The collections of the memorial places Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen in Germany house hundreds of personal belongings of further prisoners of the concentration camps. Some of these artefacts were being investigated as part of a project launched in collaboration with the memorial places and the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. An attempt was made to gain new information about the producers of the artefacts in a search for traces, employing microscopic examination, using material data from instrumental analysis, and consulting archival documents.
Most of the objects are made of metals or synthetic polymers. They range from things of daily use to jewelry, miniatures, and games. The artefacts were mainly made of materials from semi-finished products taken secretly from the German defense production, where many prisoners were forced to work.
There is still a great lack of information about the living conditions in the concentration camps. Only those who survived and dared to talk could bear witness, but the majority of the prisoners were murdered or remained silent.
The main objective of this project was to relate the materials used for making the artefacts to a certain industrial (defense) production line. In this way it was attempted to find out more about the people who made the artefacts, only by the information included in the object itsself.
The artefacts were investigated and phenomenologically described concerning their shape and manufacturing technique. The material was analyzed using microscopy and instrumental analysis such as FTIR (Fourier Transmission Infrared Spectroscopy), and RFX (X-ray Fluorescence).

Plastics, perhaps more than other materials, are associated with the economic boom after the Second World War. In 1957, Roland Barthes expressed his “constant astonishment” at this new material pointing out that “for the first time […] the artificial aims at the ordinary.” For the mass market, plastic served as a material that promised unlimited applications and enabled innovation. Barthes’ encounter with the material took place at a fair aimed at potential consumers. Plastic was already part of a consumer vision and thus an idea of the future. Plastic and consumption became synonymous. Despite Barthes’ astonishment at an “ideal machine”, the production conditions were still far from standardised. Many consumer goods such as air mattresses, mackintoshes, balls etc. were produced by hand – which opened up business opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises in particular.

The paper focusses on Austrian family businesses whose foundation dates back to the years after 1945. It shows that the small-structured businesses were all the more dependent on existing networks because, in contrast to industry, they were hardly able to provide resources for research and development. There was a lively exchange between the entrepreneurs, schools (such as the Technologisches Gewerbemuseum in Vienna) and universities (such as the Montanuniversität in Leoben).

Some of the businesses analysed were managed by more than one generation of the owning family. As a result, there were also deliberate shifts in activities and networks as well as points of reference (industry, art, architecture, design) when the next generation took over.

Shaping public and private rooms by plastics is a well-known development. It was already mentioned by contemporaries of the 1950s describing a new ‘Century of Plastics’. This is quite different in case of the impact of plastics on nature, the quality of soils, the aesthetics of landscapes, and the pollution by plastics waste. Application of plastics influenced natural environment to a high degree: vineyards were “improved” by different resins and thermoplastic in the 1960s, “forest trails”, made by polymers demonstrated modernity. Later, glass houses, made by plastics, begun shaping landscape of coastal states of the Mediterranean Sea. Banks of streets were stabilized by grids of plastics and some sports fields are completely covered. “Mountains” of plastic waste can be observed in some countries and in the Ocean. The impact of plastics on the environment is so strong that plastic layers in earth were mentioned in the Anthropocene discourse as one indicator of the beginning of the Anthropocene.

To which degree plastics formed and polluted nature? How developed the societal shift from an (in general) positive estimation of plastics to a focus on pollution as the dominating negative outcome? How to compare developments in different regions? The paper gives first results of a transnational approach and invites (i) to analyse the impact of plastics on the environment since the 1950s, (ii) emotions concerning this material, and (iii) the perception of plastic in different societies. It is based on studying contemporary newspapers and technical journals, linked to plastics.

One of the oldest technological plastics collections worldwide can be found in the Museum of Science and Technology (TMW) in Vienna. More than 700 material, processing and product samples were collected within a network between the museum and Austrian and German industries, between 1913 and 1986. Today, the artefacts open new ways of interpreting plastics history:
Samples from the 1910s to 1930s – colourful, handcrafted goods – bear witness to the fascination of dyeability and point to the fact that plastics were already more than just a “surrogate”.
1930’s items indicate the decline in the artisanal processing of plastics in Austria and the growing influence of the German industry which had already become intertwined with the Nazi regime.
In 1940, two years after the annexation of Austria into the German Reich, the TMW held a NS-politically motivated exhibition. The earlier variety of colours faded in the face of regulations; items refer to one motto of the Four-Year Plan: “Plastics instead of metal”. After 1940, the show has been adapted into a permanent exhibition, handing down the material image characterised by the Nazi era until the 1960s. Meanwhile, the plastics boom of the 1950s had begun and plastics had started to flood the consumers' world.
A new permanent exhibition was installed in 1963, financed by the plastics industry. The focus was on professional education, responding to the industry’s growing need for well-trained specialists.
Highlighting exemplary items, the paper traces plastics history and examines interactions between economy, science, technology and politics.