History
The preliminary organization of the VSStÖ was formed in 1893 in Vienna. In the beginning, it was more a student debate club that was sympathetic to young workers and the union movement. It fought for general elections in which both men and women could vote, free access to universities, and against bourgeoisie science. The resistance to nationalist and anti-semitic movements at universities led to discrimination and attacks against members of the Socialist Students and led finally to the prohibition of the VSStÖ during the Austrofascism period until the end of World War II.
After the liberation from the National Socialists by the Allied Forces in 1945, the Socialist Students were actively involved in the foundation of democratic student representation, which was established in 1946 as the Austrian National Union of Students. On the ideological basis of Marxism, the VSStÖ has subsequently fought for free and open access to universities, sufficient social funds for students, gender equality, and has taken an active role in the peace movement as well as the anti-globalisation.
Read more about this topic: Socialist Students Of Austria
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“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
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“As I am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act; Caesar’s history will paint out Caesar.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)