Austria in the Twentieth Century

377 Pages·2009·7.307 MB·English

by  Rolf Steininger, Michael Gehler, Gaunter Bischof, Günter Bischof

Austria
in the
Twentieth
Century
Studies in Austrian and Central European History and Culture
Günter Bischof, Series Editor
Austria in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Rolf Steininger, Günter Bischof,
and Michael Gehler
Rolf Steininger
Günter Bischof
Michael Gehler
editors
Austria
in the
Twentieth
Century
0
Transaction Publishers
New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)
First E-Book publication 2009
Copyright © 2002 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
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dard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2002020451
ISBN: 978-1-4128-1196-5 (E-Book)
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Austria in twentieth century / Rolf Steininger, Günter Bischof, Michael
Gehler, editors.
p. cm.—(Studies in Austrian and central European history and
culture ; 1) Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1^128-0854-5
1. Austria—Politics and government—20th century. 2. Austria—Intel­
lectual life. 3. National socialism—Austria. 4. Austria—Ethnic relations. I.
Steininger, Rolf, 1942- II. Bischof, Günter, 1953- m. Gehler, Michael. IV.
Series.
DB91 .A87 2002
943.605—dc21
2002020451
For Gordon “Nick”Mueller
This Page
Intentionally
Left Blank
transaction
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
I. WORLD WAR I AND THE FIRST REPUBLIC 10
Hermann J.W. Kuprian, On the Threshold
of the Twentieth Century : State and Society
in Austria before World War I 11
Manfried Rauchensteiner, Austria
in the First World War, 1914-1918 36
Wolfgang Maderthaner, 12 February 1934:
Social Democracy and Civil War 45
Dieter A. Binder, The Christian Corporatist State:
Austria from 1934 to 1938 12
Rolf Steininger, 12 November 1918-12 March 1938:
The Road to the Anschluß 85
II. WORLD WAR II 115
Friedrich Stadler, The Emigration and Exile
of Austrian Intellectuals 116
Erika Weinzierl, Resistance, Persecution,
Forced Labor 137
III. THE SECOND REPUBLIC 161
Günter Bischof, Allied Plans and Policies
for the Occupation of Austria, 1938-1955 162
Klaus Eisterer, Austria Under Allied Occupation 190
Franz Mathis, The Austrian Economy:
Basic Features and Trends 212
Manfried Rauchensteiner, The “Big Two
The Grand Coalition, 1945-1966 and 1987-2000 235
Oliver Rathkolb, The Kreisky Era, 1970-1983 263
Michael Gehler and Wolfram Kaiser,
Austria and Europe, 1923-2000:
A Study in Ambivalence 294
Anton Pelinka, Austria between 1983 and 2000 321
Select Bibliography 342
List of Contributors 359
Index 362
Introduction
“In small Austria the great world holds its trial runs,” noted the
optimistic dramatist Friedrich Hebbel. Austria is “the laboratory for
the end of the world” wrote the acerbic wit Karl Kraus during World
War I. In the days of the old Habsburg Monarchy, Austrian writers
showed grand ambition inventing such hyperbole to describe
Austria’s unique importance in the world. In the waning days of the
twentieth century, the performance artist Hermann Nitsch expressed
the country’s mood of “small is beautiful” when he desired only to
be the “emperor of the wine district,” the Weinviertel in Lower
Austria north of the Danube. Such decline in ambition expressed as
artistic imagination indicate Austria’s trajectory in the twentieth
century from great European power to small state.
Few countries in the world have experienced such dramatic and
precipitate reversals of fortune as Austria did in the twentieth
century. At the beginning of the century, Vienna was still the capital
of a multinational/multiethnic empire in East Central Europe as well
as the world capital of particular sorts of artistic imagination and
grandiose intellectual pursuits. Sigmund Freud, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Gustav Mahler, Gustav Klimt, and Egon Schiele all
contributed to the birth of modernism with their unusual talents.
Bertha von Suttner won the Nobel Prize for her pacifism. At the
same time, the feverish imagination of the failing young artist Adolf
Hitler developed his noxious repertoire of racial anti-Semitism and
imperial German grandeur, eventually leading him towards genocide
and continental conquest. In Austria as elsewhere, the martial spirit
trumped the desire for peace.
The reckless imperial Austro-Hungarian/German alliance
contributed much to precipitate World War I, the “Great War” that
killed more than ten million people. This orgy of bloodshed on the
continent also rang in the beginning of the end of European
predominance in the world. With the collapse of the Habsburg,
Ottoman, German and Russian Czarist empires, the “long nineteenth
2 Austria in the Twentieth Century
century” (David Blackboum) came to an end, and the brutal “short
twentieth century” (Eric Hobsbawn) began.
The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the waning
days of World War I saw the emergence of six successor states that
changed the map of East Central Europe and destabilized the region
with their deep-seated envies and short-sighted rivalries.
Austria was one of them. A democratic polity emerged after
November 1918, but one that was troubled from the beginning. The
new Austrian government wanted to join Germany (“Anschluß”), but
the great powers making peace in Paris did not permit it. Austria’s
troubled identity between imperial grandeur and small statehood,
between the rock of Germany and the hard place of a destabilized
East Central Europe, never gelled in the years between the two
World Wars. Austrians lacked a will to live in a state that did not fit
their ambitions. Cut off from its traditional East Central European
markets and financial control over East Central Europe, the new,
much smaller Austria was also economically anemic. On top of these
destabilizing mental and economic factors, the irresolvable rivalries
between the principal political parties (political “camps” or “Lager”)
led to creeping civil war.
The political camps’ unwillingness to mend fences and co-operate
in spite of worsening international situation led to the demise of
democracy, like in the rest of much of Central and Eastern Europe.
With the advent of the “corporatist Ständestaat”—the Austro-Fascist
regime in 1933—Austria opened itself up to the pulls from both
Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany. When Hitler and
Mussolini entered the “Axis Berlin-Rome” in 1936, and the Western
powers appeased these fascist powers, Austria’s demise became only
a matter of time. In March 1938 the long-anticipated Anschluß came
suddenly and chaotically. Hitler’s army invaded and occupied
Austria and incorporated it into the “Third Reich.” Austrians were
divided over the end of their state. Many regretted it and wept
quietly. Many were forced to flee the country: a mass exodus of Jews
ensued, for many Communists and Socialists had already fled the
Austro-Fascist state after 1933. But many were out in the streets
cheering the Nazi conquest of their own country. What the Pan-
Germanists had always desired occurred: Austria became a province
of Germany and no longer could be found on the map for the next
seven years.