Academic-Social Working Group of Austria

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The Academic-Social Working Group Austria ( ASAG ) is an existing association in Austria of university graduates with social and humanitarian goals in the sense of international understanding.

The Academic and Social Working Group of Austria was founded in Vienna in 1924 as the successor organization to an "Academic Welfare Organization". Shortly after the First World War, this association acquired a student residence in Vienna and a convalescent home in Lower Austria with private help from England and the USA , which should enable Austrian and foreign students to come together. The statutes of the ASAG, whose first chairman was Oskar Fritz Bock, identified international understanding, especially at the academic level, tolerance of those who think differently and the support of domestic and foreign students in their university and social development as goals. The number of members of ASAG was never more than 100 and is currently around 50. It is a “core force” that has made use of an independent organization for the operational realization of its goals over the years, the “Office for Student Hikes”, later the “Office for Student Hikes ”and finally“ Office for Student Travel ”. The staff of this organization has fluctuated over the years, but always significantly higher than that of ASAG.

The Office for Student Hikes

An office for student hikes was founded as an executive body to achieve the goals of the ASAG , through which international get-togethers, joint tours of a sporting and cultural nature - also as thanks for the help during the emergency after the First World War - and the maintenance of folk dance were organized. The trips on a sporting basis in Austria and in other countries of the world should bring Austrian students and their colleagues from Great Britain and from the rest of the world closer to these countries in the cheapest way. These activities, which began in 1930, included riding tours to Bulgaria and Iceland , folding boat tours on the Drina and the northern Italian lakes, and a cruise in the Aegean Sea . The partner organization in Great Britain was The National Unions of Students (NUS). In addition, vacation stays for schoolchildren in Great Britain were arranged.

In 1937 and 1939, the Office for Student Migration organized so-called good-will tours through England and South Africa, with folk dancing playing a special role. In 1940 the office for student migrations had to be closed due to the war.

New bloom

After the Second World War, the Student Migration Office ( renamed the Student Migration Office in 1950 ) gradually resumed its activities. Again the most important part of the activity consisted of bringing foreign students and teachers, that is, people with little financial means, to Austria and having Austrian students on the Besis show them Austria about voluntary and unpaid work. The Austrian employees received extensive training. In addition to Oskar Fritz Bock, Primarius Rudolf Jonas and Eduard Poisel , among others, took part in this reconstruction work. In the summer of 1946 there were again 21 three-week camps with a total of 333 domestic and foreign participants. Due to its good private contacts with Great Britain, the Student Migration Office also took part in the founding phase of the Austro-British Society . Foreign relations, especially with Great Britain, expanded. As a result, there were hiking tours in the mountains, folding boat trips on the Danube, summer camps, ski camps and city tours. Ten years after the end of the Second World War, there were already a total of 15,921 participants in these events from 57 countries around the world, more participants per year than ever before the war. In addition, there were 124 trips abroad (up to 1954), in which 1,752 Austrian students or students studying in Austria took part. In 1949 the good-will tours were resumed with great success (Scandinavia, USA, Canada, Cuba, New Zealand and South Africa).

The employees of the office for student hikes joined the Austrian Tourist Club and, as the Academic Mountain and Ski Community Section, formed the largest section in this Alpine association (this section was only dissolved in 2000). In 1963, on the initiative of Fritz Kolb, the then Austrian Ambassador to Pakistan, a team from the Office for Student Hikes was invited to Pakistan to explore a ski center ( Malam Jabba in the Swat Valley ).

From the 1970s onwards, management activity declined due to competition from commercial tour operators and the declining demand for such group events. The office for student hikes initially changed its name again to office for student travel , but ceased operations, which was last run as a student travel agency, in 1999. Joint trips abroad by the former employees of the office for student hikes, organized by Wolfgang Milan , kept the pioneering spirit of the post-war period alive even after the office for student tours was closed .

Folk dance

As early as 1946, the Office for Student Migration (later: Office for Student Migration) started conducting folk dance courses. After Herbert Lager took over the management of these courses in 1949, this dance group was called the “Akademischer Volkstanzkreis Wien des Büro für Studentenwanderungen” (AVK). Around 400 students took part in these activities. The AVK organized good-will tours to South Africa and "encounter trips" to Sweden and Norway and took part in the folk dance festivals ( Kathrein dance ) in Vienna . Every year in June (until 1993), celebrations for the summer solstice were held in the vicinity of the city of Vienna, which were very popular. In the following years, these activities were discontinued due to a lack of young people at the Office for Student Migration. A circle of friends under the direction of Helmut Kurth maintains folk dance in Vienna to this day.

Study funding

The funds that have been saved over the decades are currently being distributed in the form of grants, according to the resolution of the ASAG board. Mainly students from the reforming countries of Central and Eastern Europe who wanted to complete the JOSZEF program at the Vienna University of Economics and Business , but do not have the necessary funds, will benefit . By 2008, in close cooperation with the Center for Study Abroad in Vienna, a total of 77 students had been awarded grants for completing the JOSZEF program. To date, around 100 mobility grants have been awarded to Austrian students at the Vienna University of Technology and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences to enable them to study abroad. In addition, valuable musical instruments with a total value of € 135,000 were purchased and loaned to talented students at the Vienna University of Music and the Center for Contemporary Music at Danube University Krems was funded with € 5,000.

literature

  • Rudolf Jonas: Trips in Iceland . Vienna: Seidel-Verlag 1948.
  • Rudolf Jonas: happiness, sun and the beautiful wide world (Seidel-Verlag, Vienna, 1949)
  • Fritz Kolb: Loner in the Himalayas (Vienna 1957)
  • Festschrift 50 Years of the Academic and Social Working Group of Austria (Vienna, 1974)
  • Academic-Social Working Group Austria (Ed.): Aims and Paths to International Understanding , Vienna 1992
  • "Forty Years of International Understanding" ed. from the Office for Student Hikes, the Academic-Social Working Group of Austria and the Academic Mountain and Ski Association in the Ö.TK Vienna, 1964