Leo Stauber studied History in Regensburg, Vienna, Milan, and Prague, and obtained his Master’s degree in 2024. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of International Studies at Charles University in Prague, where he is part of the WEAVE research project Linking Arms: Central Europe’s Weapons Sector: 1954–1994, which examines continuities and parallels between Austria’s and Czechoslovakia’s Cold War weapons industries.

Research interests:

• Austrian and German Contemporary History
• History of Arms Production and Arms Trade
• Cold War History
• Labor History

Current research project:

Arms Town Steyr as Home Front in the Global Cold War (working title)

The fate of the Upper Austrian town of Steyr was for many decades seen as synonymous with the fate of Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG, historically one of Austria’s largest industrial enterprises. Emerging out of Europe’s largest rifle factory in the late 19th century, this company was a key supplier of weapons not just to Austria’s and Germany’s armies in both World Wars and employed a majority of Steyr’s workers. Despite being rebranded as a producer of tractors and lorries after 1945, Austrian rearmament and mounting economic challenges soon led to a renewed reliance on arms production and arms sales, with exports primarily to countries in the Global South being credited for guaranteeing employment and keeping Steyr afloat in times of crisis. By the 1980s, Steyr-Daimler-Puch was increasingly publicly scrutinized for its arms exports, both on the national and on the local level. My dissertation project seeks to provide a case-study for the effects of arms production on the producing societies themselves by examining the example of the historical "arms town" Steyr. By embedding the history of Steyr-Daimler-Puch’s exports within the context of the challenges to Europe’s post-war economic order and by tracing the transnational linkages and connections fostered through arms production and the opposition against them in Steyr, the project explores how the dynamics of the global arms trade shaped local politics, the economy, and everyday life.

Publications:

Die siebenbürgische Memorandum-Bewegung aus Sicht des rumänischen, ungarischen und deutschen Nationalismus. In: Ungarn-Jahrbuch. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Hungarologie, Vol. 38 (2023), Regensburg.

“Der elegante Coup der Generale” – Der Machtwechsel in Indonesien in den Medien der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1965–1967. Vienna, 2024.