A nation in denial
Some years ago, at a summer school in Germany, I met a Scottish lady who had lived in Vienna for many years, where she worked for the Atomic Energy Authority. Her 18-year-old son couldn’t wait to get out, and she fully supported his plan to go to university in Germany. Vienna, she told me, was suffocating. There was a meanness about everyday transactions, snobbery, poisonous gossip and a frigid disapproval of difference.
I was put in mind of this when Austria this week commemorated the 70th anniversary of the Anschluss, and an opinion poll showed that almost two thirds of Austrians wanted an end to the "endless discussion" of the country's Nazi past.
While Germans have long since been forced to confront their complicity in the crimes of the Nazis, the Austrians, who lined the streets to cheer as Hitler’s troops marched in, were allowed to view themselves as the victims of a hostile invasion – a delusion fostered by the Allied powers at a time when they feared Austria might join the Soviet bloc. As Otto von Habsburg, the 95-year-old son of the country's last emperor, put it this week: "No state in Europe has a greater right than Austria to call itself a victim."
Even today, any effort to promote an honest review of the country’s wartime history arouses violent resentment. This is, after all, a nation that elected Kurt Waldheim as its president after his career as an SS officer responsible for war crimes in Serbia had been exposed, while the entry into a coalition government of Jorg Haider's far right Freedom Party (FPÖ) in early 2000 led to the imposition of sanctions by the EU.
The British artist Rachel Whiteread, who created a memorial to Austria’s 65,000 murdered Jews, was shocked by the hostility she faced. “Vienna?” she told an interviewer. “I absolutely hate it … The opulence, the lack of black faces the fact you can lift up the corner of any carpet in Vienna, and you're going to find something fairly nasty underneath.”
When the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2004 – after decades of vilification by the country’s right-wing press – she was dutifully congratulated by the president. But a spokeswoman for the FPO – stll part of the governing coalition – protested: “The prize means that the author and her somewhat bizarre perception of Austria will be spread more widely.”
In case anyone was in any doubt what that “bizarre perception” was, Jelinek obligingly spelt it out in an interview with Agence France Presse: “Austria is built on the lie that it was the first country to fall to Hitler. We were the first who exported Hitler as a finished persona. It is always the writers who point this out.”
You are entitled to your opinion Mr Schuler, even if it is wrong.
The STATE, Otto von Habsburg referred to, the First Republic of Austria, whose Chancellor, Dollfuss was murdered by the Nazis because of his resistance to Hitler, this STATE, which was a final refuge until 1938 for Jews and politically persecuted people fleeing Nazi Germany after Hitler's rise to power, whom the Germans incidentally had voted into power, this STATE was indeed eradicated, wiped from the map, ceased to exist through the hostile act of the "Anschluss" and therefore CAN be called Hitler's first victim. Clearly, this label "victim" does not apply to all the Austrian people, of whom many committed the most unspeakable crimes.
Please, kindly differentiate. Germany elected its Nazi"government" and as such Germany as a State continued and had to, as a State and not only its people, face retributions. Austria as a State did not exist between 1938 and 1945 and therefore could NOT, as a State, be taken to account for the crimes of its "citizens". It was the Austrian people, who must be and are being held to account. Therefore, the Archduke was right in his analysis.
Posted by: Wolfgang Geissler | Saturday, 15 March 2008 at 11:23 AM