Not a good century - Austria's erratic past

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde - to elect one Nazi is unfortunate, to elect a second looks like carelessness. Austria has not had a very good century and remains a country that has yet to come to terms with its past. Given the hatred of foreigners spouted by Joerg Haider's Freedom Party, it is curious to remember that Austria began the 20th century as part of the tottering multi-ethnic Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which Hungary was the junior party and of a territory covering most of what is now eastern Europe. Vienna was the center of the empire - a glittering cosmopolitan capital with splendid architecture, and renowned painters, musicians, scientists and doctors. painting, music and science.

Today, it is a little country of eight million people, mainly Catholic German speakers. It is rich but unimportant, sitting on the extremity of the present European Union and surrounded on three sides by former Communist states. But Vienna still looks imperial and Austrians cling to Hapsburg pretensions with a mixture of parochialism and superiority. Decadent Hapsburg elegance is an easier image to wear than murderous Hitler Nazism - but that's the one that counts, and that's the one that gets Austrians in trouble. For most Austrians the past never happened - they were never Hitler's willing henchmen. Having repressed their history, Austrians find it explodes in their faces from time to time. In 1986, they elected a state president, Kurt Waldheim, a former chief of the United Nations who had concealed his service in the SS. Austria was isolated and the United States, among many other states, banned him from entering the country. And now Joerg Haider and the Freedom Party have arrived in government.

Adolf the Awful was of course born here, spending his misfit youth as a would-be artist in Linz and Vienna, wandering through the colorful ethnic soup of Slavs, Jews and Gypsies. But this multi-nationalism fed a backlash, especially among the German lower middle classes from which Hitler sprang.

With World War I, the empire fell apart and its German-speaking bit proclaimed the Republic of German Austria and called for union with Germany. The Allies said no, and Austria for the first time stood alone - a nation by accident.

It was a poor and miserable place, politically a puppet of Mussolini's Italy. Bitterly opposed Social Democrats and the Christian Socialists ran armed militias and a new Nazi movement openly again demanded union with. Among the first to join the Nazis were a Viennese shoemaker and his wife - Joerg Haider's parents. Austria slipped into fascist dictatorship. In 1938, Hitler's Nazi forces marched in. There was no resistance - the troops mostly got an ecstatic welcome from Austrians.

There were some 185,000 Jews in 1938 when Hitler annexed the country.Nearly 70,000 Austrian Jews were killed in Nazi death camps, and 70,000 more were driven out of the country. After the war, however, the Allies referred to Austria as Hitler's first victim. There was no real confrontation or public recognition of its role in the Shoah until the late 1980s, when Austria elected Kurt Waldheim as president, despite revelations that he hid a Nazi past.

In 1945, Austria was divided into American, British, French and Soviet zones of occupation. The Soviets set up a new government which the other allies recognized. In 1955, the Russians left under a treaty to consolidate an independent but strictly neutral Austria as a buffer state between the Communist East and the free West.

As Austria set off on a great economic recovery, it created the convenient myth that it had been "the first victim of German Nazism." It was a myth encouraged by the cozy patronage and power-sharing government of the two main parties, the Social Democrats and the renamed People's Party of former Christian Socialists.

The war years, the deportation and mass-murder of Jews and other ethnic minorities were swept out of sight and out of mind. The farce of Austria as the "first victim of German aggression" became fact.

A piece of popular fluff like the 1960s musical and movie "The Sound of Music" fitted the first victim theory beautifully and the young masses of the world got to know a previously unknown Austria of singing nuns, heroic children, and noble officer, defying and outwitting Nazi thugs while an emotional Austrian audience collaborated by roaring out the Austrian national anthem in patriotic defiance of the assembled Nazi top brass.

School textbooks now include the Holocaust, and, as in Germany, documentaries on the subject run frequently on national television. Austrian chancellors have visited Israel and admitted their country's guilt; a Holocaust memorial is under construction.

On the positive side, some repair work has been done after the furore over Waldheim's secret past. Schoolbooks refer to the Shoah, and, factual wartime documentaries appear from time to time on television. Austrian leaders have come to Israel to pay their respects and apologize for Austria's part in the horror story laid out in Yad Vashem memorial center.

What danger then is the retrograde Haider Freedom Party in government, mocking the heroic little Austria victim myth? After all Austria remains both small and unimportant in the European context? If Haider is not a new Hitler - and even his most ferocious critics stop sort of that accusation - is he a potential Mussolini or Franco? He is at least some oddly indecent ghoul, raking up scraps of decayed 1930s fascism. He is a despicable revisionist for calling the concentration camps "punishment camps" in a country that sent so many citizens to be "punished" for being Jews - and for equating reparations for ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia with reparations for Austria's robbed and murdered Jews.

Summary of early history