Old boys/Old masters

,Ego-Histoire' and Austrian historiography

Abstract

The paper discusses some aspects of autobiographical documents written by historians. Out of this genre which was named ego-histoire in France a collection of texts representing life stories of Austrian scholars older than 70 has been taken as an example for analysis. These texts allow to give first informations concerning the social composition of the group under investigation. Pierre Bourdieu's theories on the ,homo academicus' has been taken to analyse elements of the reproduction of the universitarian system as reflected in the corpus of autobiographical texts.