938 and National Socialism led to the expulsion of most of its staff, the demise of its innovative research agenda, and the ultimate destruction of the Vivarium building in 1945.

In the years before the destruction of the BVA, its state-of-the-art technical equipment, innovative infrastructure, and multidisciplinary orientation inspired new methods and fields of biological research, including the inheritance of acquired characteristics and sex hormone research. While the latter area can be associated with the so-called Pioneer of Neuroendocrinology Eugen Steinach (42), the former idea was based on the research of Paul Kammerer. While Steinach was nominated eleven times for the Nobel Prize and “often mentioned in the interwar years in the same breath as Sigmund Freud or Albert Einstein” (39), Kammerer became one of the most controversial figures in the history of biology. He started his career at the Vivarium in 1902 as an unpaid assistant that ended abruptly in 1926 with Kammerer's suicide after he “had been found guilty of scientific fraud” (34). To some scholars, it seemed as if he had manipulated the results of his epigenetic experiments with midwife toads by injecting ink into their feet to claim the existence of inherited nuptial pads. Undoubtedly, this affair had an impact on the loss of the BVA's reputation during the following years. But more importantly, as Klaus Taschwer has shown in his recent accounts on Paul Kammerer (Der Fall Paul Kammerer. Das abenteuerliche Leben des umstrittensten Biologen seiner Zeit [Munich, 2016]) and the University of Vienna during the first half of the twentieth century (Hochburg des Antisemitismus. Der Niedergang der Universität Wien in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, [Vienna, 2015]), the anti-intellectualism and antisemitism of Austrofascism and National Socialism played a crucial role in the condemnation of the BVA and its researchers. Like the former, this new publication has its merits substantially in the remembrance of the many expelled Vivarium scientists that were forced to emigrate or were killed in the Holocaust like Hans Przibram and his wife Elisabeth. As the text repeatedly points out, “No institute lost more of its researchers in the Holocaust than the Institute for Experimental Biology” (10). Antisemitic networks at the University of Vienna provide another important explanation for the many unaccomplished and “failed careers” (36) of BVA researchers after World War I.

After 1945, the Academy of Austrian Sciences, to which the BVA was donated by its founders in 1914, and the Austrian postwar society did not show signs of remorse nor took any responsibility for the crimes committed against the BVA and its scientists. These shortcomings in the process of coming to terms with the past obviously had a strong impact on the historiography of science after 1945. With the exception of the 1952 published novel Sieg der Verfemten (Triumph of the Ostracised) by Friedrich Lorenz and the bestselling Case of the Midwife Toad from 1971 by Arthur Koestler, the history of the BVA was mainly forgotten until the publication of Wolfgang L. Reiter's paper “Zerstört und Vergessen: Die Biologische Versuchsanstalt und ihre Wissenschaftler/innen” (“Ruined and Forgotten: The BVA and Its Scientists,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 10, no. 4, 104–33) in 1999. Down to the present day a monograph on the history of the Vivarium and its researchers represents a desideratum.

These circumstances may explain the emphasis of this new publication on the relevance of the BVA's research for the present scientific discourse. Almost every page states a “revival” (11) of its “innovative power [that] cannot be overestimated” (24) and detects a “growing interest in the scientific history of, but also the biological research that was carried out at this unique research institute” (61). In this context the narration is dominated by the natural sciences practiced at the Vivarium, while relatively little attention is paid to its cultural significance, the social background of the scientists, and the interactions between social issues and research questions that Deborah R. Coen has discussed in her 2006 article “Living Precisely in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna” (Journal of the History of Biology 39, no. 3, 493–523). At least, the importance of the Viennese Jewish middle class and the prominent role of female researchers at the BVA are mentioned as well as Kammerer's left-wing orientation and Przibram's drawing talent as “traverser of the border between science and art” (21) in his student years. Given the great social conflicts that shaped the first half of the twentieth century, it may be doubted that the work at the BVA was free from conflicts and that all its research projects succeeded before National Socialist prosecution. It would have been desirable to learn more about competition between the scientists, failed research projects, and their everyday lives outside of their research institution.

Nevertheless, thanks to the careful research of Klaus Taschwer, this new publication provides with its many—unfortunately untranslated—facsimiles of archival findings and its lucid annotations possibly the best starting point for further investigations of the history of the Vivarium and its contexts.